Tea

Historical and Geographical Context

All tea comes from two varieties of trees: C. sinensis, which is indigenous to western Yunnan in China, and C. assamica, which was first discovered in the Assam region of India. Leaves from individual trees can be harvested three to five times a year, and the quality of the tea is dependent on the season in which it is picked. The first leaves of the year create the highest quality tea. Both tree varieties are used to produce four forms of tea: white, green, oolong, and black. Flavor variety is derived from the length of time leaves are fermented and oxidized.

According to Chinese legend, tea was discovered by Emperor Shen Nung in 2737 BC. For many centuries only the Chinese knew how to process tea, and it was in the finished form that the leaf was slowly spread through Asia. In the sixth century, tea was introduced to Japan by Zen Buddhist monks who had studied in China and found the drink a revitalizing liquid during long meditations. Tea drinking in Japan became common in the general population in the eighth century when the Japanese began to cultivate the plant. By the eighth century, tea was also [Page 1436]known in Tibet, although it was not until the Song Dynasty (960–1279) that it was consumed in high quantities. By the early fifteenth century, Chinese merchants traded tea in present-day Vietnam, Java, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, and the east coast of Africa. Threatened by the Mongols and the Japanese in the 1430s, the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) turned to a policy of isolation, remaining secretive about the cultivation and processing of tea, trading the substance only under their terms.

In 1606, the Dutch were the first Europeans to trade tea with China and were the main importers of tea to Europe until the encroachment of the British East India Company in 1678. At first, Europeans used tea as a costly medical herb to cure fever, headache, stomach ailments, and giddiness. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, tea was drunk socially as an invigorating beverage among the fashionable set in Paris, made popular by Cardinal Mazarin of France. In London, tea became a beverage drunk in the royal court in 1622 when the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, a purported “tea addict,” married Charles II of England. The beverage reached North America by the 1690s when it was sold in New England. Tea is especially important to Britons, and Britain imports more tea than any other European nation. Tea has created vast fortunes for traders and the government and is considered a drink that defines British national identity. Tea imports to England increased rapidly: the first records in 1675 totaled 4,713 pounds per year, reached 2 million pounds 50 years later, and 187 million pounds by 1877.

The British had implemented taxes on tea imports from the earliest days. By the eighteenth century, the tax rate had reached 119% of tea's wholesale price. High tea taxes resulted in a considerable amount of smuggling and adulteration. To curb smuggling, the prime minister of England, William Pitt the Younger, reduced the tea tax to 12.5% in 1784. A three-pence tax on tea was also imposed in British America with the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. This was a controversial move that eventually led to the Boston Tea Party, on December 16, 1773, during which colonists dumped tea crates into the sea, an event that rallied support for the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). As a result of the War of American Independence, the British were cut off from silver supplies in Mexico that had been used to buy Chinese tea. In 1758, the British parliament granted the East India Company a monopoly for producing opium in India, which they would exchange with the Chinese for tea. This eventually led to the First Opium War (1839–1842) and the forcible opening of Chinese ports to the British.

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