By Joel Denker

The “China Drink” was how many of the early English devotees of the exotic brew described it. The drink was steeped in the lore and tradition of an ancient culture whose habits the British did not grasp. Not only the Chinese tea drinking rituals, but also the plant and its cultivation, were cloaked in mystery. The Chinese concealed these secrets from the “barbarians,” who were more than happy to live in ignorance.

Long before it was enjoyed in sociable tea houses, tea was appreciated in China for its ability to invigorate the mind and spirits. Buddhists and Taoists found that it strengthened their concentration and staved off fatigue. Meditation, central to these faiths, was encouraged by the refreshment.

According to legend, a Buddhist monk, who became drowsy because he had not kept to his meditation regime, created tea. To punish himself, he cut off his eyelids. They fell to the ground, and with the Buddha’s intervention, sprang up as a tea bush.

Tea also restored the body. An herbal medicine, its leaves and juices were expected to heal the limbs and sharpen the eyesight. Lu Yu, the poet laureate of tea, rhapsodized about its blessings: “If one is . . . feeling hot or warm, given to melancholia, suffering from aching of the breain, smarting in the eyes . . . , or afflicted in the hundred joints, he may take tea four or five times. Its liquor is like the sweetest dew of heaven.”

First called ch’a by the Chinese, tea grew wild in the borderland between China, Burma, and India. Large trees, which grew from fifteen to thirty feet, adapted well to the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, where rain and tropical heat were both abundant. When it was first domesticated in the fourth century A.D., cultivators reduced the plant’s size to that of a  small bush. The leafy evergreen sprouted small, pretty white flowers.

From China, tea was transported along the Great Silk Road to Central Asia and the Middle East, where it acquired a new name, chai. In the seventeenth century, Dutch traders started calling the plant tay, a word from Fukien, a Southern Chinese dialect.

Tea drinking was taken over by the Chinese aristocracy. It was sipped on ceremonial occasions, at parties and banquets. “Tribute tea” was offered by imperial underlings to the Emperor. So revered had the plant become by the ninth century A.D. that only virgins, who wore silk gloves and who did not eat “impure” garlic and onions, were permitted to pluck the leaves of the court gardens.

The ways of consuming tea were invented and reinvented. Initially, the leaves were shaped into cakes, immersed in boiling water, and seasoned with ginger, onion and orange peel. In later years, the leaves were pulverized into a powder and whipped into hot water. Only by the time of the Ming Dynasty (1388-1644), did anything resembling our own tea infusion emerge. Loose leaves were steeped in boiling water to bring out a distinctive fragrance and astringent flavor.

The Chinese developed a tea aesthetic in which every aspect of the ritual was given scrupulous attention. The poet Lu Yu even prescribed the smallest details for boiling the water: “When the water is boiling, it must look like fishes’ eyes and give off but the hint of a sound. When at the edges it clatters like a bubbling spring and looks like pearls innumerable strung together, it has reached the second stage. When it leaps like breakers majestic and resounds like a swelling wave, it is at its peak.”

Western Europeans discovered the alluring drink in the seventeenth century and began scrambling to capture the commodity. The English, who were to dominate the trade, chartered the East India Company in 1660 as their commercial arm. Their ships anchored in the Chinese port of Canton and received “chops,” a collection of tea chests, from traders. The boats were also loaded with tea accessories, packages of porcelain cups, saucers, and pots. These were stacked on top of the tea in the hold to serve as ballast.

“The tea wagons” deposited their cargo at the London docks. The tea was brought to warehouses on Teak Close, Cinnamon Close, Mandarin Stairs, and other wonderfully named streets in the district. It would later be auctioned off on Mincing Lane in the area of Plantation House.

Tea drinking began in England as the exclusive pastime of the titled and well-heeled classes. Queen Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese woman who married King Charles II, set the tone. Catherine, who was given a tea chest in her dowry, set out to banish ale and spirits from the court and replace them with tea.

Tea needed a wider social arena, but the coffee houses, an all-male preserve, stood in the way. In 1660 the Garraway Coffee House in London opened up to tea drinking, whose health benefits it extolled. The refreshment was drawn from a cask, heated, and, then served to customers. Thomas Twining, a London coffee house owner, broke ground with a tea shop in 1717 that welcomed women.

Genteel ladies, who socialized in the shops and organized society tea parties, gave tea drinking respectability. Learning about the varieties of tea, the fine distinctions of taste, and the etiquette of its service became part of an affluent young woman’s training

A particular English form of tea drinking was taking shape. Unlike the Chinese, the British drank their tea with milk. In another sharp break with Oriental tradition, it was also consumed with sugar. By the late seventeenth century, sugar, first used in Europe as a spice and a medicine, had become an obligatory sweetener. Conveniently, England’s West Indian colonies supplied the ingredient.

Tea gradually entered the diet of the working class and the poor.  Factory hands were given a tea break and their families developed the habit of late afternoon “tea,” an early supper after work. Heretofore luxuries, sugar and tea were transformed into staples of the masses. After 1750, anthropologist Sidney Mintz points out, the poor consumed more sugar than any other group.Along with bread, butter, and jam, sweet tea provided a quick caloric boost.

Some observers denounced the widespread tea drinking of the commoners as a social blight. “It is the curse of the nation that the laborer and mechanic will ape the lord,” the social reformer Jonas Hanway argued. “To what a height of folly must a nation be arrived, when the common people are not satisfied with wholesome food at home, but must go to the remotest regions of the world to please a vicious palate. . . .”

Others welcomed tea as a healthy alternative to alcohol. Temperance advocates contended that the custom had saved many a family from disaster. “It has civilized brutish and turbulent homes, saved the drunkard from his doom, and to many a mother . . . it has given cheerful, peaceful thoughts that have sustained her,” the nineteenth century English author Douglas Jerrold wrote.

To satisfy the seemingly unquenchable demand for tea, the British started searching for a more dependable source than China. In China, they had to work through middlemen in a society with an often uncooperative government. Better to import tea from a land they ruled directly.

India was the logical candidate. Since the English presumed that tea did not grow in their colony, they transplanted seeds from China. Most of the plants did not survive. The venture seemed hopeless until officials discovered an excellent “jat,” a variety from the same family as Chinese tea, growing wild in Assam, a northeastern region of India.

Plantations were carved out of the jungles. These “tea factories,” as historian Tom Standage calls them, operated very differently from the smaller scale, less rationalized farms in China. Regimented lines of “coolies” picked tea leaves. Machinery did the job of rolling and drying the crop.

India’s “tea gardens,” the ironic British term, turned out tons of “black tea,” leaves that had been allowed to “ferment,” to achieve a sharper, more intense flavor and a darker color. By the late 1880s, imports of cheaper black tea had overtaken Chinese green  tea, an unoxidized product from the same plant, in the market.

The stage was now set for modern tea consumption. From a simple plant a myriad of grades, orange pekoe (long, thin leaves) or pekoe (shorter, thin leaves), and types — Lapsong Suchong, Yunnan, Jasmine — had been conceived. Tea gourmets today speak casually of nuances like “tippy” teas, those with young shoots, and of “flushes,” the time when the first tea buds come out. Just make mine Lipton’s.

 

Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/