{"id":4093,"date":"2016-03-20T12:15:44","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T12:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/?p=4093"},"modified":"2016-03-20T12:15:44","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T12:15:44","slug":"all-the-tea-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/2016\/03\/all-the-tea-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"All the tea in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Is there any tea on this spaceship?”\u00a0<\/em>Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.<\/p>\n

I’m sitting here with a steaming cup of inspiration at my side. An Englishman drinking tea from a porcelain cup stirred by a spoon: what could be more ordinary than that? But dig carefully into what led to\u00a0this scene and you can\u00a0find stories of magical transformations, global trade, empires and planet-changing events billions of years ago.\u00a0Let’s start with a taste of the history of tea, the enriching elixir, the\u00a0healthy pause that refreshes.
\nThe tea bush, isn’t native to Britain1<\/a>; when and why did this country get into the habit of putting its leaves into hot water?<\/p>\n

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Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney discuss whether to put the milk in before or after the tea<\/p><\/div>\n

Tea has been drunk in China for thousands of years – the plant Camellia sinensis is native\u00a0there. It’s leaves are rich in\u00a0caffeine, most likely to reduce damage from insects or associated fungal attacks2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Caffeinated drinks first made a big splash in Europe in the Seventeenth Century. Coffee, sourced from the Middle East was drunk at ‘coffee houses’ alongside chocolate from the Americas and tea. Processed tea was brought direct from China by sea around Africa, a route opened up by the Portuguese the century before. Though still only available to the elite, coffee houses had an impact in many ways. As a semi-public space, typically with newspapers to hand, they were a venue for political activity: Charles II of England wanted to shut down London’s coffee houses as they contained “idle and disaffected persons” <\/i>who “produced very evil and dangerous effects”<\/i>. A great public outcry ensued and, not the most powerful of monarchs (his father had been\u00a0executed by Parliament only 26 years earlier), Charles backed down and the seditious sipping continued. Insurance titan Lloyds of London started life as a coffee house3<\/a> around this time.\u00a0Meetings of the early Royal Society, (attended by the guys who now have scientific Laws named after them: Newton, Hooke, Boyle and others) often finished up in Coffee Houses.
\nIt’s tempting to make a link between the dramatic changes associated with this Early Modern period in history with the sudden infusion of caffeine. To drink safely in urban areas without modern sanitation you need a drink made from boiled water. Before tea and coffee became popular, this was often an alcoholic drink, wine or beer, weaker than we are used to today. It’s tempting to think of coffee and tea jolting the modern world awake one sip at a time.<\/p>\n

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For the next 150 years tea’s popularity in the west only grew. In the period leading to\u00a0American independence in 1776, the British Government’s desire to monopolise (and tax) the supply of\u00a0tea to its American colonies led to the Boston Tea Party\u00a0and\u00a0tea-drinking being seen as unpatriotic.\u00a0The Tea Act, that so annoyed the patriots of Boston was passed to help the hugely influential British East India Company, who also had a monopoly on supplying tea to Britain. This, plus high taxes led to high rates of smuggling of tea (and other goods) from France via the England’s southern coast.<\/p>\n

Tea is native to India, particularly in Assam, but it’s leaves were seen locally as a herbal medicine rather than a way to make a drink. By the 1830s the East India Company (who by now had control over most of the Indian sub-Continent) were looking for an alternative source of tea than China and recognised a suitable climate in Assam4<\/a>. Initially plantings were made of transplanted Chinese plants, but the native varieties fared better. Tea plantations spread, soon taking in the area near Darjeeling and eventually spreading to Southern India and Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). All these names are now also varieties of tea. By the early Twentieth Century tea drinking became popular in India itself, characteristically as milky, sweet and spicy Chai5<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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By the second World War, tea was so ingrained in British culture that a regular supply of\u00a0tea was seen as the\u00a0second most important factor in\u00a0troop morale, behind actually winning and ahead of food6<\/a>. The UK government took control of world supplies of tea 7<\/a> – and assigned it first to troops, then to home front, then the rest of world. This caused problems for the Irish republic, whose tea habit was at least as strong as Britain’s and whose\u00a0trade mostly passed through the Empire it had freed itself from\u00a020 years before.\u00a0According to an not entirely impartial history of the time8<\/a>: “The Irish government, no doubt fearful of a mass revolt in the event of tea shortages<\/strong>, set up a private limited company, Tea Importers (Eire) Ltd., in order to start importing tea directly from country of origin<\/em>” (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n

Tea drinking is now in decline, with Britons seduced by the delights of espresso and cappuccino, but new delights such as green or white tea are now\u00a0available. Tea’s\u00a0global spread was\u00a0part of the Western Imperial phase of globalisation – unequal trade enforced by gunboats. The current phase of global change is in many\u00a0ways\u00a0more equal:\u00a0major UK brand Tetley Tea is now owned by Indian conglomerate Tata following an amicable takeover.<\/p>\n

Those of you hoping for more Geology will be pleased by the next posts in this series, when I turn to the cup and the tea-spoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Is there any tea on this spaceship?”\u00a0Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m sitting here with a steaming cup of inspiration at my side. An Englishman drinking tea from a porcelain cup stirred by a spoon: what could … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-getting-under-the-surface"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4093"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4110,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093\/revisions\/4110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/metageologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}