TEA

I find tea fascinating because it's something that we have in common with the world of the 18th centuries. in the 18th century was that it was a very unfamiliar experience it was brand new it was exotic it was exciting in ways that I don't think we share today

so tea was discovered by Britain in this 1650s alongside of a range of other hot drinks which also still really familiar to us and they were introduced as medical remedies at the beginning and of course they are a drug they all contain caffeine. in many ways we could say I think that tea habituated British drinkers to itself rather than the other way around. at the start of the 18th century tea was a really expensive and exclusive drink only a few people knew about it people who were in the social elite around the court and in the fashionable circles of London were. by the end of the 18th century almost every household in England right down to the poorest cottages were consuming tea on a weekly basis and so tea was really the first commodity to find a mass market in Britain the first commodity that was coming from overseas.

the tea we drink today in Britain is very very different from the tea that Britons fell in love with in the 18th century. in the 18th century the tea that people drank was largely green tea and later oolong tea nothing like the heavily oxidized tannin ated black tea that we drink today. that black tea is really a legacy of British tea production in colonial India in the 19th century. and of course no one in 18th century Britain had a tea bag and about 90-95 percent of the tea we drink in Britain today is manufactured using tea bags. there's some evidence recently of tea reacquiring this state of being a an elite product there are certainly lots of shops opening in London selling teas that are made in small quantity by artisanal producers often in China. having said that do I see the popular consumption of tea being anything different from the current consumption of heavily oxidized black tea in tea bags. no I I don't see that. and if I'm perfectly honest that's the kind of tea that I drink most commonly in my home.

In september 1848 floating in a boat moored in a canal somewhere outside of shanghai Robert Fortune had his head shaved clumsily by a hired servant. He then had a long braid of dark hair sewn onto the nape of his neck before swapping his european outfit for traditional chinese clothes. fortune a six foot tall scotsman was disguising himself as his chinese alter ego Sing Wa to pass as in his own words "a very fair Chinaman". He was on a mission to sneak into the forbidden unmapped interior of china to steal a state secret. But Fortune wasn't a spy he was a botanist hired by the british east india company to collect samples and acquire information on how to grow and process tea. and in successfully doing so you would change the fate of two empires by stealing a plant.

This was fortune's objective. Camellia synesis also known as the tea plant. Tea drinking had been a ritual in china for at least 1500 years before it first arrived on European shores at the end of the 16th century. And over the next 200 years the drink took britain in particular by storm. First with the upper classes as a luxury item before its popularity infused through every level of british society. This was largely due to the east india company who held a monopoly over trade with china the only tea producer in the world to keep the shipments coming and the tea flowing. And the revenue generated from the important sale of tea to meet britain's insatiable demand grew to 10 of the british government's income. funding the rapidly industrializing nation's infrastructure and fueling its growing population of workers. tea and its trade had become an essential cog in the machine of the british empire. But there was a problem.

china remained closed off to the outside world only allowing strictly controlled trade through one designated port in canton. with no interest in trading for europe's products and goods china would only accept silver as payment for tea. and this was fine with britain for a while until the country's silver deposits eventually began to run low risking a financial crisis. so britain came up with a solution to their dilemma. they counter traded opium grown in british india with the chinese. smuggling the drug into china which was paid for in silver then in turn using that silver to purchase tea. fueling a growing opioid epidemic across china in response chinese officials eventually seized and destroyed their supply in canton while ransoming british merchants taken hostage sparking the first opium war between the two empires. in the ensuing conflict china has dealt a series of defeats by britain and was eventually left no choice but to sign a peace treaty that ceded hong kong to the british and opened up four more trading ports on china's coast. granting the west the greater access to chinese trade they were so hungry for.

meanwhile in india britain had been experimenting with their own tea production operation. native tea plants have been found growing in the aston province that had recently been annexed into british possession. the resulting tea was lackluster compared to the chinese tea but it was possible enough to stir the idea of securing britain's own tea supply. and therefore the possibility of freeing britain of the chinese monopoly price markup an increasingly strained relationship between the two empires. however the native indian variety of the tea plant the lack of first-hand expertise in how exactly the chinese produced tea was responsible for the indian tea's shortcomings. if indian grown tea was to replace the chinese supply it had to be better. india possessed the perfect geography for growing tea but it needed a better stock. specifically britain wanted the source of finest tea plants directly from china's interior and then transplant them into india. but this was not something china would provide willingly so the tasks needed to be carried out covertly.

as it happened robert fortune had already risen to prominence doing just that. making a name for himself spending three years travelling between the newly opened chinese trading boards disguising his way into forbidden cities and evading pirates all in the name of plant collecting. so the east india company hired him financing another three-year journey into china but with the sole objective of acquiring the finest tea plant samples he could find. which brings us back to that boat outside of shanghai. from shanghai he made two separate journeys into china's interior. the first sailing up the axi valley to the green tea regions of the ange province to spend weeks collecting plants from the sunglow mountains. and on the second fortune sought sampled from the heart of black tea production located deep in the wooly mountains a three-month journey by foot over rough unmapped terrain.

on each trip he spent time at renowned tea production sites pretending to be a visiting official, taking detailed notes of their respective processes. chinese tea production was a carefully crafted series of timings in how tea was plucked, dried, cooked, rolled, cooked again, then sorted by quality. and fortune observed and recorded every detail meticulously. he then returned to shanghai with all the plants and seeds he could carry, and one final task to find workers trained through generations in the science and art of tea making. the population of china was considered the property of the ruling ching dynasty and to be caught soliciting them out of the country was too great a risk for a westerner.

despite this there was still a thriving underground trade in chinese labor. and with it a network of compradors. chinese middlemen loyal to western merchant houses with the contacts to prove into the interior of china and find those with the expertise and willing to take britain's offer to relocate to india for three years.

so fortune set sail for india along with 8 chinese tea experts and 13 000 tea plant seeds of the finest stock, completing this task and placing the necessary tools in the hands of the british indian tea operation.

and with it the fates of empires shifted. it was too late by the time china had realised what britain had taken from them. the british indian tea operation would quickly grow to overtake china's, providing high quality tea for more people at lower prices. the british combination of milk, caribbean sugar, and indian grown chinese tea leaves was one of the early products of globalization was a supply chain that stretched from east to west. the requirement to boil water for tea sanitized disease-ridden water improving the health of british city populations while also providing a cheap efficient source of calories for workers as the country industrialized. while the theft of such an integral part of china's foreign exchange and the climate of an opioid epidemic and the aftermath of the opium war defeat played no small part in the destabilization of the qing dynasty and its eventual fall to internal revolution.

tea could therefore be viewed as an icon of the industrialization movement. a product of the british and larger insatiable european hunger for turning the natural resources of the earth into tradable goods in the pursuit of innovations and free trade that rapidly spurred civilization into a period of prosperity never known before. while also leaving scars on the countries and cultures this movement and hunger tore through. in ways that are still felt to this day. all in pursuit of the perfect cup of tea.