Little-known history of tea - The world's second most popular beverage after water

Today, tea is one of the most popular beverages in the world, with the global market outpacing all of its closest competitors combined. Here's the little-known history of tea - the second most popular beverage after water.

The truth about tra that few people know

After water, tea is the most popular beverage in the world - more popular than coffee, soft drinks and alcohol combined . 84% of Britons enjoy a cup of tea daily, with many drinking an average of three to four cups a day. The world tea processing industry has sales of $200 billion and is expected to grow by another 50% by 2025.

Tea is such an important part of many cultures, that it even has mythical origins. For example, there is a legend that the Buddha woke up from falling asleep during meditation; Frustrated by his undisciplined behavior, he cut his eyelids off and threw them on the ground. These eyelids then evolved into tea plants to help future meditators stay awake.

Tea is really important to a lot of people, but it is especially important to the British and their empire, so much so that it governs the entire foreign policy of the kingdom once proud to be the Sun. 'never dive' from their territory. Tea also inspired one of the most astonishing stories of 19th century espionage.

Tea of ​​the elite and folk

Since the 9th century, China's Tang Dynasty has popularized tea throughout the region. By the 16th century, the European powers first traded, then colonized different East Asian countries, where the daily life of ordinary people could not be without tea. Tea was firmly established when the Portuguese became the first Europeans to sample (in 1557), followed by the Dutch who were the first to ship a shipment of tea to Europe.

Indian tea hill. (Source: shikhar.com).

England did n't come to the tea party until the 17th century. In fact, in his 1660 diary, Samuel Pepys mentions "a cup of tea (a Chinese beverage) that I have never drunk before". It was only after King Charles II's Portuguese Empress popularized it at court that tea became a fashionable social drink. After the British started using it, the tea trade became a huge business.

However, because tea was monopolized by the East India Company and taxed by the government at 120%, an army of smugglers opened secret channels to get the tea into the hands of poorer consumers. Finally, in 1784, Prime Minister William Pitt wisely adopted the method of popularizing tea. To eliminate the black market, he reduced the tax on this multi-purpose leaf to just 12.5%. Since then, tea has become a popular drink - marketed as an invigorating and appetizing drink.

Little known details

Tea became so important to the British that it even sparked wars across the empire. Most famously, when the British imposed a tax of 3 cents/pound on all the tea the East India Company exported to America, which resulted in the destruction of the entire tea ship. The "Boston Tea Party" was the first major act of defiance by the American colonies and eventually led to countermeasures from the London government. These also sparked the American War of Independence.

Less well known is how Britain twice went to war with China over tea. At that time, tea was grown and exported only from China to British India and later within the British Empire. This resulted in a massive trade imbalance, where the largely self-sufficient China wanted only British metallic silver in exchange for their famously delicious tea leaves. This kind of economic policy, known as mercantilism , drove Britain really mad.

Tea hills in China. (Source: thatadventurer.co.uk)

In retaliation, Britain planted poppy plants that flooded China and only this plant. When China (quite understandably) objected to this, Britain sent gunboats to . The "opium wars" then turned out to be one-sided, and when China sued, demanding peace, they received a compensation of $20 million and had to cede Hong Kong to Britain (the territory). this was returned only in 1997).

Tea Intelligence

But even these wars have not resolved the trade deficit with China. Efforts to grow tea trees in British India produced only low quality, tasteless products, while the British needed the good stuff. So they turned to a Scottish botanist named Robert Fortune with a very simple task: Cross the border to China, mingle with Chinese tea farmers, steal both experience and special is the tea variety of the indigenous people.

Fortune was eager to accept the assignment, even though he could not speak a word of Chinese and had hardly ever left his native England. Not the father of the legendary agent 007, he shaved his hair, braided it like a Chinese style, and then set off on his adventure. And it was literally an adventure - he was attacked by robbers, his ship was shot by pirates, and he had to 'taste' fevers, tropical storms and hurricanes.

Despite all this, Fortune not only learned Chinese, traveling around Suzhou and the surrounding tea estate, but also assimilated into remote farming communities. When the tea farmers questioned Fortune's appearance and why he was so tall, he deceived them by claiming that he was a very important government official - who were all tall.

A special kind of Indian tea

During the course of his three-year mission, Fortune secretly delivered a number of shipments of tea plants to the British side in the form of 'bonsai art' (formerly a well-kept secret). Eventually the British began to grow their own tea plants using Chinese farming techniques in their colonial India.

Not long after, an Indian tea variety, almost indistinguishable from the (stolen) Chinese variety, began to dominate the market, especially in the huge and growing empire of China. Brother. Within 20 years of Fortune's remarkable mission, the East India Company had more than fifty tea contractors worldwide.

Today, China not only produces more than India (in second place) but also more than the top ten countries combined. In total, 40% of the world's tea comes from China . But it was British tea - coupled with the incredible and unlikely mission of Robert Fortune - that drove the huge global market. Without this overconfident Scottish plant lover, the world's love of tea might have been very different.