It was at the period of the
great discoveries that the European people began to know
more about the extreme Orient. At the end of the sixteenth
century the Hollanders brought the news that a pleasant
drink was made in the East from the leaves of a bush. The
travellers Giovanni Batista Ramusio (1559), L. Almeida
(1576), Maffeno (1588), Tareira (1610), also mentioned
tea. In the last-named year ships of the Dutch East India
Company brought the first tea into Europe. It was known
in France in 1636, and reached Russia in 1638. England
welcomed it in 1650 and spoke of it as "That excellent and
by all physicians approved China drink, called by the
Chineans Tcha, and by other nations Tay, alias Tee."
Like all good things of the world, the propaganda of Tea
met with opposition. Heretics like Henry Saville (1678)
denounced drinking it as a filthy custom. Jonas Hanway
(Essay on Tea, 1756) said that men seemed to lose their
stature and comeliness, women their beauty through the
use of tea. Its cost at the start (about fifteen or sixteen
shillings a pound) forbade popular consumption, and made
it "regalia for high treatments and entertainments, presents
being made thereof to princes and grandees.
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