With trade opening in the Far East, the English desired trading rights there as well. Dutch seafaring dominance barred the English from establishing a territory in any place other than India, however. Admitting defeat to the Dutch monopoly, England set up trading stations in India, the country that would later, under the hand of the English, become the largest and most powerful tea-producing country in the world. By 1669, England granted a group of merchants a monopoly on English trade in the Far East. These men had made large sums of money with a company called the Levant Group, which had organized an overland trade route with India. This newly formed company was known as the John Company and was established as the lawful English East India Company.
The John Company sent regularly scheduled shipments of Chinese tea to England from their base in India. But this tea was still being purchased from Dutch traders in India and was brought to England aboard company ships. The English were desperate for cheaper prices and more direct purchasing, but it was not until 1684 that the first English East India Company ships arrived at the port of Whampoa, downriver from the Chinese port of Canton, and gained official clearance from the Chinese to purchase tea directly. Although the Europeans continued to arrive in China in ever-increasing numbers, the Chinese remained wary of the “barbarian outsiders” and would not allow them entry onto Chinese soil. The port of Canton was off-limits to foreigners, who were made to stop their ships at the anchorage of Whampoa, some sixty miles down the Pearl River from Canton. Here, the Hong merchants would greet each arriving vessel and escort only the captain upriver to Canton to conduct business.
For the next 150 years the English East India Company had exclusive import rights to bring Chinese tea to England and set the prices of tea sold to the Crown. But other adventurous traders and merchants, anxious to join this race to the riches, protested the monopoly. In 1834 the Crown broke the monopoly, and almost instantly dozens of independent traders sprang up in London. A frenzied race across the seas to the port of Canton began, with the sole intent of purchasing as much tea as possible, as cheaply as possible. With the trade monopoly ended, the English East India Company was desperate to find a place where it could grow tea and control all aspects of production. Their problem was thus: trade with China was no longer exclusive, and the Dutch controlled Indonesia. What remained was India, which, while solidly under English rule, had no established tea industry. The English, wishing for a better solution, had to settle for what it had—India.
The Boston Tea Party
On December 16, 1773, a band of sixty American patriots known as the Sons of Liberty dressed as Mohawk Indians and under cover of night boarded three sailing ships that were docked in Boston Harbor. These ships—the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver—had arrived in Boston with cargoes of precious tea from the British tea merchant Davison, Newman, & Co. for the colonists.
Frustrated and angry over years of taxation imposed on them by England for such items as tea, sugar, glass, paper, coffee, and wine, the colonists rebelled in 1767 by boycotting English goods. The Crown’s reason for the taxation was to offset the cost of shipping these goods all the way across the Atlantic to the “colonies.” The colonists felt that they did not have a say in matters of the Crown and that they would receive no direct benefit from these tax payments. Colonial merchants also supported this boycott, and they began to smuggle “contraband tea” from Dutch traders. Dutch traders had at one time supplied tea to the colonists before they lost control of sales to the colonies to the English in 1674. The Dutch, who were happy for the boost in business, imposed no tax on the colonists.
ORIGINS AND DERIVATIONS OF WORDS FOR TEA
Tea is historically recorded as being originally sourced from and shipped to the rest of the world from China. There were two major points of exit for Chinese tea in the mid-1600s, and local dialects provided the origins of the two main spellings and pronunciations for the words used to transliterate the Chinese character for tea. In Chinese there is only one written character for tea; however, there are several ways that this character is pronounced.
The history of the words used around the world for tea all trace back to one of two sources: either the eastern China port of Amoy (now known as Xiamen) or the southern China ports of Canton (now known as Guangzhou) and, to a lesser degree, Hong Kong. In the Min-Nan dialect (also referred to as the Amoy dialect) spoken around Xiamen, the character for tea is pronounced and spelled similarly to te. Both the Cantonese dialect spoken by the southern coastal population of China and the Mandarin dialect of the northern Chinese pronounce this character as cha or ch’a.
With the Dutch and the Portuguese (and later the English) being the early links to the West as far as the tea trade is concerned, one would expect that the use of one or the other of these pronunciations would follow the historical trade routes that became established by these merchant explorers. This may have been true during the late seventeenth century, but it does not follow true after the mid-eighteenth century, for reasons that are not completely clear to linguists.
The two main pronunciation branches follow, with representative examples of their worldwide variations (various accent uses not noted).
te: Catalan, Danish, Hebrew, Italian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish
tea: English, Hungarian
tee: Afrikaans, Finnish, German, Korean
the: French, Icelandic, Indonesian, Tamil
thee: Dutch
cha: Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese
chai: Russian
chay (caj): Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian,Croatian, Czech, Serbian, Turkish
The trade in smuggled tea began to cut deeply into the sales of English tea. In an attempt to empty their warehouses of unsold tea, King George III devised a scheme to sell the tea on these three ships to the colonists at a low cost, which would in turn put the Dutch smugglers out of business. But, as the colonists quickly realized, this move was a gambit that would only make them vulnerable once again to “taxation without representation” from England. So the colonists declined the offer and refused acceptance of the tea. For weeks leading up to December 16, meetings were held and the course of action discussed and debated. On November 29 broadsides appeared all over Boston, which read:
Friends, Bretheren, Countrymen!
