The Idler: Remembrances of Teas Past

If you are heated, it will cool you — if you are depressed, it will cheer you — if you are excited, it will calm you. ~Gladstone

I confess, I am an addict — an addicted tea drinker. This is, I surmise, partly the fault of my grandmother, who played a very influential role in my developing years. I remember she would drink tea nearly every afternoon between lunch and dinner, and she always had it with milk. In truth, I have always just taken tea for granted; just as, I am sure, coffee drinkers take coffee for granted. It’s there, it’s always been there; it will be there when you want it. But I have recently met other tea lovers — “connoisseurs,” if you will — and I began to realize from our discussions about tea that it, like everything, has a history and a story. It hasn’t always been there—not in Europe or America or China for that matter. But once it was discovered (actually, “concocted” is a better term) man became so addicted that he went to incredible lengths — life and limb were regularly risked and lost — to obtain it, and to discover how to cultivate it. Herewith part of the tale of the little green leaf.

 

Oriental History

An old Chinese legend attributes the discovery of tea to the Emperor Shen Nung around 2737 B.C. Shen Nung was called the “Divine Healer” because, among other accomplishments, it is said that he discovered the medicinal qualities of many herbs. In his book The Tea Story, J.M. Scott writes that it was Shen Nung’s habit of boiling his water before drinking it, and fortunately for the world, it was this habit that brought about the discovery of tea. He used branches from the camellia bushes as fuel for his fire; some of the leaves swirled upward in the hot air and many fell into the pot of water. The scent was so delightful that the Emperor was tempted to taste the water. Later Shen Nung was to exclaim the value of tea:

Tea is better than wine for it leadeth not to intoxication, neither does it cause a man to say foolish things and repent thereof in his sober moments. It is better than water for it does not carry disease; neither does it act like poison as waterdoes when the wells contain foul and rotten matter.

The next person to play a significant role in this story is Lu Yu. Lu Yu was an orphan who had been reared by a Buddhist priest; it was thought that he, too, would become one. But Lu Yu had other ideas; he ran away and became a wandering clown, and although he was a great success he longed for something more — knowledge. He started reading many books until, in time, he became a scholar. In the eighth century A.D. he wrote the Ch’a Ching. This book was considered a tea classic because it told not only of the history of tea, but contained poetry and etiquette and also served as a textbook on tea. Lu Yu described how tea was best grown, manufactured, and infused, as well as the ritual which had developed around the drinking of tea. The Ch’a Ching brought fame and fortune to Lu Yu; he was revered by all, and the tea merchants looked on him as their patron saint. But the man who was never satisfied with his lot in life turned his back on it all to continue his search for the meaning of life. He became an impoverished hermit, and as such he died. A thousand years later, Lu Yu’s book was still being used, this time by the British, as a practical textbook on the cultivation of tea.

Some centuries later, the first brave travelers among the fiercely xenophobic Chinese were Mohammedan traders and Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits acclaimed the value of tea for much the same reason the Buddhist monks did, “as a counter to alcohol.” One Jesuit recipe shows the relation between tea and holiness:

To a pint of tea add the yolks of two fresh eggs; then beat them up with as much fine sugar as is sufficient to sweeten the tea, and stir well together. The water must remain no longer upon the tea than while you chant the Miserere psalm in leisurely fashion.

Sometime around 1846-8 Pere Evarist Regis Huc and Pere Joseph Gabet travelled from the Chinese coast to Lhasa to explore that region of peoples whom the Church hoped to convert. Pere Huc noted everything that was of interest to him and later published his experiences in Souvenirs d’un Voyage dans la Tartarie, le Tibet et la Chine. Scott says that almost every incident was in some way connected with tea:

The party consisted of Pere Huc, Pere Gabet, their Tartar servant Samdadchienba, three camels, a black mule and a white horse…. Whenever they camped, … they brewed tea outside their little tent, under the stars. Tartar peasants, Mongol and Tibetan herdsmen gave them tea in hospitality with the welcome, ‘Drink in peace’. When occasionally they stopped at an inn they were at once offered tea. ‘You must swallow oceans of tea, and that boiling hot, before they will consent to bring you anything else.’ The maitre d’hôtel was called the Governor of the Kettle. Tea was served before every meal and every meal was basically tea.

The tea from this area was called “brick” tea, brewed with salt and fat, mixed with butter and meal, and compressed into the form of a brick. It was a means of currency as well as food and drink. Peres Huc and Gabet depended primarily on this concoction for sustenance during their entire journey.

Tea reached Japan at the end of the sixth century A.D., taken by Chinese Buddhist monks. But then two hundred years of civil war occurred and most of the monks’ tea gardens were destroyed, along with the memory of how to cultivate it. It was “re-found” around 800 A.D., and for about 500 years it was regarded as a medicinal drink by the monks. It was not until green tea came into use that tea became a popular beverage in Japan. Somewhere between 1192-1333 A.D. the Zen monks, who at this time drank tea primarily to help stay awake during meditation, integrated the habit into a Zen ritual to honor the first patriarch, Bodhidharma.

