Elixir of refreshment - TEA
In China, they sipped it from tiny porcelain cups Tibetans mix it with salt and butter, the Japanese whisk it during ceremonies, Russians add lemon, while Moroccan use mint, Americans add a dash of high-fructose corn syrup, The Irish and Turks drink it by the bucket, while the call of the ‘Chaiwala’ is known across India, where they serve it with milk, sugar, and spices. It was a tribute to Chinese emperors, sustained meditating Buddhist monks, and turned Britain into one of the deadliest drug dealers in history. This poses a question into the history of tea and how has it changed our world, and what does it have to do with Jesus's Chinese brother?
Tea wasn't always a delicious drink which to us is a concoction of infusing tea leaves and hot water. No, the first humans who lived in native regions where tea grew, around Assam in India, and the Szechuan and Yunnan provinces of China chewed tea leaves for thousands of years before learning to brew them. So when did we start drinking tea then? Well, we don't know exactly. The most popular legend places its origin around 2500BCE.
This handsome chap the mythical Chinese emperor Shennong was boiling some water to make it safe to drink when some tea leaves fell into it. Surprised by this new, tasty and energizing drink Shennong taught his subjects how to grow and drink tea. Drinking tea probably originated in Sichuan or Yunnan. It spread from southern China to the north, with the help of Buddhist monks. Tea had become their favorite drink as it would help them stay awake during their long meditations. The spread of tea followed along with the spread of Buddhism through China and to other places in Asia. Tea in ancient China was quite different from modern tea. The Guanaya, a Chinese dictionary from around 200 AD describes how they made tea. They compressed all the dry tea leaves into bricks. To make some tea they just broke a bit off the tea-brick and mixed it with some hot water.
It wasn't an enjoyable beverage at that time. It was a bitter, medicinal drink, used to treat stomach problems, bad eyesight, skin diseases, and sleepiness. During the Tang Dynasty, Chinese civilization reached a high like never before. As art, culture, and cities flourished, so did tea technology. Tea growing and processing methods improve the taste of tea. From medicine, it transformed into an enjoyable tree. Tea houses and tea gardens soon sprang up in cities and towns across the empire. Tea became apparent in everyday life, from the Emperor all the way down to the peasants. It was a green tea that was the tea of choice at that time. The Chinese didn't start making black tea until around the 17th century. The Tang Chinese emperors began demanding that tribute be paid in tea. Peasants now began growing tea along with her heavy rice farming workload. Overworked farmers sometimes had to ignore their rice crops and famine haunted the poorer China while the Emperor sipped away on the finest tribute teas.
It got even richer trading across Asia. The ancient ‘Tea-Horse Road’ linked China's Southwest provinces with Tibet. Vegetables couldn't really grow in the harsh Tibetan climate. But now they could mix yak milk, yak butter, and salt with tea to add a little bit of plant fiber to their mostly animal-based diet. In return, they gave powerful warhorses to the Chinese. Buddhist monks and traders moving along the Silk Road brought tea with them into Central Asia and into the Middle East. Tea spread from Burma in the South Siberia in the north, from Korea and Japan over in the east, over to Turkish, Mongolian, and Russian merchants in the West.
Tea arrived in Japan and Korea around the late sixteenth century, introduced by Buddhist monks who had traveled to study. During Japan's Kamakura era, the custom of drinking tea reached the samurai. These intimidating warriors soon fell in love with tea. They began hosting tea parties and spread tea houses and the tea culture across Japan. Tea won a complete victory in Japan when the Shogun of Japan, Sanetomo, was suffering from a hangover so terrible he, and everyone around him thought he was literally about to die. Until a Zen Buddhist priest brought the shogun a bowl of tea along with his book on “The Benefits of Tea”. It cured his hangover and Sanetomo became a tea addict and helped spread tea across Japanese society.
Zen Buddhist monks would create an entire spiritual ceremony around tea, which evolved into the Japanese tea ceremony, which continues to this day. By the time the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) arose in China, tea bricks had fallen out of favor. Now steeping loose tea leaves in boiling water was all the rage. And they developed black tea by fermenting tea leaves, and during this time, tea began to be traded in Europe. Oddly enough there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term “tea”, in Spanish one would say “Te”, “Tae” in Irish, or “latte” in French. The other is a variation of “cha”, like “chai” in Hindi and Russian or Chinese and Turkish. Both versions come from the Chinese character “查”. In Mandarin and Cantonese, it’s pronounced “cha”. Tea reached them overland by way of the Silk Road.
The Dutch brought the first shipment of tea to Amsterdam in 1610 and started spreading it around Europe. Europeans didn't quite take kindly to tea. The price was a bit too steep for the bitter and medicinal drink. Tea arrived in England around 1645 but the English weren't keen either. They were coffee drinkers. That was, until the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza and Charles II of England married in 1662. Catherine loved tea! the first thing she asked for when she landed in England, was a cup of tea. Spotting a potential opportunity in 1664 the British East India Company gifted Charles and Catherine 1 kilo of Chinese tea, and soon, all of the high, fashionable society wanted to be seen sipping tea just like the Royals.
Ironically named honorable, East India Company was founded in 1600 through a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I. It received a monopoly on all English trade with the Far East. The East India Company grew enormously wealthy and was an empire in its own right. It could conquer territory, mint money, command armies to make war or peace, and collect taxes.
