"We want our tea," demand Marco and Giuseppe, gondolieri, in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers. One of the most delightful of the Savoy Operas, it was first performed in London, England in 1889. It was, however, supposedly set over a century earlier, in 1750 Venice.
The tale of tea originates many millennia earlier and far to the east. Twenty million years earlier, in the area of today's Assam and southwest China, there arose and evergreen shrub or small tree, today's Camellia sinensis.