That worst of Plagues, the Detestable Tea ship’d for this Port
by the East India Company, is now arrived in the harbour;
the Hour of Destruction or manly Opposition to the
Machinations of Tryanny stares you in the Face;
every Friend to his country, to Himself and Posterity
is now called upon to meet at Faneuil Hall at nine of clock,
this Day at which time the Bells will begin to Ring to make
a united and successful Resistence to this last worst and most
Destructive Measure of Administration.
Finally, on December 16, a group of more than five thousand towns-people gathered at the Old South Meeting House to request that the three ships sitting in the harbor be turned around and returned to England. When the governor of Massachusetts refused this request and demanded that the colonists accept the shipment of tea, the patriots felt they had no choice but to act. Swarms of people filled the streets surrounding Griffins Wharf, where the ships were docked. Someone was recorded as asking “how tea will mix with salt water.” Shortly after dusk a group of patriots dressed like Mohawks, and brandishing hatchets and axes, followed Samuel Adams aboard the ships. They seized all 342 chests of tea from British tea merchant Davison, Newman, & Co. They split open the chests and dumped the contents of precious tea one by one overboard into Boston Harbor.
This act of rebellion unleashed smoldering feelings of resentment toward England and served as a starting point for the gathering storm of resistance building in the colony. During the following months, American sentiments against the British ran high; tea arriving via clipper ship from England was boycotted at the docks in Annapolis, Philadelp
hia, and New York. In Delaware broadsides signed by the Committee for Tarring and Feathering were posted that warned: “A ship is now on her way to this port, being sent out by the ministry for the purpose of enslaving and poisoning all the Americans … she cannot be brought to anchor before this city.” On March 7, 1774, at a second Boston Tea Party, sixteen chests of tea from British tea merchant Davison, Newman, & Co. were among those once again thrown into Boston Harbor.
England received the message loud and clear that it could no longer control the American colonies. Pressing further in their desire for independence and self-rule, the colonists continued to stand their ground and won their much-desired freedom from England in the bloody Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Such were the passions of the time that tea fell victim to. This miscalculation by England cost the Crown the loss of a fledgling nation that went on to become the largest and most powerful consumer nation in the world, with a great thirst for a different temperance drink: coffee.
The English Explore the Assam Valley of India
From as early as 1815, rumors had spread that local Singpho tribes in the northeast region of the Assam valley near the town of Sibsagar knew of the existence of wild-growing tea in that region. These locals were used to drinking a picked and fermented concoction of tea leaves called miang or letpet. Letpet was a preparation of tea leaves that had once been eaten as a vegetable but was now also being consumed as a fermented drink. In 1823 the English explorer and trader Major Robert Bruce found this rumor to be true. Bruce had been dispatched on a trading expedition to this region, known then as Burmese Assam. He found extensive areas of wild-growing tea, which the local tribes had used for centuries as both food and beverage.
Bruce arranged for the local Singpho chief to send him a supply of these tea plants and tea seeds, which on arrival in Calcutta were determined by the English to be of a different and therefore inferior species of tea bush. Consequently, the English did not put much credence into Bruce’s discovery. It was not until years later that the English realized that they had simply not recognized this plant for what it was—a different variety of tea bush indigenous to Assam and thus different from the Chinese tea bushes. Bruce died in 1825, but his brother, Major C. A. Bruce, continued efforts to convince government officials that the wild tea plants that thrived in the lush, dense jungle of Burmese Assam had a connection to the tea trees of Yunnan, China. He brought British officials from the India Tea Committee to the Sibsagar region, who ultimately gave their approval to start experimental tea gardens in this area.
England and China: Exchanging One Addiction for Another
By now the English wished that they had listened to earlier advice from Sir Joseph Banks, an English explorer and naturalist. Back in 1788 he had recommended that England pursue the idea of cultivating tea in northeastern India, but at the time the Crown chose to ignore this advice and fixate instead on trying to control the tea trade with China. The English had grown desperately dependent on Chinese tea. With their trade deficit growing, England launched a devious scheme to utilize the one thing they had that the Chinese could be made to want—Indian opium. For many years the English East India Company had operated opium production in Bengal. In 1776 the English intentionally began to create a market in China for opium, simply and ruthlessly exchanging one addiction for another: the Chinese became as hooked on opium as the British were on tea. But the consequences became much more dire for the Chinese.
Money from the sale of opium in China began to flow back into depleted English coffers, offsetting the money that was continually draining out to purchase tea. Despite years of protests for the British to stop dumping opium in China, the Chinese emperor could not stop sales of this popular drug. Failing to ban the drug, the emperor ordered vast quantities of British opium to be destroyed by setting fire to the warehouses. English retaliation against this rebellious Chinese act was the spark that ignited what became known as the Opium Wars of 1839–1842.
