You could probably float quite a few ocean liners in just some of the tea consumed around the planet every year. It is a popular drink everywhere in all its different manifestations - traditionally offered with milk and sugar in England, mixed with rancid butter to warm the soul in Tibet's chilly mountains, flavored with peppermint in Morocco where servers pour it from a height of several feet into tiny cups without spilling a drop, served with ice and lemon in the southern heat of the United States, prepared with great and ancient ceremony in Japan.

Even though it knows no cultural boundaries, many folk tend to associate tea drinking primarily with the British, probably because it plays such a prominent part of daily life in Britain. A cartoon published in a British newspaper a few years ago captured the way a lot of people there feel about their cuppa tea. It showed two British soldiers, an officer and a sergeant, standing on top of a hill. The sergeant says that several divisions of enemy troops are advancing on their position from the east, others are approaching from the north, and some are coming from the south. They should arrive in about an hour. "Good," says the officer, "that gives us time for a spot of tea before they get here."

The Brits love their tea - so much so that the word "tea" has established a place in their culture with a larger meaning than just the beverage. High tea, for example, is an evening meal that includes meats, sandwiches and other good stuff in addition to a pot of hot tea on the table. Tea and sympathy is what you get from your loved ones when you feel down in the dumps in the United Kingdom and its former far-flung dominions. In other countries you get TLC. Millions of Brits grew up hearing those encouraging words every day: "Time to come in for yer tea, luv." Maybe that's what makes the British a civilized nation - those two words, "tea" and "luv" used in combination. Of course, a handful of Brits are not terribly civilized - like those soccer hooligans who trample across Europe from time to time. Clearly those people did not grow up in the tea culture, otherwise they would not behave the way they do.

Jeanne M. Dams observed in "The Body in the Transept" that tea is "the panacea for everything from weariness to a cold to a murder." We cannot comment on the last category but the other categories certainly seem to be on the mark. The relaxing effects of a cup of tea are well established. But the effects may be more than just a fleeting feel-good experience. In fact, Dr. Simon Maxwell, Clinical Pharmacologist at Leicester Royal Infirmary is quoted as follows in a press release issued by the Tea Council in Britain that a "number of studies show that tea consumption has a mild but beneficial effect in lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, two major factors for heart disease." According to the press release, one study suggests that drinking five cups of tea each day could cut the chance of a stroke by as much as 70 percent. So there you go - you finally have something you enjoy that may actually be good for you. That is not to be sniffed at when just about everything else we like is either unhealthy or a social nuisance that annoys the neighbors.

To return to the Brits for a moment, anyone would think that they were the first to discover the pleasures of tea. Not so! According to legend, the first person ever to take a tea break was the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung in the year 2737 BC. It happened this way supposedly. The emperor, who was a herbalist among his other pursuits, was reposing under a wild tea tree while a servant boiled a pot of drinking water. A leaf from the tree fluttered down to the pot and flavored the water in a way the emperor found most agreeable. Tea was born. Under the Tang Dynasty tea became China's national drink - and, of course, the Chinese are still one of the main cultivators of tea.

Tea became popular in Britain during the 17th Century and within 100 years had replaced gin and beer as the beverage of choice for ordinary folk, a fact that did not especially please government revenue officers who had been getting quite a nice income from liquor taxes. So they taxed tea heavily, an arrangement which fell away fortunately in the mid-18th Century. The person who is reputed to have ushered in the habit of afternoon tea was Anna, Duchess of Bedford, who reasoned quite sensibly sometime in the early 19th Century that a spot of tea was a good way to fill the time between lunch and dinner. Everyone agreed and a national habit came into being. Next time you enjoy a cuppa in the afternoon, raise your mug to the memory of old Duchess Anna. Had it not been for her, you might be taking your break with carrot juice or broccoli cider.

The practice of taking a tea break did not come down to us without controversy. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, the big businessmen, landowners and ministers of the church tried to stop it because they argued it interfered with the work of their employees. The fools. They should have realized that you don't come between the British working man and his tea. Perish the thought. Anyway, the workers won that particular battle and the tea break was institutionalized.

Tea and rebellion have long enjoyed an association. The most famous example of this remains the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773 when a group of men went aboard ships of the British East India Company and tossed the tea cargo into Boston harbor. They were angered by the same tea tax that annoyed their British brethren on the other side of the Atlantic. One thing led to another and the British were eventually tossed out of what is today the United States of America.