Legend has it that tea was first discovered in 2737 B.C. by the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung, a renowned herbalist whose imperial edicts included the boiling of all drinking water as a hygienic precaution. One day, as the emperor was sitting beneath a tree waiting for his drinking water to be prepared nearby, a few stray dried leaves fell into the boiling water. Intrigued by the pleasant aroma and mellow hue of the resulting infusion, Shen Nung decided to try it.

From China, tea quickly spread to Japan, brought there by the Buddhist priest Yensei, who had been living in China at the time of Shen Nung's discovery. Yensei thereafter became known as the Japanese "father of tea", and tea drinking and preparation became elevated to an art form.

In similar fashion, tea soon traveled across the Orient, and was eventually shipped by Dutch traders via Java to Holland in 1610. It was also known to and traded by the Portuguese, whose princess, Catherine de Braganza, is credited with initiating the enduring English love of tea through her marriage to England's Charles II.

In 1650, Dutch trader Peter Stuyvesant brought the first tea to American colonists in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. When the English took over this settlement, renaming it New York, they discovered that the colonists drank more tea than all of England put together.

From New York, tea's popularity spread among the colonies of Boston and Philadelphia, which became centers of rebellion following the heavy tax levied on the importation of tea in 1767, which led to the famous Boston Tea Party and the American revolution against the British crown.

Possibly in relation to the revolution, Sir Joseph Banks suggested in 1788 that it might be possible to grow tea in India, which resulted in successful cultivation of the plant by the 1800s, followed by tea plantations in Sri Lanka by 1867, and in Africa by the late nineteenth century.

In 1904, a tea plantation owner introduced iced tea through a combination of accident and ingenuity at the St. Louis World's Fair. As it was a particularly hot day, he found his hot tea booth being passed up by crowds in favor of cold drinks. Frustrated, he tossed a large quantity of ice into his vats of hot tea, and the resultant cool treat became one of the highlights of the fair.

The tea we drink today, somewhat astonishingly, is still quite similar to that first cup drunk by Emperor Shen Nung, since all tea stems from the same plant, Camellia sinensis. There are now, however, three recognized basic types of tea—green, oolong, and black—and from these three spring over 3,000 cultivated varieties. Opened in 1963, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf proudly carries over forty of the world's finest and rarest loose leaf teas.