A Short, Sweeping History of Herbal Tea

The habit of steeping plants in hot liquid almost certainly predates any written record. Archaeological evidence from multiple sites suggests that plant-based infusions were part of daily life in the Stone Age — not necessarily as beverages, but as preparations for flavour and preservation.

The discovery that hot water extracts more from plant material than cold, that certain plants changed colour when steeped, and that the resulting liquids were pleasant or warming — these were insights that any observant person with a fire and a plant could reach independently. And it appears many people around the world did.

We cannot know the first herbal tea with certainty. What we do know is that by the time written records appear in multiple ancient civilisations, herbal knowledge was already well-established and sophisticated.

One of the oldest records of systematic plant knowledge is the Shennong Bencao Jing — the Classic of Herbal Medicine, attributed to the legendary Emperor Shennong ("Divine Farmer") and believed to reflect knowledge accumulated over centuries, eventually written down perhaps 2,000 years ago.

The text describes hundreds of plants and their properties, organised by category. It formed the foundation of traditional Chinese botanical thinking and was expanded and annotated by later scholars for centuries.

The Chinese herbal tradition was not primarily about pleasant beverages — it was a sophisticated medical system in its own right. Decoctions (plants simmered in water), infusions, and compounded preparations were all part of a framework that attempted to categorise plants by flavour, temperature quality, and organ affinity.

This tradition's influence spread through Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia over centuries, and its textual legacy is unparalleled in depth and continuity.

Ancient Egyptian records — including the Ebers Papyrus, dating to around 1550 BCE — describe hundreds of plant preparations. Herbs including chamomile, fennel and fenugreek appear in contexts suggesting both flavour use and practical applications.

The Egyptian climate was well-suited to certain aromatic plants, and the country's role as a trading hub meant that herbs from sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Mediterranean all moved through Egyptian markets. The spice and herb trade was one of the most significant economic forces in the ancient world.

Hibiscus — now one of the most popular herbal drinks in North Africa — was almost certainly used in Egypt for centuries before any specific written record. The word "karkadé" (the Egyptian name for hibiscus tea) appears in Arabic texts, but the plant's use almost certainly predates those records.

The ancient Greeks systematised botanical knowledge in a way that shaped European thinking for nearly two thousand years. Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, wrote Historia Plantarum (Inquiry into Plants) around 300 BCE — one of the earliest systematic descriptions of plants that survives.

Later, Dioscorides, a Greek physician working in the Roman army in the first century CE, compiled De Materia Medica — a comprehensive catalogue of plants and their practical uses that was copied, translated and consulted across Europe and the Islamic world until the 17th century. Its influence on Western botanical knowledge is immense.

In Rome, herbs like mint, rosemary and sage were used in cooking, bathing and at table. The Romans also spread plant cultivation across their empire — herbs that were native to the Mediterranean moved north and west with Roman roads.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, European botanical knowledge found one of its most important institutional homes: the monastery. Benedictine and later Dominican and Franciscan monasteries maintained physic gardens — ordered plots of herbs used for the care of the community and, frequently, of the local population.

The Capitulare de Villis, a directive of Charlemagne in the 8th century, specified dozens of herbs that should be grown in imperial gardens, including chamomile, fennel, mint, sage and many others still familiar today. This document reflects how seriously the Carolingian court took herb cultivation as both practical knowledge and prestige.

Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century abbess, composer and visionary, compiled extensive botanical knowledge in her Physica — a text that described hundreds of plants with practical guidance on their use. Her writings are among the most detailed and accessible accounts of medieval European herbal practice.

Monasteries were also critical sites of manuscript copying and preservation. Greek and Arabic botanical texts were translated into Latin, making knowledge accessible to Western European scholars for the first time in centuries.

Between roughly the 8th and 14th centuries, scholars in the Islamic world made enormous contributions to botany, pharmacology and the synthesis of knowledge from multiple civilisations. Arabic translators preserved and extended the works of Dioscorides and Galen, and original scholarship by figures like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) added substantially to botanical knowledge.

Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine (early 11th century) was a comprehensive medical text that included extensive botanical material. It was translated into Latin in the 12th century and became standard reading in European universities for centuries.

The Arabic herbal tradition also maintained strong connections to trade routes that brought plants from sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia and China into wider use. Many plants that Europeans would not encounter until the age of exploration had been traded through Middle Eastern markets for centuries.

While Eurasian and African traditions developed in relative connection with each other, the Americas developed entirely independent botanical cultures of similar sophistication.

In the Andes, plants like muña (Minthostachys mollis), coca leaves and various native mints were steeped in water and used in daily life by the Inca and their predecessors. The Amazon basin, with its extraordinary biodiversity, supported plant knowledge among indigenous peoples that remains only partially documented today.

When European colonists arrived in the Americas from the late 15th century, they encountered plant traditions they had no framework to fully understand. The exchange was unequal and largely extractive — but some of the plants, like chamomile and peppermint seeds, spread from Europe to the Americas, while others moved in the opposite direction.

