Did you know that every kind of true tea that you drink, from white to green to oolong to black to pu’erh, all comes from the same plant, in fact the top three leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant?
The look and taste of the tea in your cup depends entirely – well largely – on how those leaves are processed.
If the leaves come from a different plant, it’s not true tea. What you’re then drinking is called a tisane, or an infusion.
After water, tea is the most popular beverage on the planet. And so it was a happy accident that brought the two together. Legend has it that in 2737 B.C., the Chinese Emperor at the time, Shennong, was out researching plants. He was a botanist, herbalist and agriculturalist who had a habit of testing out hundreds of plants for medicinal purposes. Some say this is what did him in one day. Regardless, he is venerated as the Father of Chinese Medicine.
Nevertheless, while taking a break on one of his excursions, he was boiling water over an open fire – convinced that those who drank boiled water were healthier. Either a breeze blew leaves from a nearby shrub into the pot, or leaves from the twigs that he plucked to fuel the fire were lofted upward into the pot. Curious, Shennong drank the resulting brew and declared it gave “vigor of body, contentment of mind, and determination of purpose.”
Over 4,000 years later, we’re able to imbibe our favourite beverage thanks to his generosity of spirit. Tea is consumed in virtually every country in the world. There are over 3,000 varieties of tea, and you can find a tea to match any food or flavour.
The journey of those raw tea leaves to the sophisticated products we buy today, and the numerous cultures built around them, is long enough to fill a book (no, I’m not going to write one).
Originally tea was consumed very differently than we do today. It was considered medicinal, and people would boil raw tea leaves into a concentrated liquid, creating a bitter yet stimulating drink. Through the centuries, the Chinese began experimenting with a variety of techniques for processing the leaves, and a number of different forms of tea were developed. It became widely popular and spread to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, often by visiting scholars who would take seeds or cuttings home with them.
An entire tea culture developed in China, with social gatherings and poetry competitions. Poets and philosophers rhapsodized about the qualities of tea. The Japanese created beautiful tea gardens in order to contemplate life, tea and serenity.
After experimentation, it was found that if the tea leaves were steamed and pounded, and slowly dried over low fire, then shaped into bricks and hung to air dry, it kept quite well. As the drinking of tea spread across the continent, remarkable systems developed to transport it.
The most famous was the Tea-Horse Trade Route. The ancient passageway once stretched almost 1,400 miles across Cathay, from China, to Lhasa, Tibet. It was long, dangerous and rough, traversing four deadly 17,000-foot passes, though torrential rains and snowstorms. The journey took 3 months.
Tea was first brought to Tibet, legend has it, when a Tang dynasty Princess married the Tibetan King.
By the 11th century, brick tea had become the coin of the realm. The Chinese used tea to buy sturdy horses from Tibet to take into battle against Mongolian invaders, while for the Tibetans, in a cold climate where little grew, a hot cup of tea mixed with yak butter provided fat, protein and greens.
Tea-horse trade offices were set up in all districts, and private trade was strictly forbidden.
Tea porters, both men and women, regularly carried loads weighing 150 to 300 pounds. The more you carried, the more you were paid. Wearing rags and straw sandals, the porters used crude iron crampons for the snowy passes.
It was dangerous, back-breaking work. There was a saying in the caravan business that:
“the money earned on this route could be enjoyed by nobody but parents”
Tea caravans would carry bricks of tea either by horseback or on camels from China across the Siberian mountains and as far away as Russia. During the bitterly cold nights en-route, the camels would huddle around the fire with the traders, and their cargo of tea naturally absorbed some of the wood smoke. The Russians loved this robust, smoky tea, and canny purveyors learned to create Russian Caravan tea for everyone to have access to.
Explorers and traders from the west had slowly been making their way to the Orient since biblical times, but it was Marco Polo’s colourful account of his travels in the 13th century that really captured the imagination of Europeans. Portuguese priests and merchants during the 16th century were the first to bring tea back to Europe with them. Once the beverage caught on, the Dutch East India Company began shipping cargoes of tea as early as 1607.
