Sooner or later anyone interested in the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) - its origin, its great variation, and its geographical distribution - comes up against two difficult questions: (1) Does the wild tea plant exist anywhere? If so, where? (2) If not, where and how did the cultivated tea plant of today originate?Our earliest knowledge of the tea plant is necessarily derived from China, where tea drinking dates back some 2,000 or 3,000 years. Whether or not the wild prototype does, or did, grow there, tea was cultivated in south-east China long before it was known to be cultivated anywhere else; and the habit of drinking tea was already prevalent and nearly a thousand years old before it was exported to the West.
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