That's very far from the mark. Tea was engineered by the Chinese for thousands of years. Initially it was drunk for its stimulating qualities, as some sort of medicine. If you pluck tea leaves and try to make tea yourself the result will be absolutely unpalatable. Through hundreds of years of growing it, the Chinese figured out rather non-intuitive tricks to make it taste better and better. The British tried to grow their own tea unsuccessfully for decades. In the end Robert Fortune illegally brought a group of trained Chinese tea workers as well as stolen seedlings to the East India plantations in India.