About 2700 BC: According to legend, tea has been known in China for millennia. It was a medicinal beverage obtained by boiling fresh leaves in water. A favorite legend of the origin of tea concerns Bodhidharma or Daruma, a Buddhist saint, who, having fallen asleep over his devotions, cut off his eyelids on awakening and threw them on the ground, where they took root and grew as a bush. The leaves of the bush, when dried and infused in hot water, produced a beverage that would banish sleep.

222 BC: Tea will be mentioned as a substitute for wine for the first time in Chinese writings of the next half century. Modern scholars give credence to what is found in the Erh Ya, an ancient Chinese dictionary, about 350 BC. It is believed that tea cultivation began in the interior province of Szechwan in China, gradually extending down the Yangtze Valley to the seaboard provinces.

708 AD: Tea drinking gains popularity among the Chinese in part because a hot drink is far safer than water that may be contaminated and may produce intestinal disease if not boiled. Tea is also valued for its alleged medicinal values.

780 AD: The Ch'a Ching, a handbook of tea written by Lu Yu, describes tea as a type of cake made from leaves that had been steamed, crushed and molded. The cake was fired and toasted or shredded and then steeped in salted, boiling water.

794-1185: Dancha style became known in China; the custom of drinking tea was already popular in the T'ang Dynasty. At this time, tea was called dancha, a brick-like ball of fermented tea leaves. Since this type of tea did not taste good, people gradually lost interest. Also the kentoshi system of diplomatic relations between Japan and China, was abolished in 894, further contributing to the decline of interest.

805: Tea is introduced to Japan as a medicine. The Buddhist bonze (priest) Saicho, 38, spent three years visiting Chinese Buddhist temples on orders from the emperor, and returned with tea.

850: The first account of tea reached the Arabs

ll41-1215: During the Eisai Period in China, Eisia, who studied in China and founded the Zen sect in Japan, brought back tea seeds and the Chinese etiquette of tea presentation. He presented tea and his book the Kissa Yojoki (The medicinal Benefits of Tea Drinking) to the Shogun Minamoto Sanetomo (1214). He wrote, "Tea is a medicine which cures diseases and promotes long life." (would it be correct to say "in 1214" instead of putting 1214 in parentheses? If so, it'd make more sense that way.)

1191: Zen Buddhism is introduced to Japan by the priest Aeisai, who returns from a visit to China. Aeisai plants tea seeds, making medicinal claims for tea that will be published in 1214. (Note the similarity to the above; note these are most likely the same event.)

1392-1910: Tea ceremonies were performed regularly at palaces in Korea. The "Day Tea Rite" was a common daytime ceremony, but the "Special Tea Rite" was reserved for specific occasions, including royal weddings and visits from leaders of other countries. There was one tea ceremony, however, that the king was not invited to. This was the Queen Tea Ceremony. The only male guest was the crown prince, the eldest son of the Queen. The other guests were female friends, family and servants of the Queen.

1423-1502: It remained for Murata Shuko to set tea free from the excessive display of utensils. (what does that mean, Sir?) He united tea and spirituality and introduced it to the common people. With him, the history of the Way of Tea started.

1484: The tea ceremony has been introduced by Japan's Yoshimasa. The tea ceremony will remain for centuries a cherished part of Japanese culture.

1559: First mention of tea by the Venetians.

1591: Japanese teamaster Rikyu Sen commits ritual suicide (seppuku) on orders from Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Rikyu had formalized the tea ceremony.

1597: The first English mention of tea appears in a translation of Dutch navigator Jan Hugo van Lin-Schooten's Travels. Van Lin-Schooten calls the beverage "chaa."

1600: First mention of tea by the Portuguese.

1615: The earliest mention of tea by an Englishman is probably that contained in a letter from Mr. Wickham, an agent of the East India Company, written from Firando in Japan, on the 27th June 1615, to Mr. Eaton, another officer of the company, resident at Macao, and asking for "a pot of the best sort of chow." How the commission was executed does not appear, but in Mr Eaton's subsequent accounts of expenditure occurs this item -- "three silver porringers to drink chaw in." (chow or chaw? spelled both ways ... is that accurate?)

1618: First mention of tea by the Russians.

1657: Public sale of tea begins in London as the East India Company undercuts Dutch prices and advertises tea as a panacea for apoplexy, catarrh, colic, consumption, drowsiness, epilepsy, gallstones, lethargy, migraine, paralysis and vertigo.

