The most authoritative and entertaining history of tea ever published, written with verve to engage a wide readership. Throughout the centuries, tea has inspired artists, enhanced religious experience, played a pivotal role in the emergence of world trade - and even triggered major wars. No other drink has touched the lives of so many people in so many different ways.

The True History of Tea brings all these disparate strands together in an erudite tale full of quirky facts and unexpected byways. Victor H. Mair takes the reader from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the splendour of the Tang and Song dynasties in China, from the tea ceremony aesthetics of medieval Japan to the fabled tea and horse trade of Central Asia, from the advent of Britain's love affair with tea to the tea party that sparked the American Revolution.

It celebrates the common heritage of a beverage we have all come to love, and plays a crucial part in dismantling that obsolete dictum: East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.