The Sea of Tea Museum

The Ruby Trading House tea wholesale company was established in 1993. In 1995, the first branded tea shop Sea of Tea was created with this company. There are 60 stores in the chain now. In 2001, the Northwest Tea Culture Club on 91 Fontanka was opened, and in 2016, the International Tea Center was opened here as well. All these years, our company has been selecting the best teas from around the world and collecting information about tea and its history. The founder of the museum became interested in collecting old tea items and tea history. Having accumulated a lot of tea exhibits, it became clear that these treasures needed to be shared with numerous tea connoisseurs in Russia. So it was decided to open up a museum exhibition at the International Tea Center. The museum is situated in a historical building – the architectural monument “The House of the Merchant Gorstkin”. The house was built in 1882 and a tea shop was opened on the first floor immediately, of which there is documentary evidence. So the Museum of the Sea of Tea is the successor to tea traditions with 136 years of experience.

All exhibits are in the public domain for visitors to the International Tea Center and cover an area of about 300 m². Tours are held according to the schedule published on the public page on “VKontakte”. The duration of the sightseeing tour is 1 hour. In-depth tours on the topics “Chinese Tea”, “Ceylon Tea”, “Indian Tea”, “Taiwanese Tea”, “Tea Merchants of Russia,” and “English Tea Party” are available. At the end of each tour participants try 6 varieties of tea from different countries and try to guess which tea is in each teapot.