When was tea introduced

In order to protect their crop, Chinese merchants started to roast their leaves in order to prevent them from rotting. The leaves that were left in the air to oxidize produced black tea or red, as the Chinese call it.

This tea was manufactured mainly for export, and the Chinese, even today, continue to drink the native green tea. The Dutch were the first to drink tea in Europe, shipping it in , with the introduction to Britain around It arrived a few years after coffee had reached England.

It was through the coffeehouses that the new drink spread to the people. In , Thomas Garway, an English proprietor, had the idea of offering tea to the public, and it quickly became the drink of choice, far outpacing wines and liquors. Unfortunately for the government, Britain soon began to lose all the taxes accompanied with the sale of liquor. They quickly remedied the situation, however, by imposing a tax on tea. Nonetheless, it was not until the early part of the next century that it became a common beverage for the upper and middle classes.

When the coffee shops became too disreputable for respectable people, it was in the pleasure gardens of London that royalty, aristocrats and ordinary working people took tea. While many other taxes on goods bound for America had been repealed, the three pence per pound of tea remained firm. It was in place to offset the bankrupt British East India Company.

Over a five-year period, the colonies paid duty on almost 2 million pounds of tea. The raptures and refinements of tea were soon to inspire a remarkable degree of connoisseurship.

Such a ritual and celebratory approach to tea would later flourish in the Gong Fu Cha, the joyous and intricate Tea Ceremony that was later imported by Japan. When Europe discovered tea in the 17th century, it was China that dominated the world market as the only supplier of tea until the 19th century. When China banned imports of the drug, the notorious Opium Wars ensued Japan was one of the first nations to import tea from China.

The Japanese added a unique elegance and rigour to Chinese tea culture. Tea was prized by Buddhist monks for keeping the mind calm and alert through hours of concentrated meditation.

When another great Buddhist master, Eisai, returned from the Chinese mainland in , he brought back not only Zen Buddhism for the first time to Japan, but also the tea seeds that launched its cultivation on the islands.

Tea was a way to rise above the troubles of daily life and gain a taste of mental freedom. Nobles and merchants threw lavish tea parties and contests, at which guests were tested and gambled on their ability to distinguish high quality tea from false or inferior substitutes. In the chanoyu, this spirit of reverence makes even a simple tea party into an occasion of wonder and beauty, coupled with a warm hospitality and animated conversation.

In a beautifully decorated tea house, with windows that look out to an elegant garden, a finely powdered green tea known as matcha — now hugely popular in the West — is meditatively prepared and served with feeling to the guests by a tea master. In the sixteenth century, Sen no Rikyu, the greatest of all tea masters, brought the wabi sabi aesthetic of the tea ceremony, its emphasis on nature, sincerity and unadorned simplicity, to its ultimate refinement.

So central was tea to Japanese culture, even in affairs of state, that Rikyu became tea master to Hideyoshi, the ruler of the nation, and held tea ceremonies for visiting dignitaries. A more relaxed and informal tea ceremony, based on the loose leaf green tea called sencha, was introduced in the seventeenth century.

Both versions of the ceremony are still performed to this day. Tea in Europe began with the opening up of trade with China. The first recorded mention of tea was by a Venetian merchant in the s, and this wondrous new discovery was soon to be reported by Portuguese missionaries to China. Leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried, were added to tea leaves. Sometimes the resulting colour was not convincing enough, so anything from sheep's dung to poisonous copper carbonate was added to make it look more like tea.

By , the government realised that enough was enough, and that heavy taxation was creating more problems than it was worth. Suddenly legal tea was affordable, and smuggling stopped virtually overnight. As well as the great debate in the eighteenth century about the taxation of tea, there was an equally furious argument about whether tea drinking was good or bad for the health.

Leaps forward in medical and scientific research mean that we now know that drinking four cups of tea a day may help maintain your health, but such information was not available to tea drinkers years ago. Wealthy philanthropists in particular worried that excessive tea drinking among the working classes would lead to weakness and melancholy. Typically, they were not concerned with the continuing popularity of tea among the wealthy classes, for whom 'strength to labour' was of rather less importance!

The debate rumbled on into the nineteenth century, but was really put to an end in the middle of that century, when a new generation of wealthy philanthropists realised the value of tea drinking to the temperance movement. In their enthusiasm to have the working classes go teetotal, tea was regularly offered at temperance meetings as a substitute for alcohol.

Another great impetus to tea drinking resulted from the end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China, in Before that date, China was the country of origin of the vast majority of the tea imported to Britain, but the end of its monopoly stimulated the East India Company to consider growing tea in India. India had always been the centre of the Company's operations, where it also played a leading role in the government. This led to the increased cultivation of tea in India, beginning in Assam.

There were a few false starts, including the destruction by cattle of one of the earliest tea nurseries, but by there was sufficient cultivation of tea of 'marketable quality' for the first auction of Assam tea in Britain. In the British government took over direct control of India from the East India Company, but the new administration was equally keen to promote the tea industry and cultivation increased and spread to regions beyond Assam. It was a great success, production was expanded, and by British tea imports from India were for the first time greater than those from China.

The end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China also had another result, which was more dramatic though less important in the long term: it ushered in the era of the tea clippers. While the Company had had the monopoly on trade, there was no rush to bring the tea from China to Britain, but after the tea trade became a virtual free for all. Individual merchants and sea captains with their own ships raced to bring home the tea and make the most money, using fast new clippers which had sleek lines, tall masts and huge sails.

In particular there was competition between British and American merchants, leading to the famous clipper races of the s. Porcelain tea caddy decorated with painted Saxony D landscapes inspired by the engravings of Johann Alexander Thiele Silver-plated teapot, signed by English silversmith William Greenwell, active at the end of the 19th century. With its built-in stove and harmonious form, it is both practical and aesthetic.

Home The history of tea. The history of tea An ancestral tradition in China, tea was to become the ultimate beverage in the Far East. An ancestral tradition Chinese texts dating back several centuries before the Common Era mention a drink made from bitter plants, presumably tea, which was reserved exclusively for the Imperial Court. The perception of tea in Europe Tea had exotic charm and was credited with medicinal properties.

Black tea For a very long time, Europeans only drank black tea, initially imported from China, then from India and Ceylon. Manger en Chine. More on this topic. The Japanese tea ceremony. Tea in the United Kingdom. Tea in Northwest Africa.