1657: Tea is offered to Londoners at Thomas Garraway's coffee house.

1658: The London periodical Mercurious Politicus carries an advertisement: "That excellent and by all Physitians approved China Drink called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay, alias Tea, is sold at the Sultaness Head, a cophee-house in Sweeti Rents."

1662: Catherine da Braganza introduces to the London court the Lisbon fashion of drinking tea; she also introduces the Chinese oranges.

1683: The great German scholar Engelbert Kaempfer set out on a journey through Russia, Persia, Arabia and India. From there he took a ship to Java, Siam, and, finally, Japan, where he lived for a time on Deshima before returning to Europe in 1693. Kaempfer wrote his own account of Japanese tea to complement that of 'my much honored friend' ten Rhyne. It was published in his Amoenitates Exoticae (Exotic Pleasures; 1712). An English version of this has recently been published, translated and edited by Robert W. Carrubba. It covers every aspect of tea growing, making, and brewing.
(I took out " in The Library of Renaissance Humanism" after Carrubba -- wasn't sure what it related to. is the book available there? or is Carrubba associated with them?)

1684: Tea sells on the Continent for less than 1 shilling per lb, but an import duty of 5 shilling per lb makes tea too costly for most Englishmen and encourages widespread smuggling. The English consume more smuggled tea than is brought in by orthodox routes.

1708: The United East India Company created by a merger of Britain's two rival East India companies is the strongest European power on the coasts of India. The company ships China tea as well as other goods and it will pay regular dividends of 8 to 10 pent.
(clarification: does it ship tea to China or does it ship Chinese tea?)

1712: The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope is a mock-heroic poem describing a day at Hampton Court where Queen Anne does "sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea."

1723: Robert Walpole reduces British duties on tea.

1767: The Townshend Revenue Act passed by Parliament June 29 imposes duties on tea, glass, paint, oil, lead and paper imported into Britain's American colonies in hopes of raising £40,000 per year.

1768: The East India Company imports 10 million pounds of tea per year into England.

1770: Parliament repeals the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 in a bill passed April 12. Prime Minister North has used his influence to have the act repealed.

1773: Tea is left to rot on the docks at Charleston. New York and Philadelphia send tea-laden ships back to England, but men of "sense and property" such as George Washington deplore the Boston Tea Party.

1773: The Boston Tea Party December 16 demonstrates against the new English tea orders. Led by Lendall Pitts, scion of a Boston merchant family, a group of men, including silversmith Paul Revere, 38, disguise themselves as Mohawks.

1773: The Boston Tea Party Group board East India Company ships at Griffen's Wharf, and throw 342 chests of tea (valued at more than £9,650) from the London firm of Davison and Newman into Boston Harbor.

1773: Agitator Samuel Adams has organized the Boston Tea Party action with support from John Hancock, whose smuggling of contraband tea has been made unprofitable by the new measures.

1773: The Tea Act passed by Parliament May 10 lightens duties on tea imported into Britain to give relief to the East India Company which has 7 years' supply in warehouses on the Thames and is being strained by storage charges.

1773: The Tea Act permits tea to be shipped at full duty to the American colonies and to be sold directly to retailers, eliminating colonial middlemen and undercutting their prices.

1774: The British ship London docks at N.Y. April 22, and the Sons of Liberty prepare to follow the example set at Boston four months earlier. While they are making themselves up to look like Mohawks, an impatient crowd boards the vessel and heaves the tea into the Hon.

1774: Colonists in York, Maine, and Annapolis, Maryland, conduct tea parties like the one in Boston.

1774: News of last year's Boston Tea Party reaches London in January via John Hancock's ship, Hayley. Parliament passes coercive acts to bring the colonists to heel.

1774: George III gives assent March 31 to the Boston Port Bill, and Boston Harbor is closed June 1 until the East India Company is reimbursed for its tea and British authorities feel that trade can be resumed and duties collected. (Revolutionary War makes this debt unpayable)

1784: Parliament further lowers British import duties on tea. The lower duties end the smuggling that has accounted for so much of the nation's tea imports and hurt the East India Company, since the rewards are now too small to justify the risks.

1797: English tea consumption reaches an annual rate of 2 pounds per capita, a figure that will increase fivefold in the next century.

