BACKGROUND Association between tea consumption and incident hypertension remains uncertain.This study conducted to examine the health effects of tea consumption on blood pressure progression and hypertension incidence.METHODS A population-based cohort of 38,913 Chinese participants without hypertension at baseline were included in the current study.Information on tea consumption was collected through standardized questionnaires.Associations of tea consump-tion with blood pressure progression and incident hypertension were analyzed using logistic regression models and Cox propor-tional hazards regression models,respectively.RESULTS During a median follow-up of 5.9 years,17,657 individuals had experienced progression to a higher blood pressure stage and 5,935 individuals had developed hypertension.In multivariate analyses,habitual tea drinkers (≥ 3 times/week for at least six months) had a 17％ lower risk for blood pressure progression[odds ratio (OR) =0.83,95％ CI:0.79-0.88]and a 14％ de-creased risk for incident hypertension[hazard ratio (HR) =0.86,95％ CI:0.80-0.91]compared with non-habitual tea drinkers.In-dividuals in different baseline blood pressure groups could obtain similar benefit from habitual tea drinking.In terms of tea con-sumption amount,an inverse,linear dose-response relation between monthly consumption of tea leaves and risk of blood pres-sure progression was observed,while the risk of incident hypertension did not reduce further after consuming around 100 g of tea leaves per month.CONCLUSIONS Our study demonstrated that habitual tea consumption could provide preventive effect against blood pres-sure progression and hypertension incidence.