National Tea Day (UK) 2022: Know Everything About Your Favourite Aromatic Beverage

One thing that is considered extremely common around the world is the habit of drinking tea. Some call it an addiction, some call it “The dose of life”. Although the whole world celebrates International Tea Day together on May 21, some countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, have separate dates dedicated to “one of the favorite flavored beverages” at the national level.

In the UK, April 21 is annually marked as National Tea Day. The day is celebrated by organizing special events in tea rooms, hotels, pubs, and cafés. Along with this, several charitable fundraising events were also held across the country, including a tea ‘Fes-Tea-Val’, which takes place annually at Chiswick House & Gardens, London.

There are numerous motives behind celebrating National Tea Day, one of them being to create awareness among the future generations of tea drinkers to understand and appreciate tea.

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History & Origin

There are two interesting stories behind the origin of tea, according to one of them, around 2700 BCE, at that time the Chinese ruler Shen Nung was sitting in the garden drinking hot water. Just then a leaf of a tree fell into the water, causing the water to change in color and smell like a rose. When the king tasted it, he really liked its taste and thus tea was invented.

Giving a spiritual connection to the origin of tea, another story tells that in the 6th century, an Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidharma, meditated regularly without sleeping. They used to chew on the leaves of a particular plant to stay awake and later this plant came to be known as the tea plant.

7 Unknown Facts About Tea

1. The people of China first started drinking Tea.
2. Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world after water.
3. Initially, tea was consumed only as medicine in winters. The tradition of drinking it daily started in India.
4. There are over 3000 varieties of tea, of which black, green, white, oolong, and yellow tea are some of the most popular.
5. The global tea market size was valued at $55,144M in 2019 and is believed to reach $68,950M by 2027.
6. In India, the tea industry offers employment to about 1.2 million people and supports more than 3 million dependents of tea garden workers, with women accounting for 50% of the employment. 
7. In 2020, global consumption of tea was reported to be about 6.3B kg and is calculated to reach 7.4B kg in the next 5 years.