The first chapter provides an overview of tea’s long imperial pedigree that takes us to China around the second millennia BCE. In situating the East India Company’s entanglement with this commodity around the time of the First Opium War, the aim of this chapter is to understand why tea became such a precious article of British commerce and ‘national’ prestige around the mid-nineteenth century, and why discourses of agrarian modernity and ‘improvement’ were adduced to its purported ‘discovery’ in Assam.