Tea Party, Anyone?
It doesn’t matter where you perambulate in this world, from South Africa to Ireland and Nepal to Vietnam, one can always find a culture of tea drinking. Some are content with electric kettles, styrofoam cups and a tea bag swimming about. Others hold to a ritual, bowing over a cup and waiting for tea leaves to softly whisper their drinkable status into the listener’s ear. Sipping on a cup of English Breakfast myself while travelling through Austin, I decide to look into the oddities of this global phenomenon and how it is that I’ve come to be sipping British tea in Texas.
Legends From The East
Of course China is to blame. There’s an infamous legend about the third century Emperor Shen Nung - conveniently a herbalist too - boiling drinking water under a Camellia Sinensis tree. Perchance, some leaves wander in to infuse the water, et voila! tea is served. Another version involves a prince-turned-monk cutting off his own eyelids after waking from a nap; a tea shrub allegedly sprouts where his bloody eyelids land on the ground. Rather ghastly. While I hold suspicions about such propaganda, let’s agree to tea originating in China.
Going West
Still, the Western World has to wait a few centuries for the Dutch to show up on the international trading scene. Looking for a way to best the Portuguese at their game, the first consignment of tea reaches Holland in 1606. Tea spreads across continental western Europe as a fashionable beverage, though reserved for the wealthy. Wanting a slice of the action, the infamous British East India Company builds up a monopoly on British trade with India and “the Far East.” (Thus the company’s eponymous name.)
But Brits being Brits, and tea considered a foreign curiosity, we have to wait for another key individual, Catherine of Braganza, to step into the light. A Portuguese queen to Charles II, she’s an avid tea drinker and manoeuvres the nation’s trading company to satiate her personal drinking habits. Naturally what a queen entertains, the nation desires. So by the 18th century, the East India Company is quite the lucrative organisation making a fortune through taxation of tea.
Organised Crime
Now to get to the tea bag floating about in our cups today, the narrative diverges here though inextricably linked. One develops further within the UK, while the other crosses the ocean to the Americas. Within the UK, a steady rise of tea taxes culminates in an organised network of tea smugglers slipping tea into the country right under the noses of the high and mighty East India Company. Without the necessity to cover the taxes, store owners start selling illegal tea at lower costs, opening up the esteemed product to the masses in the UK.
As a result, the East India Company finds itself without much business, and thus looks to America to offload its surplus stock. Well, we all know where THAT goes; the Americans taking care of the “ridding” in Boston and instigating a revolution. Once firing ceases, the American power houses of Thomas Perkins, Stephen Girard and John Astor, set up direct trade with China by building the fastest ships on the market. This golden age of the American Tea Clippers break the iron first of the British tea trade monopoly and the beverage finds itself now streaming into the United States.
Bag & Sell
So it is that our story comes to 1908 and a New Yorker tea merchant by the name of Thomas Sullivan. Until this point, tea was in loose leaf form and prepared in tea pots. Sullivan decides to get posh with his packaging strategy, and starts sending out his samples to customers in small silken bags, a tip of the hat to the product’s quality and value. Except his lazy customers simply assumed the object should be dunked straight into a cup of hot water, rather than emptying the contents into a proper teapot. Taking note, Sullivan makes a few improvements to his packaging and we have the origins of the modern day tea bag.
But of course, The Great War kicks off. So it takes nearly half a century of tragedy before a postwar desire to economise life propels our tea story forward. Now in convenient bagged form, tea meets a 1950s UK by means of Tetley. Other tea giants including Twinings of London, quickly takes up the new cause. Skip forward to today and much of the Western World has adopted bagged tea as the standard. In some instances, we’ve even eradicated any trace of the tea drinking art by creating pre-made tea purchasable in evil plastic bottles; either a shocking insult or a shocking wonder to Mr. Shen Nung.
Though the danger packed glory days of the Tea Clippers are mostly forgotten, the import and export of tea across the world is to this day, a streamlined operation. Nonetheless I find it ironic that English tea left British shores for America, only to have it returned with a 50s ideal, and then re-shipped back to a local grocers in Texas for my personal enjoyment. As my tea grows cold and I reach for another English Breakfast in American bagged style, I wonder who I’m upsetting the most: the Brits, the Yanks, or the Chinese?
