The journey of tea
After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world, and every variety of it, whether green, black or oolong, comes from the leaves of a single species of evergreen shrub. The differences between them are the result of what is done to the leaves after picking. Tea's journey from the hillsides of south-west China to the kitchens of almost every country is a story of religion, taxation, theft and accident.
Chinese legend attributes the discovery of tea to an emperor who was boiling water beneath a tree nearly five thousand years ago when some leaves drifted into the pot. Whatever the truth, tea was at first valued as a medicine rather than as a refreshment. It became an everyday drink under the Tang dynasty, and around the year 760 a scholar named Lu Yu wrote the first book devoted to its cultivation and preparation. At that time the leaves were pressed into hard bricks, which were easy to transport and so widely accepted that in some regions they served as money.
Buddhist monks, who found that tea kept them awake during long hours of meditation, carried the plant to Japan, where the preparation of the drink developed into an elaborate ceremony. Europeans encountered it much later. Dutch merchants brought the first cargo to Europe in about 1610, and it was on sale in London by the 1650s. Its popularity in England is usually credited to Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess who married King Charles II in 1662 and made tea-drinking fashionable at court.
For more than a century, however, tea in Britain remained a luxury. The government taxed it so heavily that at one stage the duty stood at 119 per cent, and the consequence was smuggling on an enormous scale. It has been estimated that more tea entered the country illegally than through the official ports. Only in 1784, when the tax was cut to a fraction of its former level, did the trade in smuggled tea collapse and the drink come within reach of ordinary families.
Rising demand created a different problem. All of Britain's tea came from China, which accepted payment in little except silver, and silver was draining out of the country. British merchants found a profitable but shameful answer: they sold opium grown in India to China, and used the proceeds to buy tea. The Chinese government's attempts to stop the drug trade led to two wars in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile the British were looking for a way to grow tea themselves. A variety of the plant had been found growing wild in Assam, in north-east India, in 1823, but nobody in India knew how to process the leaves. In 1848 the botanist Robert Fortune was sent to China, where foreigners were forbidden to travel in the interior. Disguised in local dress, he visited the tea-growing districts and sent out thousands of young plants together with a group of experienced Chinese workers, whose knowledge proved more valuable than the plants themselves. Within a generation, plantations in India, and later in Ceylon, the island now called Sri Lanka, were producing tea more cheaply than China could, and the Chinese monopoly was over.
The tea had still to be brought home, and merchants paid the highest prices for the first of each season's crop to arrive. This encouraged the construction of clippers, slender sailing ships built for speed, whose races from the Chinese ports to London were followed by the public with the excitement that would later surround sporting events. Their era was brief. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave steamships a shorter route that sailing vessels could not use, and the clippers were soon redundant.
The last great change in the way tea is drunk came about by chance. In 1908 Thomas Sullivan, a tea merchant in New York, began sending samples to his customers in small bags of silk instead of the usual metal tins, simply to save money. Some of them, not realising that they were supposed to empty the bags, put them directly into the pot, found the result convenient and asked for more. Sullivan replaced the silk with a cheaper material, and the tea bag was born. It was slow to catch on in Britain, where it was regarded with suspicion until the 1950s, but it now accounts for the overwhelming majority of the tea drunk there.