In the early 19th century, it had twice as many soldiers as the British crown. In 1689 the East India Company started to import tea directly from China. Through the 1700s, the amount of tea being imported rose significantly year after year. Millions in Britain were now hooked on tea and the tea trade with China was making the East India Company very wealthy, but the East India Company found themselves in hot water. China held all the power. Europeans were only allowed to trade at a single Chinese port, Canton, and China is the wealthiest place on earth at the time had no interest in British goods. China only wanted cold hard silver which the British were running out of. So, the Honourable company devised a very cunning plan, “Drugs!”. For centuries people across Eurasia used opium. The plant used to make morphine and heroin, for its pain-killing and sedative effects.
If the British could hook the Chinese on opium they could trade that instead of silver for tea but they would need access to land and labor where they could grow opium. So the East India Company began to colonize India. In 1757 the Honourable company won a decisive victory over the Indians at the “Battle of Polashi” (Battle of Plassey), which gave them control over a part of Bengal. Bengal, the richest place in India, which was worth about 12% of the world's GDP in 1700, was the proto-industrial textile, and shipbuilding capital of the world. Within 15 years of the East India Company seizing control, 10 million Bengalis were starved to death and Bengal was de-industrialized and contorted into a massive opium field. The British drowned China with Indian ground opium. Opium was already illegal in China but by the middle of the 19th century one in every three Chinese adults were opium addicts, and by 1840, the opium trade brought Britain revenues of 3.8 billion in today’s dollars, and that rose to about 22 billion by 1879. The infusion of cash into Britain from the tea and opium trade let them build a powerful modern Navy, while an opioid crisis devastated China. In 1839, the Chinese emperor was fuming at the fettle that he sent an official down to Canton to deal with this crisis and that official seized 1.2 million kilos of opium and dumped it into the sea. Soon British gunboats opened fire on the Chinese this standard the First Opium War of 1839-42. British warships devastated Chinese cities and armies. Opium addicted Chinese soldiers couldn't really put up much of a fight.
The Emperor was forced into a humiliating peace treaty. China would pay for the cost of the war and the destroyed opium; Hong Kong was handed over to Britain and the Canton system ended. The Europeans could now trade with China through Canton and four other ports. In a now-bankrupt war-torn and drug-addicted China, things began to boil over. In 1850 a rebellion against the Ching dynasty was led by Hong Xiuquan, the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ. This rebellion killed about 30 million people and during this rebellion, the British and French launched a second opium war in 1856. The Emperor was again forced to negotiate and even more Chinese ports were open to foreigners and opium was legalized in China. By 1800 enough tea was being imported into Britain to provide one kilo of tea per person per year that's about six hundred cups. Tea had now become a staple of British life for all classes. British and tea were inseparable. The British Empire was riding a wave of tea but they were keenly aware that it was the Chinese who grew it, processed it, and sold it to them at a lucrative profit.
Why should China make a fortune of its own product when the East India Company could take that fortune instead. From around 1778 the British had been aware that tea plants grew wild in Assam in India. After stripping off its trade monopoly with China in 1834, the East India Company finally started paying attention to a native of Assam. Tea the company discovered, they could make decent tea from Assam leaves but, they couldn't make this tastes as good as Chinese tea. Assam was a low-lying tropical region, but the Himalayan region had similar growing conditions as China's best tea regions. Assam tea didn't grow well there but if they could get their hands on some Chinese tea plants everything would fall into place. The trouble was that the Chinese government banned Chinese citizens from sharing any information about growing or processing tea or trading tea plants with foreigners. So, if the East India Company wanted tea for India, they were going to have to steal it. The thief was to be Scottish botanist Robert Fortune (which is honestly an excellent name for a person about to steal an entire industry). He was sent to China in 1848 by the East India Company to steal the finest tea plants and to learn how the Chinese manufactured tea. He dressed up as a native Chinese person because foreigners weren't allowed outside of the trading ports.
Using this disguise, Fortune learned from tea farms and factories, that all teas came from the same plant “Camellia Sinensis”. Before this, the British thought different teas came from different plants. What fortune was taught was that the difference between green and black tea was the result of processing. Black tea was fermented while green tea wasn't. After years in China, Fortune learned the entire tea making process and obtained all the necessary equipment. He sent back thousands of tea plants from China's best tea growing regions and somehow managed to convince six Chinese tea masters to go to India with him. Within years, India's tea industry was out producing China's and doing it for a lower price.
British colonialism and its tea plantations expanded into Burma, Ceylon, East Africa, and other places where tea could be grown. During the last half of the 19th century, tea estates covered India especially Assam. As the tea plantations grew, so did the need for laborers. The search for cheap labor cantered on Bengal where Indian slaves were taken from their homes to tea plantations in Assam. The conditions on these plantations were horrific. Owners refused to provide enough food, the disease was spreading, clean water wasn't provided and child labor was common. Today Assam is one of the most underdeveloped and poor states in India and as home to several separatist movements.
Nowadays over 13 million people are employed in tea production. Workers still often work long difficult hours for low wages on tea plantations, where they often have to live in poor working conditions and diseases are still extremely prevalent, but luckily, we live in a world where the East India Company or empires no longer have a monopoly on the tea trade. A fairer wealth distribution across the tea supply chain and better practices are possible. Organizations like Fairtrade and the ethical tea partnership help small tea farmers receive fair prices for their products and monitor living and working conditions among other issues. Today tea is the second most popular beverage in the world after water. Global consumption of tea is forecasted to reach 297 billion liters by 2021. By choosing to buy sustainable and human-friendly tea, the lives of tea producers can be improved significantly, and over the last 20 years, conditions on at least some of the tea plantations have improved due to these efforts. When Robert Fortune sneaked those plans out of China, he could never have imagined how large the tea industry would come.
Fun facts
- There are over 20,000 different teas in the world, “Da-Hong-Pao” is the most expensive teas in the world, it costs almost $600,000 per pound.
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