Tea in Asia
Asia is where tea began, and it remains the continent with by far the deepest and most varied tea culture. Camellia sinensis is native to the region where southwest China, northern Myanmar, and northeast India meet, and every major tea style traces back to techniques developed somewhere in Asia.
China
China is both tea's birthplace and, by most accounts, still its largest producer. Chinese legend credits the mythical emperor Shennong with discovering tea around 2737 BCE, when tea leaves are said to have blown into his pot of boiling water: a story, not a historical record, but one that captures how central tea is to Chinese identity. By the Tang dynasty, tea had become a refined, codified practice, documented in Lu Yu's 8th-century Cha Jing ("The Classic of Tea"), the earliest known monograph on tea. China produces all six major tea categories (green, black (known there as "red tea"), oolong, white, yellow, and dark/pu-erh) with famous regional specialities such as Longjing (Dragon Well) green tea from Hangzhou, Tieguanyin oolong from Fujian, and pu-erh from Yunnan, often aged for years like wine.
Japan
Tea arrived in Japan from China via Buddhist monks around the 9th century, but it was Eisai, a monk who returned from China in the late 12th century, who is widely credited with popularising tea and establishing it within Zen Buddhist practice. Japan developed its own distinct path: it favours steaming rather than pan-firing to stop oxidation, giving Japanese green teas like sencha, gyokuro and matcha their characteristic vivid colour and grassy, umami-rich flavour. The Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu), refined in the 16th century by tea master Sen no Rikyu, turned tea preparation into a disciplined art centred on mindfulness, simplicity and hospitality.
India
India became a major tea producer largely through 19th-century British colonial expansion, after the East India Company sought an alternative to its dependence on Chinese tea. Assam, in India's northeast, turned out to have its own native tea variety (Camellia sinensis var. assamica), and the region's hot, humid climate produces bold, malty black teas. Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills, produces lighter, more delicate, muscatel-noted teas often called the "champagne of teas." India is also home to chai: sweet, spiced, milky tea that is a daily ritual for hundreds of millions of people, brewed with spices like cardamom, ginger, cinnamon and cloves.
Sri Lanka
Sri Lankan tea, marketed globally as "Ceylon tea," has a somewhat accidental origin: the island's coffee plantations were devastated by a leaf-rust fungus in the 1860s–1870s, prompting planters, including the Scottish pioneer James Taylor, to switch to tea. Sri Lanka's high-grown teas, produced at altitudes above 1,200 metres, are known for a bright, brisk character.
Taiwan and beyond
Taiwan specialises in oolong tea, with high-mountain (gao shan) oolongs prized for their floral, creamy character. Elsewhere in Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea, Nepal and others all maintain their own tea traditions, from Korean green teas grown with practices influenced by both China and Japan, to Indonesian estates established under Dutch colonial rule.