Imagine the most English-English person you can think of. Now I'm fairly certain that no matter what picture you just thought up, that person comes complete with a stiff upper lip and a cup of tea in their hand, because that's what the English do. They carry on and they drink tea. Tea is so utterly English, such a rooted part of the culture, that it's also rooted in how everyone else around the world perceives that culture.
And while it's fairly common knowledge that Westerners have China to thank for the original cultivation of tea drinking, it's far less known that it was the Portuguese who inspired its popularity in England in particular, one Portuguese woman.
Travel back in time to 1662, when Catherine of Braganza (daughter of Portugal's King John IV) won the hand of England's newly restored monarch, King Charles II, with the help of a very large dowry (嫁妆) that included money, spices, treasures and the highly profitable ports of Tangiers and Bombay. This made her one very important lady: the Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland.
When she relocated up north to join King Charles, she is said to have packed loose-leaf tea as part of her personal belongings; it would also have likely been part of her dowry. A fun legend has it that the boxes were marked Transporte de Ervas Aromaticas (Transport of Aromatic Herbs) later shortened to T. E. A．
That last bit probably isn't true (experts believe the word "tea" came from a Chinese character), but what is for sure is that tea was already popular among the upper class of Portugal due to the country's direct trade line to China via Macau.
