Though extraneous circumstances have forced this post to far proceed the week about which I'm writing, I hope still to offer valuable insight into the history of tea, why it matters, and how it's been influential to my tea exploration thus far!
The books on tea which I purchased as my GripTape challenge was just beginning have granted me the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the history of tea, but that doesn't mean I had absolutely no knowledge about tea's history beforehand. As part of the summer reading before my AP World History class several years ago, I read "A History of the World in 6 Glasses" by Tom Standage. This fascinating book discusses in detail the massive amount of influence beverages have had on the course of world history, and identifies 6 of them as particularly important: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. It was Mr. Standage's work which first introduced me to the importance of the history of tea. Upon starting my learning challenge, however, there were only three or so things I remembered about tea's storied history: 1.) That tea is an ancient beverage, originating in the forests of China's Yunnan region, 2.) that tea became the center of an elaborate ceremony in China between the 8th and 14th centuries and in Japan shortly after, and 3.) that British consumption of Chinese tea in the 18th and early 19th centuries and the barriers it faced due to the strict Chinese customs-network eventually led quite directly to the "Opium Wars", through which Britain humbled the ancient Chinese empire and became the dominant colonial force in all of East Asia. Besides these key points, the details had faded into the deepest recesses of my long-term memory.
This learning process, however, has led me to reexamine in greater detail the way I understood the history of tea. It took very little time before I found myself constructing a progressing timeline to guide my memory of how the leaves of a fairly unremarkable tree have lent themselves to become the 2nd most regularly consumed beverage on Earth, next to water. In order to grant some fragment of the information contained in the tea books I've worked my way through, I'll attempt to describe the history of tea in a few short paragraphs for your pleasure!
The history of tea begins in mythological fashion with the tale of the ancient Chinese ruler, Shennong who is rumored to have lived more than 5,000 years ago. The gracious ruler, wishing to find out the effects of every herb and plant in his kingdom, went about tasting each of them in turn until he ate a deadly root and became badly poisoned. Too weak to even stand, Shennong sat under an unknown tree, drifting in and out of consciousness. While he eventually gathered the strength to boil some water, hoping it would flush the poison out of his body, he fell asleep again. Upon waking, the emperor found that some leaves from the tree above him had fallen into the water, and Shennong drank the infused beverage in an action of faith. His faith was rewarded, as the first tea-infusion in "history" counteracted the poison and he was cured of his illness. Thus, tea's entrance onto the stage of myth focused on its many (real) health benefits; while the story of Shennong is, as stated, unsubstantiated myth, it is actually quite likely that tea was first being drunk around this time in China's Southwestern Yunnan Province, situated mostly upon a great plateau covered in dense forests. Some tea trees found in this region date from at least a few thousand years ago.
The beginning of tea's actual historical presence in China comes from early records showing Buddhist temples sending tea to Chinese Emperors as tribute. Tea became rapidly popular after this, as China's elite deemed tea worthy of their investment. A further catalyst for tea's growing popularity at this time was the use of tea as part of a dowry for a Chinese princess marrying a Tibetan king. By the time of the Tang dynasty's rise to power in the 7th century, Tea was well-established as China's national drink. At this point, it was fermented in blocks and brewed commonly with other local spices and herbs (this block-tea still exists as the rare and desirable Pu erh tea). Lu Yu, who lived in the 8th century, pioneered the viewing of tea as an artistic and a spiritual practice, looking down upon "tainting" it with alien additives. Lu Yu first articulated the concept of Cha Dao (the way of tea; see next post), and created the Cha Yi (practice of tea) as a standardized set of rules for brewing tea to be followed to the letter. This led to a new age of tea brewing consisting of crushing unoxidized (green) tea leaves into a powder which would be mixed into hot water. This process flourished most during the early days of the Ming dynasty (having survived the existential threats of the tea-disliking mongol Yuan dynasty), and spread to Japan in the 14th century via visiting Buddhist monks. Ironically, as soon as powdered-tea was enthusiastically received in Japan (becoming matcha), China had already moved on to a different tea fad, one that remains the standard form of tea-brewing in China even now: infusing loose leaves in water directly.
