Turning Points in Tea

For all 46 events in order History of Tea →

• 1773

  The Boston Tea Party

  Tea thrown into the harbour — though what angered them was not the price of tea.

  The Act passed that year should have made tea cheaper, not dearer.

  In 1773 crates of tea were thrown from ships into Boston harbour — an event that helped set the course towards American independence.

  It is often explained as anger at a heavy tea tax. But the Tea Act passed that year let the East India Company sell directly to the colonies, which would have made tea cheaper. The act was also a rescue for a company in financial trouble.

  The objection was not the price. It was the monopoly, and the taxing arrangement bound up with it: accepting cheap tea meant accepting that Parliament could tax the colonies — the ground of 'no taxation without representation'. For merchants who dealt in smuggled tea, cheap legal tea was also a commercial threat.

  So this was not a story about a tax being too high. It was an argument about what accepting the tea would concede.

  RelatedHistory →Culture →Tea Myths →

• 1839–42

  The Opium War and the price of tea

  Paying for tea in silver, year after year, was one of the threads that led to war.

  Britain paid for its tea in silver, and covered the gap by selling opium.

  For eighteenth-century Britain, tea could only be bought from China. There was little the Chinese side wanted in return, so it was paid for in silver — and silver left Britain, year after year, with nothing flowing back.

  What was brought in to close that gap was opium, grown in British India. Opium was sold into China, and the proceeds bought tea — a triangle. As the opium trade swelled, the silver began to drain the other way, out of China.

  The immediate trigger was the Qing government's move against the harm opium was doing, and Lin Zexu's seizure and destruction of the stocks. Behind it, though, lay resentment at a system that confined trade to the single port of Canton, and British pressure to open more of it. The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 ceded Hong Kong Island and opened five ports: Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai.

  Tea alone did not cause this war. But the question of how to pay for the tea sat behind it, and that is worth knowing. An everyday cup was tied to forces on this scale.

  RelatedKeemun →Lapsang Souchong →History →

• 1848–51

  Robert Fortune goes undercover

  A botanist who went inland in disguise and carried the tea plant, and how to make tea, to India.

  He had already seen that green tea and black tea come from the same plant. Without that, the plan made no sense.

  Britain had no choice but to buy its tea from China. The obvious answer was to grow it on its own territory — and the man sent to make that possible was the botanist Robert Fortune.

  He travelled into inland tea districts closed to foreigners, dressed in Chinese clothing. The plants and seeds he gathered went back in Wardian cases, glazed travelling boxes. Keeping live plants alive on a long sea voyage was hard, and those cases made the difference.

  He also brought experienced tea makers with him to India. Seedlings are no use if nobody knows how to turn the leaf into tea.

  Europeans at the time widely believed that green tea and black tea came from different plants. On an earlier journey, in the first half of the 1840s, Fortune had visited both the green tea and the black tea districts and reported that the same plant lay behind them. What differs is not the plant but what happens to the leaf after it is picked — and it was that finding which made the whole scheme coherent: move the Chinese plant to India, and you can make tea there.

  RelatedDarjeeling →Keemun →History →Differences Between Black Tea, Green Tea, and Oolong Tea →Camellia sinensis →Oxidation →Tea Myths →

• 1866

  The Great Tea Race

  Sailing ships raced halfway around the world to land the season's new tea in London first.

  More than three months at sea, and less than half an hour between them.

  In the nineteenth century the ship that landed the season's new tea in London first earned a premium on its freight, and the new tea itself sold well. Out of that came the tea clipper races, run from China to England under sail.

  The 1866 race is the famous one. Ariel, Taeping and Serica left Foochow on the same tide and came into London 99 days later. Taeping docked less than half an hour ahead of Ariel.

  Clippers were built long and narrow with a great spread of sail: speed before cargo capacity. That shape existed because freshness had a price.

  The racing did not last. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and steamships could run the shorter route reliably, sail lost its commercial edge quickly. The canal was awkward for sailing ships, and steamers were gaining in capacity and reliability besides.

  RelatedKeemun →History →

• 1869

  How a coffee island became a tea island

  A leaf disease destroyed the coffee estates, and Ceylon changed to tea.

  Ceylon tea today spreads across ground where coffee fell to disease.

  Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — was a coffee island. In the middle of the nineteenth century its highlands were covered in coffee estates.

  Then coffee leaf rust spread. Leaves dropped, trees weakened, and estate after estate became unviable. It did not happen in a single year: the collapse ran through the 1870s and 1880s, and disease was not the only cause — prices and margins were going the wrong way too.

  What took its place was tea. James Taylor had begun growing it at Loolecondera in 1867, before the disease took hold. A venture already under way became the way out of the crisis — that is the order of events.

  Without that change, Uva, Dimbula and Nuwara Eliya would not be the tea districts we know today.

  RelatedUva →Dimbula →Nuwara Eliya →Ruhuna →Ceylon Tea, Region by Region →History →Tea Origins to Visit →

• 1875–76

  Tada Motokichi sails for India

  To make black tea in Japan, someone went to learn how it was done.

  Benifuki, Japan's black tea cultivar, descends on its mother's side from what he brought back.

  In the early Meiji period Japan set out to make black tea for export, alongside raw silk, as a way of earning foreign currency. Training centres were set up in Kumamoto and elsewhere in 1875.

  But making black tea is not making green tea. So in 1876 Tada Motokichi travelled to India and Ceylon and brought back both the techniques and tea seed.

  Domestic black tea then declined under cheap imports — labour and production costs were high, and it was losing on both quality and price. The liberalisation of imports in 1971 made that decline final.

  The line was never quite broken, though. Benifuki, Japan's black tea cultivar, descends on its mother's side from the stock Tada brought back. The wakoucha revived across the country since the 1990s is, in part, the continuation of a journey made more than a century ago.

  RelatedJapanese Black Tea →Japanese and Taiwanese Black Tea →History →Benifuki →Benihomare →Japanese black tea →

6 events.