Tea


		Tea: Still Hot After Five
		Thousand Years

		Sarah Alexander
		YaleGlobal, 4 June 2004

Afternoon Tea in 1886.

When you pour that lightly colored brew in your cup and lift that aromatic drink to your lips it is hard to imagine that you are continuing a five thousand year old practice. Tea is indeed one of the oldest drinks in history. The tortuous long path that tea has taken from China to reach the cup in you hand parallels the twists and turns taken by early processes of globalization.

This legendary drink is reputed to have come from a mistake - 5000 years ago, the Emperor of China was shocked to find some tea leaves in his pot of boiling water. Known for his scientific curiosity, he proceeded to taste the drink - and he loved it. It did not take long before tea became a staple of Chinese culture. By 800 A.D. a Zen Buddhist priest had already written a comprehensive history of its use. Tea was adopted into various religious and meditative services by the Zen Buddhists, who found that the substance enhanced spiritual concentration.

Buddhist missionaries to Japan brought the drink with them as an essential part of their mediation practice. In the continuing evolution of the tea myth, some Indian and Japanese Buddhists later used the magical drink to tell the story of Buddha. In their version, Buddha awoke after five years of his seven year meditation and ate the leaves of the wild tea tree in whose shadow he sat to revive himself. Soon after its introduction, the Japanese created an entire culture around tea with the Tea Ceremony or "Cha-no-yu" - meaning literally 'hot water for tea'. The ritualized pouring and serving of tea by Geisha hostesses became a mark of grace and sophistication. The Irish-Greek journalist-historian Lafcadio Hearn, who was one of the very few foreigners to gain Japanese citizenship at the time, was privileged to see this practice and wrote extensively about the years and years it took for women to master the complex art form. The original Zen Buddhist element was lost as "tea competitions" became popular amongst nobles who would win jewels or armor for guessing a particular tea blend. In the 1300s, Buddhist monks tried to initiate a campaign to bring tea back to its original Zen roots, but to no avail.

As European trade with China and Japan increased, rumors of this new substance began to filter back with the caravans. No traders could quite describe how tea was produced: suggestions were as outlandish as that the leaves be boiled, salted, buttered, and eaten. It was not until 1560 - when Portuguese missionaries established a firm trade route with China - that tea began to be imported to Europe, by way of Portugal (and later the Netherlands). This account is contested, however, by those who claim that it was actually Arab traders who gave tea to the Venetians one year earlier. The first few shipments were expensive, making the service of the drink a sign of one's wealth and therefore increasing its popularity among Dutch elites. Not everyone was willing to embrace the unknown liquid though. Doctors and scholars, known as "tea heretics" could not believe that this dark, bitter substance was good for the public; academic debates raged for almost one hundred years before the mass popularity of tea (which was now cheap enough to be widely available) won out in the late 1600s. Despite the doctors' dire predictions, tea drinking actually increased the health of Europe. Water was too dangerous to drink at the time, and alcohol consumption had gotten out of hand. Tea, made with boiled, and hence safe, water was a vast improvement on the European diet.

Britain was a late coming to the tea trade; it was only introduced in London in 1652, the same year as coffee and cocoa. By 1700, the British were already importing over 240,000 pounds of tea. The heaviness of British cuisine - breakfast was ale and beef and dinner not much healthier - made the refreshment of an "afternoon tea", often accompanied by baked goods, a pleasant and healthy addition to the British way of life.

The British trading companies became the most famous of the European tea importers, partially because of the pivotal role the East India Trading Company played in the expansion of the British Empire into India. A new language developed in this trading business in which the Portuguese, British, Indian, and Chinese trading partners could communicate. The new "pidgin English" allowed all partners to share such terms as "chow" (food) or "cash" (money), which still exist in English slang.

The trading partners did not have as peaceful and cooperative a relationship as this might suggest. Claiming that local political instability was disruptive to business interests, the India Company began to slowly take over the coastlines of India (while also pushing out Dutch and French competitors) and to force local workers to produce opium, which could be sold to China in exchange for tea. This saved the British from having to spend actual British coinage on tea and kept the exchange of capital only within the empire. The trade of opium for tea led to the Opium Wars in the early 1800s, during which the British effectively wiped out resistance to their domination of the tea trade.

In the latter half of the 19th century, tea began to play a crucial role in various social movements in Europe and America. One woman who managed a bread shop in England convinced her bosses to allow her to serve tea to her favorite customers along with their purchases. The shop set up some tables in 1864 and women quickly vied for the right to drink their tea there. This new form of socializing in a 'tea shop' was the first venue for an unchaperoned woman to meet her friends and be alone, and thus inarguably contributed to women's emancipation. Likewise, tea was often the only non-alcoholic beverage choice at Inns, making it a favorite of the prohibitionists. One who abstained from alcohol was thus a "teetotaler".

The newly independent Americans also contributed to the development of tea, with the 1904 invention of "iced tea" at the World's Fair in St. Louis and the 1908 creation of the first 'tea bag', making consumption less time consuming.

Nowadays, tea comes in green, black, and oolong varieties. Though Europeans and Americans have traditionally favored black teas, the promises of health and dietary benefits from green teas (which are supposed to reduce cancer risk and raise metabolism) are raising its consumption. Everyone has their own individual way of drinking tea - with milk or sugar, plain, or with jam or honey as is the tradition of imperial Russians. Choosing a tea drinking method has become a way for people to express their own individuality - though this was probably not what the Zen Buddhists meant 1300 years ago when they advocated tea as a method of self-reflection!