The Japanese eventually developed a tea-serving ceremony with social and religious significance. This ceremony, called cha-no-yu, is a highly formalized ritual which also dates back to the thirteenth century. The tea is meticulously prepared and accompanied by a variety of delicate seasonal dishes. Every aspect of the ceremony — the setting, the flavors and textures of foods, the colors and shapes of the containers, even the conversation — is carefully planned to achieve total harmony. The tearoom, or cha-shitsu, is constructed so one has to enter on one’s knees, thus symbolically beginning the ritual with humility. By the fifteenth-century in Japan tea had become an important social beverage. Friends would gather together in an isolated atmosphere, drink tea, and discuss the aesthetic merits of paintings, calligraphy, and flower arrangements. It appears that the most famous exponent of the tea ceremony was Sen Rikyu, an aesthete at the sixteenth-century court of Toyotomi Hideyoshi who codified the ceremony into a style known as wabi (meaning roughly “simplicity,” “quietude,” and “absence of ornament”).

 

Occidental History

England was a country of coffee drinkers until the 1600s. In 1658 tea was first advertised in a newspaper as “That Excellent and by all Physitians approved China drink.” By 1715 the British East Indian Company was firmly established in Canton, and in 1805 England imported 7.5 million pounds of tea from China. Around this time, the cultivation of tea began in India, and the modern tea industry began in 1839 when tea from India was first sold in London.

But tea had its opponents. The most formidable was Lord President Duncan Forbes, whose opposition stemmed more from fiscal than from medical reasons. His list of things wrong with the economy included excessive addiction to that “most mischievous drug.” The duties on tea were so high only the wealthy could afford to obtain it legally, but the less fortunate were able to obtain tea from the smugglers who, beginning in the 1700s, ran amok. Needless to say, these contraband runners had caused more than their share of trouble among the people. Lord Forbes recommended therefore that tea should be made illegal for all persons with an income of less than £50 or £100; he added that “all servants should be forbidden tea.” A Scottish physician, Dr. Thomas Short, said that it “threw some people into vapours.” And the religious leader John Wesley in 1748 decried that because of tea consumption the people of London appeared with “nerves all unstrung, bodily strength quite decayed.” (Wesley resumed his own tea-drinking a decade later, brewing tea in a gallon-size teapot.)

Jonas Hanway was a non-religious opponent who saw tea as a “many-headed monster which devours so great a part of the best fruits of this land.” In a book-long essay on tea he said:

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 to please a vicious palate! There is a certain lane near Richmond where beggars are often seen in the summer season drinking the tea…. Were they the sons of tea-sippers who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood? What will be the end of such effeminate customs extended to those persons who must get their bread by the labours of the field!

Dr. Samuel Johnson reviewed Hanway’s book in the Literary Magazine, and although addicted to the drink himself, still agreed with Hanway to some extent:

I have no desire to appear captious, and shall therefore readily admit, that tea is a liquor not proper for the lower classes of the people, as it supplies no strength to labour, or relief to disease, but gratifies the taste without nourishing the body. It is a barren superfluity to which those who can hardly procure what nature requires, cannot prudently habituate themselves. Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.

In other words, tea was only for those who could afford frivolity — the wealthy.

But the proponents outnumbered the others. Eighteenth-century actor David Garrick liked his tea weak; the dramatist Richard Cumberland and Sir Joshua Reynolds were also habituates of tea — as close friends of Johnson’s they had to be. Tea historian Scott writes that “Gladstone claimed that he drank more tea between midnight and 4 A.M. than any two other members of Parliament put together.” Mr. Balfour and M. Clemenceau drank tea together at the Conference of Versailles. On this continent, Americans have enjoyed tea from the beginning, following the lead of the nation’s father, George Washington who usually had tea for breakfast, “English fashion.”

Scott goes on to say that the

clergy almost to a man have been friends of tea — from the country parson in a poor living by the sea who felt that the end justified the means and accepted it from the smugglers, to such men of fame and later fortune as Sidney Smith.

Sidney Smith called living in the country “a kind of healthy grave” and considered tea the only saving grace in his mundane life: “Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea!”

The British, as mentioned earlier, were originally coffee drinkers, and there were many coffee houses in and around England. Scott asserts that “it is a peculiarity of the British as opposed to the Latin races that they cannot comfortably talk without something to eat or drink.” These coffee houses (which later served coffee and tea) became so popular that they emptied out the taverns; at one time there were as many as 2,000 in London. The popularity of these houses made it necessary to impose higher and higher duties on tea to make up for the losses of revenue on alcohol.

Individual coffee houses nourished separate factions in England:

Whigs were found in one, Tories in another, poets in a third and clergy in a fourth. Men of fashion came to congregate at White’s in St. James’s, business men at Lloyd’s, while Tom’s in Devereux Court was associated with the law and the business side of tea. White’s became the club it is, Lloyd’s the heart of insurance, and Tom’s housed the tea-trader Thomas Twining until from lack of space he moved next door to the Golden Lion which was to be the first shop exclusively dedicated to the sale of tea.