By the end of the conflict the Chinese were powerless against the might of the English forces. They were forced to pay the English for both the cost of the opium and the expenses of the war. Perhaps the greatest indignity was their forced cooperation at signing the Treaty of Nanjing, which gave the English ownership of the colony of Hong Kong and free trading rights in all Chinese ports.
Despite these heavy concessions from China, England was still desperate to control tea imports in an even greater way. While continuing to pursue the goal of growing their own tea, England’s India Tea Committee argued over where to grow the tea gardens and chose locations out of ignorance where the bushes did not thrive. They also insisted on cultivating Chinese tea bushes, not the indigenous India tea bushes (at this time they did not believe these were tea bushes simply because they had a different appearance and habit). Because of their lack of understanding on these two points, cultivation was not going well in India. The English knew that they needed to learn the process of tea cultivation from the Chinese, the only people who knew these secrets. But fearful of foreigners, the Chinese exercised control over traders and zealously guarded any information about tea production. Foreigners had always been barred access to travel into China’s interior. Ever fearful of the possibility of interactions with Western females, China kept Western women even further at bay than were Western men.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SAIL: THE TEA CLIPPERS
Despite the protests against English taxation that led to the Boston Tea Party, New England colonists remained tea drinkers. In fact, the United States began to trade directly with Canton, China, after 1784 for purchases of tea. In the 1840s fast, sleek, streamlined ships called Yankee Clippers became a new force in the highly profitable merchant trade.
The fast-sailing clipper ships were built to bring valuable cargo of tea, silks, and porcelains to port by the fastest means possible. These graceful, three-masted, fully rigged ships ruled the seas for a time. When the Crown decentralized control of imports of tea into England in 1834, the East Indies Tea Company no longer had sole grip on the two-hundred-year monopoly on tea imports. The company was suddenly encountering competition from other English businessmen and entrepreneurs. This was followed by another blow in 1849, when England repealed the Navigation Acts. Now, anyone, including non-English, could bring goods into a British port.
American shipbuilders raced into the game. Competition from America was on in full force in this Age of Sail. England retaliated with a fleet of British-built tea clippers, and the race was on for the fastest delivery of tea from China to England. The tea clippers not only provided the freshest tea, but a boisterous interest in this exciting new twist in tea commerce fed the passions of a committed tea-drinking public. Wagering on which ship would make the journey fastest became a social exercise of the day, and the tea from the winning ship gained a special cachet in social circles and of course commanded the highest price.
The development of steamships in the early part of the 1800s and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 put an end to the glorious and romantic era of these sleek clipper ships. Even though the tea clippers such as the Houqua, the Flying Cloud, the Taeping, and the Rainbow could make the trip in 107 days, steamships could do it in just under fifty. The only surviving tea clipper, the British Cutty Sark, is now kept in a specially created dry dock in Greenwich, England.
In 1848, in a well-crafted plan of espionage and pretense, the English hired the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to dress as a Chinese businessman and go undercover in Fujian Province with the intent of collecting tea plants and learning the Chinese processes for manufacturing both green and black tea. With the help of Chinese accomplices Fortune’s subterfuge was successful. He returned triumphant, with smuggled tea cuttings, technical information, and more than eighty Chinese tea specialists who were ready to put their knowledge to work in India. The subsequent tea bushes propagated from cuttings and seeds he smuggled out of China numbered more than twenty thousand plants.
Now it seemed that England had the pieces o
f the puzzle necessary to begin establishing tea gardens in India. Fortune’s plants and seeds were sent to the Darjeeling region, where by sheer luck the Chinese plants thrived in the cool, high elevations. But things were moving much more slowly in Assam. Not understanding that China had different varieties of local tea plants that were acclimated to cooler weather and higher elevations, the English planted Chinese tea bushes in the warm, humid, rainy lowland region of Assam. These bushes failed, as did thousands of other plants, cuttings, and seeds that had been brought from China. It was not until 1847 and the arrival of George Williamson in Assam that English understanding of tea cultivation began.
SIR THOMAS LIPTON
Perhaps no one has done more to promote tea than the Scottish merchandising whiz Sir Thomas Lipton. After the coffee blight of the mid-1880s decimated the coffee crops in Ceylon, Lipton purchased bankrupt estates in Ceylon and began cultivating tea. He undercut the going selling price for tea and created the slogan “Direct from the Tea Gardens to the Teapot,” a selling tactic that brought him great financial success. Lipton emphasized the adventurous nature of his tea enterprise, and played on the exotic, foreign nature of Ceylon to captivate the interest of tea drinkers back home.
Lipton was the first merchant to sell his tea in sealed packets, emphasizing freshness, cleanliness, and honest weight. He became a millionaire and succeeded by capturing the loyalty of tea drinkers in both England and later in America. His efforts to encourage and realize colonial tea expansion in Ceylon added to the British empire’s already firmly established control of tea production in India. This expansion brought about the ability of the British to control tea cultivation at the source and to sever trade ties with China for tea forever.
The Story of Tea Page 4