Tea History

English Tea History

Many stories end with a marriage, this story is different. It starts with a marriage… In 1662, Prince Charles II married the Portuguese Princess, Catherine of Braganza. The princess was very fond of tea and accustomed her royal spouse to this new drink. I must say that tea was familiar to the English before the marriage of the high-standing persons; Garway's Coffee House, for example, traded in tea in London since 1657. However, tea was mostly known as a medicinal drink, and was much less popular than coffee.

After Charles II became king, a whim of the foreign princess became the Drink of the Queen. This fact secured the success of tea first among aristocracy, and then among other English citizens. The popularity was formed slowly but forever.

The spreading of tea in England had very serious opponents — coffee and beer merchants. Suspecting (not without grounds) that the new drink can be a serious business rival, they lobbied (in 1684) high import duties on tea. The duties quintupled the cost of the drink and led to the emergency of tea smuggling (from the Netherlands) and wide spread of counterfeit tea. It was in this period (the end of the 17^th century) that the English began to show preference for black tea and not green. Because black tea was more difficult to imitate.

	Twinings shop-sign. London, the Strand.

In 1706, on the Strand, in London, Thomas Twining opened Tom’s Coffee House — where one could buy not only coffee but also tea. In 1717, in the coffee house, a dry-tea shop appeared, the whole establishment was called Golden Lyon, and thus a new, and, probably, the main leaf in the English tea history was turned. Having started a wide retail trade in tea, Thomas Twining provided great masses of English ladies with the access to the fashionable drink. These masses, actually, formed the phenomenon known as the English tea tradition. The matter was that in the 17^th-18^th centuries ladies were not allowed into proper coffee shops. Let the advocates of equality forgive me, but the wise English thought that the woman should sit at home and adorn the family house — and they were right! While gentlemen were at war, conquering vast expanses of the sea, and creating the Great British Empire, ladies, partly — paying tribute to fashion, and partly — in search of entertainment, created a wonderful means of human communication — the English tea party. In its final shape the English Afternoon Tea tradition had been formed by the middle of the 19^th century — I will tell you later about it, because now we better get back to the 18^th century.

In 1708, East India Company was created. Have you ever played computer game Civilization™? If you have, then you know that in terms of this game East India Company is one of the wonders of the world. It is not an exaggeration. There has not been another event like this in world history. It was this company, with its own fleet, own army, and unlimited for that time financial capacity, that created the British Empire. For us, however, the Empire is of no importance — all the more since nothing has remained of it. What is important is that for East India Company to import tea was more profitable than to import coffee. Despite the popularity and precedence of coffee, it was doomed (though finally tea surpassed coffee by popularity only in the latter half of the 19^th century). From 1700 to 1721 import rates of tea into England increased fifty times. Tea was brought from China — until the middle of the 19^th century there was no other tea but Chinese (Japan exported next to nothing).

There was but one problem in the tea trade between England and China. The Chinese sold tea only in exchange for silver. Shipping silver from England was not profitable — in 1776 a splendid idea struck the English. They started to bring opium from India into China; there they sold it to the Chinese for silver, and this silver they used to pay for tea. Everything was just fine — ships loaded with one herb came to China, and then ships with another herb left China. Despite the illegality of such trade, the Chinese tolerated it until 1839.

	Classic English tea table (The Orangery at Kensington Palace).

In 1784 English Parliament decreased tea import duties almost ten times. It was tea lobbying this time and the initiator was Daniel Twining. Tea fell in price and became national English drink. At the same time tea smuggling failed. In 1802 tea was introduced into the ration of the British army. In 1824 a daily portion of rum at the Royal British Navy was decreased from a half-pint to a quarter of a pint. Rum was partially replaced by tea in the ration. The reaction was immediate — seamen called the mixture of tea with rum grog after the nickname of Admiral Edward Vernon (Old Grogram — from his grogram cloak), who initiated this change.

Foreseeing possible problems with the trade with China, the English were trying to find ways to grow tea in their own colonies. In 1823, on the government’s instructions, Charles Bruce smuggled tea seeds and saplings from China. In 1820 (according to another version in 1826) in Assam, an Indian state, wild growing tea trees were discovered — and the idea of growing tea outside China from the revolutionary one began to become evident. In 1834 a special committee on analysing possibilities of cultivating tea in India was created. In 1835 first tea estates in Assam were marked out. And, finally, in 1836 the first consignment of Assam tea appeared in Calcutta’s markets.

In 1839 the Chinese destroyed a large consignment of the English opium — thus, starting the First Opium War. Opium Wars continued until 1860 and ended with China’s total defeat. While the Wars were on, the trade between England and China fell into relative decay; and this fact, in the end, contributed to the development of the tea industry in India.

In 1840 the most beautiful part of English tea history started. First, Anna Maria Stanhope, the 7^th Duchess of Bedford, completely formed the English tea tradition, and invented afternoon tea — tea between lunch and dinner, accompanied with refined conversation, sweet gossip and fine etiquette, which was polished in Victorian time and exceeded any oriental tea ceremony by complexity.

Second, at this time, the famous tea clipper (high-speed sailing vessel designed in the USA and successfully reproduced in Britain) races began. These beauties of vessels brought tea from China into England incredibly fast — in 90-100 days. The speed was very important — regardless of any packaging, during the sea voyage tea got spoiled and its price dropped. One and a half century ago time was already money. On 30^th May, 1866 dramatically ended the most famous tea clipper race. After 99 days of sailing side by side Ariel was the first to enter the mouth of the Themes. But having lower draft she could not moor and had to wait for the rising tide. Taiping moored first and won the race, being only 12 minutes faster than Ariel. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made the tea races senseless and clippers began to bring wool from Australia.

	Old Lipton tea (Bramah Tea & Coffee Museum).

In 1870, R. Twining & Co. Ltd. first began to blend teas to improve the taste of the final drink, on the one hand, and to provide customers with the stability of quality, on the other hand. The matter is that quality, taste, and flavor of tea depend on many different things. There are no two identical consignments of tea — even if they were plucked in the same tea garden. The western business culture, however, is the culture of stable quality. Buying tea labeled English Breakfast, the customer wants to get a particular drink and he does not care what the weather was like in this or that tea garden. Tea blending solved this problem. Nowadays almost all teas sold in the West are blends of invariable quality and different content. Thanks to the English.

In 1875, Thomas Lipton opened his first shop. Then he became the father of the modern aggressive advertising, founder of the tea empire, and the man who made Ceylon a tea island. The case with Ceylon was quite amusing. Originally, it was an island of coffee (from 1825). But in 1869 some detrimental fungus destroyed almost all coffee plantations and they were promptly replaced by tea gardens. And already in 1887, the amount of tea brought from India and Ceylon to Britain exceeded the amount of tea brought from China.

By the end of the 19^th century, the forming of the Tea Britain was for the most part over. Brooke Bond and Lipton (now both these trade marks belong to Unilever NV/Plc) laid the foundation of the modern tea trade; in England, blends of Indian and Ceylon teas became more popular than Chinese tea; tea became an element of the English mass culture; tea manufactories of India and Ceylon began to become tea industry.

At this very point the English tea culture had reached its summit. But this is a topic for a separate article.

Denis Shumakov