The Mandarin Chinese word for "cha" is pronounced "t'e" in certain Chinese dialects . Also the Malay word for the leaf is"the". This word "the" was used to describe both the drink and the leaf. The Japanese character for tea is written exactly the same as the Chinese, though pronounced with a slight difference; so these may be the origins of our word tea in the western world. Tea may have been discovered in 2737 BC by Shen Nong, a Chinese Emperor of the San Huang Period(3,000 - 2,700 BC). He was a scholar, the father of agriculture and the inventor of Chinese herbal medicine. One summer day, while visiting a distant place, he and the court stopped to rest and his servants began to boil water for the court to drink. Dried leaves from the nearby bush fell into the boiling water, and made it a brown liquid. The Emperor was interested in the new liquid, drank some, and found it very refreshing. The tree was a wild tea tree, and so, tea was created. The first samples  of tea reached England between 1652 and 1654. Tea was referred to as the China drink, tcha, chaw, tay, tee, and tea and was at first regarded more as a medicine than a fashionable drink. The original English pronunciation of the word tea was "tay" and can be traced back to around 1655 when the Dutch introduced both word and beverage to England. The pronunciation "tee" also originated in the 1600's but only gained predominance after the late 18th century. By 1650 the Dutch were actively involved in trade throughout the Western world. During that year Peter Stuyvesant brought the first tea to America to the colonists in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (later re-named New York). The following information is true EXCEPT   _  .
The Japanese write the character for tea the same way as we Chinese. It was a Chinese Emperor who first found tea very refreshing. The word "the" was used to describe only the leaf. Tea was discovered quite by chance in history.