1820: Mr. David Scott, the first commissioner of Assam, sent certain leaves, with a statement that they were said to belong to the wild tea-plant, to Calcutta from Kuch Behar and Rangpur — the very districts indicated by Sir Joseph Banks as favorable for tea-growing. The leaves were submitted to Dr. Wallich, a government botanist in Calcutta, who identified them as belonging to a species of Camellia, and no result followed on Mr. Scott's communication. These same leaves ultimately came into the herbarium of the Linnean Society of London, and have since been authoritatively pronounced to belong to the indigenous Assam tea-plant. Dr. Wallich's attribution of this and other specimens subsequently sent in to the genus Camellia, although scientifically defensible, unfortunately diverted attention from the significance of the discovery.

1820: "Adulteration of Foods and Culinary Poisons" by English chemistry professor Frederick Accum enrages the vested interests. The book shows, among other things, that counterfeit Chinese tea is made from dried thorn leaves colored with poisonous verdigris.

1820: Caffeine is isolated by the German chemist Friedrich Ferdinand Runge as the component which makes coffee such a powerful stimulant. It is said that he did this because Johann Wolfgang von Goethe asked him to investigate the matter.

1823: Acting for the British government, Charles Bruce smuggles knowledgeable laborers out of China and puts them to work transplanting young tea bushes into nursery beds to begin tea plantations.

1824: Cadbury's Chocolate has its beginnings in a tea and coffee shop opened by John Cadbury, 23, a Birmingham, England, Quaker who had served an apprenticeship at Leeds and for bonded London tea houses. He will employ someone from China to preside over his tea business.

1826: The first tea to be retailed in sealed packages under a proprietary name is introduced by English Quaker John Horniman, whose sealed, lead-lined packages have been designed in part to protect his tea from adulteration.

1827: J. I. L. L. Jacobson introduced the first tea plants from China into Java and became known as the founder of Indonesia's tea industry. Tea growing in Formosa dates from the early 19th century.

1830: Mormonism is founded by Joseph Smith. Their "Word of Wisdom" is a code of health prohibiting tea, coffee, alcohol and tobacco.

1830: Congress reduces U.S. duties on coffee, tea, salt and molasses imports.

1831: Boston's S. S. Pierce Co. has its beginnings in a shop opened to sell "choice teas and foreign fruits" by local merchant Samuel Stillman Pierce.

1832: Frances Trollope deplores American eating habits. Suppers, she reports, are huge buffets that may include "tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe cake, johnny cake, waffle cake, and dodger cake, pickled peaches, and preserved cucumbers ... "

1833: The East India Company loses its prized monopoly in the China trade (most of it in tea) by an act of the British prime minister Charles Grey, 69, the second Earl Grey. (?)

1834: Dr Wallich admitted "the fact of the genuine tea-plant being a native of our territories in Upper Assam as incontrovertibly proved." In the meantime, a committee had been formed by Lord William Bentinck, the governor-general, for the introduction of tea culture into India, and an official had already been sent to the tea districts of China to procure seed and skilled Chinese workmen to conduct operations in the Himalayan regions.

1837: Major Samuel Shaw barters the cargo (what cargo?) for $30,000 worth of tea and silk, the investors receive a 25 percent return on their capital, Shaw becomes first U.S. consul at Canton, and more Americans are encouraged to enter the China trade.

1839: Some 95 chests of Assam tea arrive in London and are sold at auction. Unlike green Chinese tea, the leaves from India are fermented and the new black tea, which is less astringent than green tea, begins to gain popularity.

1840: Afternoon tea is introduced by Anna, the duchess of Bedford. The tea interval will become a lasting British tradition, but the English still drink more coffee than tea.

1840: The Assam Company was formed to take over the early tea garden of the East India Company, and this, the premier company, is still in existence, having produced up to 1907 no less than 117,000,000 pounds of tea

1850: Tea catches up with coffee in popularity among the English.

1859: Hartford and Gilman buy whole clipper ship cargos in New York harbor, sell the tea at less than 1/3 the price charged by other merchants, identify their store with flaked gold letters on a Chinese vermilion background, and start what will grow into A&P.

1861: U.S. tariffs rise as Congress passes the first of three Morrill Acts which will boost tariffs to an average of 47 percent. Duties on tea, coffee, and sugar are increased as a war measure.

1863: The Great American Tea Co., founded in 1859, grows to include six stores and begins selling a line of groceries in addition to tea.

1860: A small (tea?) plantation exists in South Carolina under circumstances not conducive to financial success on a large scale of production.

