experts, as well as from ordinary observers, for many years after
it had become familiar to them as a native of Indian forests.

How early in the history of the Chinese that people discovered
and developed the inestimable qualities of the tea plant is not
known. That Chinese scholar, S. Wells Williams, in his Middle
Kingdom places the date about 350 A.D. But somewhere between 500
A.D. and 700 A.D. Tea had become a favorite beverage in Chinese
families. Some of the written records of that ancient people push
the epoch of tea-drinking back as far as 2700 B.C., appealing to
ambiguous utterances of Confucius for corroboration. Tea in China
had obtained sufficient importance in political economy in 783 or
793 A.D. to become an object of taxation by the Chinese
Government.

Gibbon, in his great work, tells us that as early as the sixth
century, caravans conveyed the silks and spices and sandal wood
of China by land from the Chinese Sea westward to Roman markets
on the Mediterranean, a distance of nearly 6,000 miles. But we
hear no mention of the introduction of tea into Europe or western
Asia until a thousand years later.

According to Mr. John McEwan (International Geog. Congress,
Berlin, 1899,) tea soon found its way from China into Japan and
Formosa, but was not cultivated in Japan on a commercial scale
until the 12th century.

John Sumner, in a Treatise on Tea (Birmingham, 1863), states that
the Portuguese claim to have first introduced tea into Europe,
about 1557. Disraeli (Curiosities of Literature) offers evidence