This evocatively illustrated book tells the story of tea around the world, and celebrates its contribution, past and present, to civilized existence. It covers the many different ways of preparing tea as well as the early cultivation of tea in China and India to the more modern processes used today, and the worldwide development of the trade in tea over the last four hundred years.

Tea has indeed influenced the course of history, shaping trade routes and contributing to the causes of the Opium Wars, which saw China reduced from a great imperial power to a shadow of its former self. In the West we owe the vogue for chinoiserie and "japanning", the development of porcelain, and the design of the clippers like the Cutty Sark indirectly to the craze for tea.

The tea-party was as much a staple of social life in ancient China as in the 19th-century drawing-rooms of Europe, and bricks of tea transported perilously by yak caravan were as central to life in the Tibetan monastery as the gently simmering samovar was to the life of imperial Russia.

The illustrations are drawn from a wide range of sources and reflect all these themes - from tea-pickers in the Himalayas, to the fragile porcelain.