History of tea nomenclature

Tea first arrived in Europe in 1610, after chocolate in 1528, but before coffee in 1615.

In 1690, E. Kaempfer, a German medical doctor cum botanist who came to Japan from Holland and observed the habit of tea drinking among the people, named the bush ‘thea’.

Nomenclaturist Carl Linnaeus published his Species Plantarum (1753). He took the original Amoy pronunciation (Tay), and applying the country of discovery to his two part naming system (genera and species, he came up with Thea sinensis.

Subsequently, he names the two varieties Thea viridis and Thea bohea.

In 1818, Robert Sweet, an English botanist, united Theus and Camellia into one genus and called it Camellia, as it is still called today.

The name Camellia came from a Moravian Jesuit named George Josheph Kamel (1661-1706), who studied Asian plants. In 1688, George Josheph Kamel went to Luzon, in the Philippines, where he studied botany, even though he was sent as a priest. He had his paper published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

The species name, sinensis, means ‘from China’. Interestingly enough, over 2000 varieties of tea are derived from this one plant species.

It wasn’t until 1959 that the International Code of Nomenclature named the tea plant Camellia sinensis.
History of tea nomenclature