The age of European exploration and colonisation transformed the herb trade at a scale that had no precedent. Spices and herbs that had moved through complex overland routes — subject to numerous middlemen and markup — suddenly became direct commodities of imperial trade.

Plants moved rapidly across oceans. Hibiscus, native to Africa and Asia, was transplanted to the Caribbean and Americas by African enslaved people, who brought seeds and the knowledge of how to use them. Rooibos, found only in a corner of South Africa, began attracting commercial interest from European settlers in the late 19th century. South American plants like stevia and yerba mate began their long journey toward global recognition.

This period also saw the rise of the European apothecary — the druggist and herbalist who synthesised printed botanical knowledge with practical trade in plant remedies. The apothecary's shop, with its jars and drawers of dried herbs, is a direct ancestor of the modern herbal tea shop.

The industrial revolution brought major changes to how herbs were processed and sold. Where dried herbs had previously been sold loose from apothecaries or market stalls, the 19th century saw the development of packaged, branded herbal products. Companies like Celestial Seasonings (founded 1969 in the US) and Pukka Herbs (founded 2001 in the UK) represent the mature commercial form of what began as small-scale cottage industry.

The tea bag itself — invented in the early 20th century in America, accidentally, when a tea merchant sent samples in silk pouches — transformed how most people prepared tea of any kind. By the mid-20th century, bagged herbal tea was becoming a standard grocery product across the Western world.

The counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s brought renewed interest in herbalism, natural foods and alternatives to pharmaceutical products. This cultural shift drove significant growth in the herbal tea market in the US, Europe and Australia.

Sub-Saharan Africa has contributed some of the most distinctive and globally beloved herbal plants, though their histories are often less well documented in Western sources than those of European or East Asian traditions.

Rooibos, from the Cederberg region of South Africa, was used by the indigenous Khoisan peoples for generations before European settlers commercialised it in the 20th century. Today it is one of the most exported South African food products.

Hibiscus — the plant behind one of the most widely drunk herbal beverages in the world — is native to West Africa and tropical Asia, and its use in drink preparations spread with African diaspora communities. The Senegalese bissap, West African zobo, Egyptian karkadé and Jamaican sorrel are all versions of the same fundamental plant used in culturally specific ways.

The African continent also has vast untapped botanical diversity. Many traditional plant uses remain local knowledge, shared within communities and not yet catalogued or commercially developed. As global interest in herbal ingredients grows, questions of fair attribution, community benefit and intellectual property have become important conversations in the broader herbal industry.

Before the printing press, botanical knowledge was held in expensive hand-copied manuscripts and the memories of trained practitioners. Most people depended on local herbalists, midwives and monastery-trained monks for plant knowledge.

The Gutenberg printing press, developed in the mid-15th century, changed this over the following decades. Printed herbals — books describing plants and their uses — proliferated rapidly. Some of the most famous were produced in the 16th and 17th centuries: John Gerard's Herball (1597), Nicholas Culpeper's enormously popular Complete Herbal (1653), and many German and Dutch equivalents.

Culpeper's herbal was particularly significant because he wrote in English rather than Latin, deliberately making botanical knowledge available to ordinary people who could not read the scholarly language. His book went through dozens of editions and remained in print for centuries. It also reflected the beliefs of its time — including astrological associations that modern readers find curious — but its descriptions of plants remain largely accurate.

The printing press did not just spread knowledge — it standardised and occasionally confused it, as descriptions were copied and sometimes misattributed across editions. But the net effect was a significant democratisation of botanical information that set the stage for the modern herbal industry.

Today's herbal tea market is genuinely global — and it reflects that. A hibiscus-ginger blend draws on African, South Asian and South American plants. A rooibos-vanilla blend combines a uniquely South African shrub with a flavouring from Mexican orchids. A chamomile-lavender tea might include flowers from Hungary, France and England, blended in a German factory and sold in a Japanese shop.

Alongside this convergence, there is growing consumer interest in origin, traceability and traditional context. Buyers want to know where rooibos was farmed, whether chamomile is sustainably grown, and how ancient traditions inform modern blends.

The science of herbal tea has also matured significantly. Laboratory analysis of plant compounds has made it possible to study what is actually in a cup of chamomile or ginger tea, and to subject health claims to genuine scrutiny. This is largely good news for the honest enthusiast — it separates well-supported ideas from exaggeration and encourages brewers to value herbs for what they genuinely are rather than what marketing says they do.

The story of herbal tea is still being written. Every tradition it has passed through has added something — a plant, a technique, a flavour pairing, a piece of knowledge. What you brew today is the latest chapter in a very long story.

If you would like to explore the living traditions that shape modern herbal tea, visit our herbal tea history guide or browse the botanical wellness traditions article for a respectful survey of Ayurvedic, Chinese and European folk customs still practised today.