Camellia sinensis
species of plant
Camellia sinensis, commonly known as tea plant, tea shrub, and tea tree, is a species of evergreen shrub in the flowering plant family Theaceae. Originally native to the highlands of the Hengduan–Purvanchal region between southwestern China, northern Myanmar and northeastern India, the leaves, buds and stems of C. sinensis are harvested by humans to produce tea, leading to its artificial introduction and cultivation as valuable cash crops in many other parts of the world, with China, India and Kenya being the three largest tea-producing countries.
Tea leaves used to make white tea, yellow tea, green tea, oolong, dark tea (which includes pu'er tea) and black tea are all made from two of the five varieties of C. sinensis that form the bulk of the tea crops now grown, C. sinensis var. sinensis and C. sinensis var. assamica, but are processed differently to attain varying levels of oxidation, with black tea being the most oxidized and white being the least. Kukicha (twig tea) is also made from C. sinensis, but uses only twigs and stems rather than leaves and buds.
Names
The name sinensis is a compound meaning "from China" in Botanical Latin. The two parts are sin from Latin meaning China and -ensis the suffix meaning place of origin.
The generic name Camellia is taken from the Latinized name of Rev. Georg Kamel, SJ (1661–1706), a Moravian-born Jesuit lay brother, pharmacist, and missionary to the Philippines.
“Camellia sinensis” enters the record as species of plant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Camellia, sinensis and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q101815. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1661 and 1706.
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This entry incorporates text from “Camellia sinensis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.