Page 28 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

tea 1805

earth, apart from air and water. This has had immense beverage in Japan from the eighth century; in the thir-
consequences for almost every aspect of human life and teenth century the habit of drinking tea spread to the rest
international relations. of the population, and tea became the universal drink.
Tea is a drink made by picking and drying the leaves Tea began to be imported to Europe in the seventeenth
of a species of camellia, camellia sinensis.The leaf is then century.When the direct clipper trade to China opened up
infused in hot or boiling water.Tea has many advantages in the 1720s, the price dropped and the imports soared.
as a trade good. For one thing, it can be produced By the middle of the eighteenth century it was widely
cheaply. The semitropical climate it prefers is found in drunk by all classes in Britain. It was exported to the
geographic regions as widely separated as central China colonies, and the duty imposed on tea contributed to colo-
and East Africa. Only a few leaves are needed to make a nial unrest (as demonstrated in the Boston Tea Party of
good pot of tea, and they can be reused. Dry tea is very 1773, in which angry colonists dumped shipments of tea
light and stores well, so it can be shipped across the globe into Boston Harbor), which culminated in the American
with ease, and its high value in relation to its weight Revolution and the establishment of the United States.
makes it worthwhile to do so. The British empire was to a considerable extent built
around tea, and the British East India Company’s prof-
The Spread of Tea its were largely based on the tea trade and the three-way
Tea moved from the jungles of the golden triangle into movement of opium, tea, and silver between India,
the monastic gardens of China at least a thousand years China, and Britain.The British introduced tea into Assam
before the birth of Christ. It spread across all of China by from the 1840s, and by 1890 the region boasted large
the eighth century CE. From the ninth century onwards it plantations and machine-based production in factories.
became the chief commodity traded with the wandering Tea production continued to expand and spread, moving
tribes of central Asia.The Mongols and Tibetans became into southern India and Sri Lanka. The Indians them-
great tea drinkers, and blocks of tea became the local cur- selves became great tea drinkers only from the 1920s.
rency.Tea was drunk by Buddhist monks as a medicinal Before that almost all the tea had been exported to
Britain, where it was sold for a higher
price than it could fetch in India.
Because tea is best grown on planta-
tions, its cultivation has altered the ecolo-
gies of the areas where it was grown,
unsettled tribal populations, and thrown
hundreds of thousands into boring, miser-
ably paid labor, yet made huge profits for
investors and tea managers. In Assam, for
example, swathes of jungle, rare plants and
many animals were destroyed. The tea
coolies were herded into factories and into

A Chinese tea shop in the late
nineteenth century. The men are
engaged in other activities as the
tea is served.