“A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
High up in the Bohea Mountains of China, farmers cut terraces into limestone crags and built dikes and drains in order to grow tea. Endowed with fertile soil and a mild, humid, subtropical climate, this region, now known as Wuyishan, became a major tea producer, yielding yearly more than half a million tea chests to be suspended on bamboo rods on the shoulders of thousands of coolies, who set out on a backbreaking six-day journey along the rugged mountain path. From the port of Canton, they would be loaded inside clipper ships bound for England. Once on the ocean, they would travel another 16 thousand miles, crossing the Indian Ocean toward Cape of Good Hope on South Africa’s southern tip before heading north along the Atlantic to reach British shores.
In 1830, 30 million pounds of tea were shipped from China to Britain. By 1879, it had risen to 136 million pounds. Be it Congou, Gunpowder and Bohea, or black Pekoe, tea became the English’s most fashionable beverage. In her 1861 Book of Household Management, Mrs. Beeton declared that “the beverage called tea has now become almost a necessity of life.” Elizabeth Braddon wrote in her 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret, “Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic harmony to her every movement, a witchery to her every glance. The floating mists from the boiling liquid in which she infuses the soothing herbs; whose secrets are known to her alone, envelope her in a cloud of scented vapor, through which she seems a social fairy, weaving potent spells with Gunpowder and Bohea. At the tea-table she reigns omnipotent, unapproachable.”
With such enormous demand for tea, the British were running out of silver to pay for it. But they found another solution. When the Mughals lost Bengal and Bihar to Britain, the British East India Company took over the opium industry and ramped up operations in Bengal. By 1832, opium production made up one-sixth of the gross national product of British India. As opium was smuggled into China to pay for tea, opium addiction reached epic proportions despite several import banning attempts. When an embargo was placed upon tea export, the Opium Wars broke out. British victories legalized the opium trade and forced China to hand over Hong Kong, an island that was to be under British control until 1997.
In between the Opium Wars, the British East India Company sent the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to China to obtain tea plants in order to establish a tea industry in colonial India. Tea plantations were soon set up in Darjeeling and Assam, as well as Ceylon and British colonies in Africa. Consequently China lost its grip on the tea market, and a new tea culture soon took over India. Today, there are tea vendors, called “chaiwalah”, lining the streets of India. Tea drinking activities have become a national pastime, from the poorest of villages to the haughtiest of neighborhoods. In A Nice Cup of Tea, George Orwell’s first rule for making tea is to use Indian or Ceylonese tea. “China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays – it is economical, and one can drink it without milk – but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.” Thanks to Britain, tea is no longer just a drink of affection for East Asia, but across the world.
The French writer Marcel Proust described how the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in a cup of herbal tea brought forth his memories of home: just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, so in that moment all the flowers and the water-lilies, the parish church and the whole of Combray sprang into being from his cup of tea. In search of lost time, mine is that of the tea lady with her little teapot steeping freshly bruised tea leaves, of being home, sipping slowly from a teacup no bigger than a shot glass. The taste is intense bittersweet – intensely bitter with a sweet aftertaste, always enough to come back for more.
Recipe for green tea to use only fresh tea leaves and tender shoots:
1 – Bruising: bruise tea leaves by hand to crush them lightly.
2 – Parboil: place tea leaves in a teapot with just enough boiling water to cover, give it a gentle swirl, then discard the water.
3 – Steeping: submerge tea leaves in water that is just short of boiling, at 90-95°C; steep lidded for 10-20 minutes.
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