Loose-leaf tea first reached Europe in the 17th century on Dutch trading vessels, but didn't become very popular in Britain until the 18th century. The beginning of the industrial revolution led to the skyrocketing importance of tea; it was a beverage which could be enjoyed as an invigorating cuppa by factory workers and as a refined excuse for social calls by the aristocracy alike. Tea truly broke down social barriers in its ubiquitous consumption; this consumption, however, was all dependent upon supply, something which was constantly unstable and frustrating for British merchants. All of Britain's tea at the beginning of the 19th century came from China, as the Qing dynasty jealously guarded the secrets of its most famous drink from all foreign interests. China had reluctantly opened a single port for trading with European powers, through which all exported tea flowed. From a British supply point of view, this was an inefficient and expensive process, particularly because the Chinese only sold tea in return for pure silver. Finally, in a simultaneously cruel and ingenious manner, the British East India Company developed a plan for undermining Chinese authority and cheapening the tea-buying process: the highly addictive drug opium, produced in Indian factories under British control from poppy seeds, was systematically introduced to Chinese markets via intermediary Chinese merchants willing to bribe customs officials in return for silver. The silver from opium sales was used to buy Chinese tea, and the unethical cycle continued. This process worked very well for the British for quite some time, until the Chinese government desperately sent reformers South to deal with the corruption issues. These new inspectors, resistant to bribes and opium alike, realized the scope of the problem at hand and reacted by searching ships and dumping illegal opium into the sea. This infuriated the British-allied Chinese opium merchants, who demanded compensation for their destroyed product. The Chinese government, correctly pointing out that there would be no compensation due to the illegality of the opium itself, directly confronted the British East India company. Through a rather complicated series of events which must be skipped over for brevity's sake, Britain ended up resoundingly defeating the Chinese military forces in a short-lived conflict and forced upon China a demeaning and, frankly, embarrassing treaty which not only opened a large number of new Chinese ports for European trade and gave Hong Kong over to British rule, but which also effectively cleared the way for the opium-tea trade to continue unchecked. Much to the dismay of the Chinese, Britain had established territorial and political dominance in the region which would last for more than a century in one fell swoop.
It was around this time, however, that the Chinese tea trade became almost inconsequential to Britain due to the recently discovered presence of native tea plants in Northeastern India. Having performed prior fruitless explorations for tea-growing in India involving a surprisingly daring series of covert operations for information inside of China, the British East India Company jumped instantly upon the new opportunity available to them. Within less than a decade, the vast majority of British tea was being imported from India; it was this transition which further established black tea as the standard tea-of-choice for Britain, as it was the cheapest and most efficient tea to produce en masse. By the end of the 19th century, tea was officially entrenched as the quintessential staple of British culture it still is today.
This post would be remiss without any discussion of the Boston Tea Party, mostly due to the nationality of my readers! Though the events leading up to the dumping of tea into Boston harbor are certainly colorful, what's particularly interesting are the alternatives to British-supplied Chinese tea which began to achieve prominence in the colonies directly prior to and during the American revolution as a protest of British rule. Smuggling operations run by the French and Spanish, along with illegal sales by American merchants led to the consumption of a low-quality, by all accounts rather revolting beverage called "freedom tea" which was, according to contemporaries, barely worthy of the title "tea". Thankfully, this trend was short-lived, and the United States was quick to capitalize upon newly-opened Chinese markets in the direct aftermath of the Opium Wars, supplying high-grade tea to many consumers. Interestingly, iced tea has always been far more popular in North America than its hot counterpart, a trend which most tea enthusiasts have no satisfactory explanation for. Perhaps some of iced tea's popularity is due to the greater overall trading history of tea in the American South, where generally higher temperatures necessitate a refreshingly cool beverage. This, however, is merely my own conjecture and should be taken with a grain of salt!
Though this brief history falls woefully short at accurately detailing the true extent to which tea has had an influence on the histories of the Middle East, Africa, South America, and the world in general, I hope it has proved a valuable introduction into the tantalizingly vivid history of tea as a social and political force in the lives of countless individuals throughout history. The question I turn to now is: having written all that, why does it matter? How is knowing any of these things useful? The answers to these questions are what really interest me, and are what encapsulate the majority of my personal interest in tea.
Tea is a living beverage. As someone who wishes to devote their life to the research of history, it's actually fairly rare for me to find something which I can interact with on the same dynamic level as the people I care about studying once did. I can drink tea coming from the same area in the exact same manner as someone who lived 200, 500, or even a thousand years ago, which is an absolutely amazing thing. As a rather fascinating paradox, tea is one of the most historically-grounded ways to center oneself on the present moment. I like to think about tea as collapsing the timeline of modern human civilization into a single, tangible resource. While this may sound excessively melodramatic, I find it difficult to overstate the impact tea has had on the events of the past and which it continues to have on the events of the present. From the deserts of Morocco to the highlands of Argentina, from the arid plains of Kenya to the dramatic seaside-mountains of China's Fujian province, and from the wood-paneled tea rooms of London to the remotest of Tibetan base-camps, tea is a shared experience of nearly all the world's people. Tea matters because tea has never stopped being important to people since Shennong's first miraculous chance-encounter with the leafy drink, through the impacts of European colonialism, and into our present reality. Infused in every cup is what makes us human, the good and the bad, the trivial and the vital; tea must never be taken for granted.