1866: More than 90 percent of Britain's tea still comes from China.

1866: The Great Tea Race from Foochow to London pits 11 clipper ships that race to minimize spoilage of the China tea. The skippers crowd on sail but the voyage still takes close to three months.

1868: With the collapse of the feudal system in Japan, brought about the "Meiji Restoration" in, the hereditary successors to the Tea lineages.

1872-1924: The installment of the thirteenth generation Urasenke grand master, Ennosai, became acquainted with a circle of businessmen, who banded together to give support to Urasenke. This rebuilds interest in the Tea Ceremony and support for it study.

1893-1964: Tantansai 14th generation formed a national organization for Urasenke followers, and also began introducing the tradition of Tea abroad. His heir, Hounsai, father of the present grand master, has striven indefatigably to spread international appreciation of the Way of Tea, and through his dynamic efforts Urasenke has become the largest tradition of Chado both in Japan and around the world. Today, Zabosai SEN Soshitsu XVI, who on December 22, 2002, succeeded as the sixteenth-generation grand master in the Urasenke line descending directly from SEN Rikyu, continues the practice of his forefathers.

1869: The coffee rust Hamileia vastatrix appears in Ceylon plantations and will spread throughout the Orient and the Pacific in the next two decades. It will destroy the coffee-growing industry, and soaring coffee prices will lead to wide-scale tea cultivation.

1869: The English clipper ship Cutty Sark sails for Shanghai to begin a 117-day voyage with 28 crewmen to handle the 10 miles of rigging that control her 32,000 square feet of canvas. Built for the tea trade.

1875: It was a popular to cut tea with other cheaper items like grass. A new British Sale of Food and Drugs Law tightens restrictions against adulteration, making any adulteration injurious to health punishable with a heavy fine and making a second offense punishable with imprisonment.

1876: Glasgow grocer Thomas Johnstone Lipton opens his first shop at age 26. Lipton sailed to America at age 15 to spend four years learning the merchandising methods employed in the grocery section of a New York department store.

1884: When the rust disease caused by Hamileia vastatrix begins making deep inroads, Ceylon's coffee output falls to 150,000 bags, down from 700,000 in 1870. The last shipment of coffee beans will leave the island in 1899.

1890: Thomas Lipton enters the tea business to assure supplies of tea at low cost for his 300 grocery shops.

1893: Thomas Lipton registers a new trademark for the tea he has been selling since 1890 and which is sold only in packages. Over the facsimile signature "Thomas J. Lipton, Tea Planter, Ceylon," Lipton prints the words "Nongenuine without this signature."

1897: Britons begin to eat lunch, dooming the classic British breakfast.

1898: Annual British tea consumption averages 10 pounds per capita, up from 2 pounds in 1797.

1904: Tea bags are pioneered by New York tea and coffee shop merchant Thomas Sullivan, who sends samples of his various tea blends to customers in small hand-sewn muslin bags.

1904: Green tea and Formosan continue to outsell black tea five to one in the United States.

1904: lced tea is created at the St. Louis fair by English tea concessionaire Richard Blechynden for the sweltering fairgoers who passed by. As in the case of the ice cream cone, however, evidence will be produced of prior invention.

1909: Thomas Lipton begins blending and packaging his tea in New York. His U.S. business will be incorporated in 1915. Three years after his death in 1931, his picture will begin appearing on the red and yellow packages that identify Lipton products.

1918: British food rationing begins with sugar Jan. 1 and is extended in February to include meat, butter, and margarine. Other rationed commodities include four ounces of jam and two ounces of tea, weekly.

1924: The song "Tea for Two" is written by Vincent Youmans.

1931: The song "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" is written by Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman. (Sir, I added the two last names. I did a web search to find out if this was a song or a book and what happened to it in 1931, and discovered more information.)

1947: "Tea with Mrs. Goodman" by English novelist Philip Toynbee, 31, is published.

1952: "The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice," a film by director Yasujiro Ozu, is made.

1953: The Tea Board of India is established by the Tea Act of 1953. It consists of a chairman and 38 members representing the central and state governments and all interests connected with the industry. It has extensive functions and responsibilities under the direction of the central government.

1953: White Rose Redi-Tea, introduced by New York's Seeman Brothers, is the world's first instant iced tea.

1953: The play "The Teahouse of the August Moon" by John Patrick is first performed on Oct.15 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with John Forsythe and David Wayne. It runs for 1,027 performances.