According to oral tradition, tea has been grown in China for more than four millennia. The earliest written accounts of tea making, however, date from around 350 CE, when it first became a drink at the imperial court. Around 800 CE tea seeds were taken to Japan, where regular cultivation was soon established. Just over five centuries later, in 1517, tea was first shipped to Europe by the Portuguese soon after they began their trade with China. In 1667 the Honourable East India Company ordered the first British shipment of tea from China, requesting of their agents one hundred pounds weight of the best tey that you can get’. In 1826 the Dutch bought seeds from Japan for cultivation in their growing East Indian Empire, supplementing this effort in 1833 by imports of seeds, workers and implements from China. Meanwhile, also in the 1830s, the East India Company began growing tea on an experimental basis in Assam - the first one hundred boxes of Assamese tea reached Britain in 1840, and fo