By the late-eighteenth century tea was being served in public tea gardens (which had evolved from existing pleasure gardens) throughout the countryside around London. These gardens

consisted of formal flowerbeds, shrubberies and pools, winding paths for gentle exercise, and arbours (‘genteel boxes’) in which to whisper, rest and take refreshment. … In the evenings they were gaily lighted with thousands of lanterns. There were concerts and fireworks displays.

But in the first half of the nineteenth century, as the town of London grew into the city of London and spread into the countryside, the gardens were swallowed up in stone and cement. For a while there was nowhere outside the home where one could enjoy a spot of tea.

Then sometime in the late 1800s there arose the tea shoppe. According to several sources, this institution owes its existence to the manager of the Aerated Bread Company near London Bridge who would invite her friends and faithful customers to have tea in her room behind the shop. It was such a success that she suggested to her employers that they sell tea on the premises — they did, and the rest is history.

Around 1840, the British custom of afternoon tea was originated by Anna, the Duchess of Bedford. Diane Yanney writes in Country Home that during that era people would eat large breakfasts but would then eat no more until 8 or 9 in the evening. The duchess would have a sinking feeling in the afternoon which she remedied around four o’clock by serving tea and cakes, and thus began a British institution.

In his “Essay on Tea” (1930), William Lyon Phelps summarized afternoon tea thus:

At precisely 4:13 p.m. every day the average Englishman has a thirst for the astringent taste of tea. He does not care for hot water or hot lemonade colored with tea. He likes his tea so strong that to me it has a hairy flavor. There are several good reasons … for tea in England. Breakfast is often at nine, … so that early tea is desirable. Dinner is often at eight-thirty, so that afternoon tea is by no means superfluous. Furthermore, of the three hundred and sixty-five days in the year in England, very, very few are warm; and afternoon tea is not only cheerful and sociable, but in most British interiors really necessary to start the blood circulating.

However, tea is more than just an afternoon drink to the British. It is drunk several times during the day: there is morning tea with a slice of bread or toast; then comes “elevenses,” a break for tea and biscuits; and then afternoon tea between two and six, not to be mistaken for “high tea.” Yanney writes that high tea is actually a hearty, informal supper, served about five o’clock, more popular in the rural areas of Scotland and northern Ireland than in England. On average, six cups of tea per person are drunk daily in Great Britain.

Tea was just as important to the American colonies as to Great Britain. Scott says of the colonists:

They were of good tea-drinking stock, and they liked it very much for what it was. Enormous quantities were drunk in the towns. New York had a pump of pure water which was sold exclusively for tea-making…. At the huge funeral gatherings of those days the ladies at least drowned their sorrow in tea. It was brewed in the backwoods. It was drunk by the English standing army…. The colonists imitated their forefathers, not only in drinking tea but also in smuggling it. No doubt there are as many fine houses built from smuggling fortunes in the United States as there are in England.

The Tea Act of 1773 was introduced in the colonies by the British Ministry of Lord North. This Act was an attempt to juggle the taxes on tea to make English tea once again marketable in America. Previously, in 1770, all the Townshend Acts’ duties had been lifted except the one on tea, after which time tea was mainly supplied to the colonies by Dutch smugglers. Therefore, in an effort to help the financially troubled British East India Company sell the 17 million pounds of tea it had stored in England, the Ministry enacted the Tea Act, which re-arranged excise regulations so that the company could pay the Townshend duty and still undersell its competitors.

At the same time, the North administration hoped to reassert Parliament’s right to levy direct revenue taxes on the colonies. The shipments of tea became a symbol of taxation tyranny to the colonists, reopening the door to unknown future tax abuses. Colonial resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, and in a similar action in New York in April 1774. Scott says that tea was branded a casus belli, and “from this war the United States was born.” After that, the popularity of tea never reached its original height in the United States.

One of the best known teas in the States is Lipton’s tea. Scott tells an anecdote about Sir Thomas Lipton:

Sir Thomas Lipton was the most whole-hearted advertiser of them all…. He was forty years old and already a millionaire from selling hams and cheeses when on the way to Australia his ship called at Ceylon and he had the idea of selling tea to the masses. He bought an estate … and marketed good-looking, standardized packets, ‘Direct from the tea-garden to the tea pot’…. There is a good story of him on a voyage to Ceylon. His ship ran aground in the Red Sea, and cargo was thrown overboard to lighten her. Most of the passengers were crowding round the lifeboats, but Sir Thomas was busy stencilling ‘Drink Lipton’s Tea’ on anything that would float.

Through the years, many of us have stayed afloat only with the aid of our teapots, for we know, as James Hurnard puts it,

Every good cause and every generous object

Gains strength, and purpose, and determination

When it is heated over a cup of tea.

Author

  • Gayle Yiotis

    At the time this article was published, Gayle Yiotis was an assistant editor of Crisis.

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