According to Lu Yu's Tea Classics, tea-drinking in China can be traced back to the Zhou Dynasty (1100- 221 B.C.): Tea was discovered by Shennong and became popular as a drink in the State of Lu because of Zhou Gong.

 

Tea drinking in China has a history of four thousand years. As the legend has it, Shennong, a legendary hero, tasted hundreds of wild plants to see which were poisonous and which were edible, so as to prevent people from eating the poisonous plants. It is said that he was poisoned seventy-two times in one day but was saved by chewing some tender leaves of an evergreen plant blossoming with white flowers. Since he had a transparent belly, people could see how the food moved throughout his stomach and intestines. When they saw the juice of the tender leaves go up and down in the stomach as if it were searching for something, they called it "cha", meaning search in Chinese. Later it was renamed "cha" having the same sound of the present one.