When Charles II of England married Catharine of Braganza in 1662, she brought her tea-drinking habit with her from Portugal to the English court, and the British East India Company added tea to their growing trade network.
Tea from China had a lengthy route to Europe. It spent at least 3 months on the Tea Horse Road, and if mountain passes became closed by rains or snow, the journeys became even longer. From Chinese ports like Fuzhou or Shanghai, it then took several months of sailing time to Europe. The best early teas arriving in England were always at least a year old.
However, tea was one of the very few commodities that could carried at speed, and was valuable enough to justify racing the typhoons and shoals of the South China Sea just to be able to dock in London a few hours or days ahead of the pack.
By the middle of the 19th century, demand for fresh tea was so high that the first vessel home could command a premium price for its teas, and a ship might bring home a cargo worth almost 1/4 of what it cost to build the vessel on its very first voyage. Tea traders were always looking for ways to speed up transit, and eventually the light, sleek and fast Tea Clipper ships made their appearance, battling the seas to be the first to port. Crowds would gather on the docks in London to celebrate the first arrival, and betting at Lloyds was fierce. The best captains were the rock-stars of the period!
In the meantime, because tea trade was so lucrative, the British government taxed it, which of course resulted in smuggling. In 1784 the Prime Minister suggested that of the 13 million pounds of tea consumed in Britain, only 5.5 million had been brought in legally.
As with drug smuggling today, tea smugglers and merchants would often extend their supplies by adulterating them with other materials, from leaves of other plants to used tea leaves, which they would tint with things like Prussian Blue pigment and verdigris to make it look better. The additives could be toxic, and adulterations continued until eventually physicians began to notice consistent illnesses among tea drinkers.
The tea tax had consequences abroad as well. In the 1760s, Britain was deep in debt, so British Parliament imposed a series of taxes on American colonists to help pay those debts. The colonists were furious at being taxed without having any representation in Parliament, and strongly protested.
The taxes were repealed in 1770, except on tea . Britain didn’t want to give up tax revenue on the over 1 million pounds of tea the colonists drank each year. In protest, the colonists boycotted tea sold by British East India Company and smuggled in Dutch tea, leaving the East India Company with millions of pounds of surplus tea and facing bankruptcy.
In May 1773, British Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea to the colonies duty-free but still tax the tea when it reached colonial ports. Colonists in Philadelphia and New York refused to allow the tea to be offloaded and sent the ships back to England. In many other colonial ports, the shipments of tea were unloaded but left untouched on the docks to rot.
Finally, in December 1773 a group of colonial merchants and tradesmen called The Sons of Liberty disguised themselves in Native American outfits, boarded the docked ships in Boston and threw 342 chests of tea into the water à the equivalent of nearly $1,000,000 dollars today.
Squabbling went on between Britain and the colonies for 2 more years, eventually culminating in the American Revolution.
On the Eastern front, Britain was losing revenue importing silks, porcelain and tea from China, while they didn’t have anything that China wanted in return. In the 17th century the British tried cultivating tea in India, and also discovered a variety of tea plant native to India which produced fine, rich black tea. That didn’t completely repair the trade imbalance, though, and in the 18th century, the British East India Company decided to increase their revenue by importing Indian opium illegally to China, addicting thousands of Chinese people. Some Americans entered the trade as well, including the grandfather of President Franklin Roosevelt.
In 1839, after a Letter to Queen Victoria begging for a stop to the opium trade was ignored, the Chinese Emperor ordered the seizure of all the opium in Canton. The smugglers lost 20,000 chests of opium without compensation. The British responded with military force in the First Opium War. The Chinese lost and were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which, among other things, gave Hong Kong to the British for 99 years. Hostilities continued, and in 1858 after the Second Opium War the Chinese had to make further concessions, including the legalization of the opium trade.
So after all the blood, sweat and tears, how did we come to associate tea with genteel indulgence?
It started with Afternoon tea.
In the middle of the 1800s Anna, Duchess of Bedford, started the custom of an afternoon tea break. At the time, the normal hour for dinner was between 7:00 and 8:30 p.m. An extra meal called luncheon had been created to fill the midday gap between breakfast and dinner, but it was very light and the long afternoons left people feeling hungry.
The Duchess would become peckish around four o’clock in the afternoon, and began asking that a tray of tea, bread & butter, and cake be brought to her room. She liked it so much that it became a habit and she began inviting friends to join her.
Sandwiches were invented by the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718 – 1792). He was a dedicated gambler and refused to leave the gaming tables to eat, once playing for 24 hours non-stop! During one of these marathon gambling sessions he ordered a waiter to bring him a piece of ham between two pieces of bread, and the rest is history.
The afternoon pause for tea with sandwiches caught on and eventually spread around the world.
Afternoon Tea became an integral part of safaris when they began to be offered commercially by British game hunters in Kenya in the 19th century.
After Teddy Roosevelt’s famous safari in 1909 for the Smithsonian Institute made headlines around the world, not least for its style, with 250 porters and guides, and all the amenities, including china, crystal, even a piano, the idea caught on, and famous big game hunters like Frederick Selous, after which one of Kenya’s game reserves is named, catered to their select clients. The custom of afternoon tea continues on safari to this day, in various forms.
Afternoon Tea became an integral part of safaris when they began to be offered commercially by British game hunters in Kenya in the 19th century.
After Teddy Roosevelt’s famous safari in 1909 for the Smithsonian Institute made headlines around the world, not least for its style, with 250 porters and guides, and all the amenities, including china, crystal, even a piano, the idea caught on, and famous big game hunters like Frederick Selous, after which one of Kenya’s game reserves is named, catered to their select clients. The custom of afternoon tea continues on safari to this day, in various forms.
For a long time, tea etiquette was fixed, but I’m happy to say that you can enjoy tea any way that you please now.
A classic Afternoon Tea includes a selection of savouries (anything from sandwiches to tarts to cups of soup), a scone with clotted cream (or whipped cream; personally I prefer to use crème fraiche) and a fruit preserve (strawberry is traditional, but feel free to experiment), and several pastries. Everything should be finger-food size, eaten from small, salad-sized plates. Avoid anything heavily scented for your décor (such as scented candles or perfumy flowers), as they’ll detract from your ability to appreciate the tea and food.
Whatever tea you choose to serve should have a distinct aroma of its own. If it doesn’t, toss it out – it won’t have any flavour either. Do buy good tea; find a good purveyor (I use Murchies in British Columbia). In a pinch, Twinings teas available in grocery stores are good.
Afternoon tea can be accompanied by small glasses of sherry (very traditional), but I favour a great Mimosa myself. Cocktails are acceptable.
High tea is NOT equivalent to afternoon tea. It’s a supper served with tea – something the lower classes in Britain, who couldn’t afford all the fancy china, silver and expensive teas, would share with each other.
Themed teas are fun. I’ve done several Halloween teas myself, of course. Tea, spooky goodies and costumes – who doesn’t love that! Honestly, six of us had so much fun last year! Don’t think I’ll be able to reprise this year, as I have two live events on two back-to-back weekends towards the end of October. But, you never know.
Of course, tea is the perfect beverage to accompany a good book, a practice I highly encourage.
There’s so much more about tea that could be included, but then this post would turn into a book. But there are plenty of good books available on the history and culture of tea, should you want to learn more.
And if you’d like to have special fun, I recommend The Official Downton Abbey Cookbook, by Annie Grey and Gareth Neame. A delightful read, and free on Kindle Unlimited. Do yourself up like the Earl & Countess of Grantham, and send me photos!