Tea

Where do we get our tea from? One thing can be said for certain

. It is not Lancashire or Yorkshire - despite the impression the Yorkshire Tea TV 2015 advert may give - 357 years since first tea advert in Britain, 'Yorkshire Tea', like many others we drink in Britain, comes mainly from India (especially Assam) According to YT, the reason Assam is so popular is because 'it has the perfect climate for tea and a long growing season." this gives the impression that it grows there naturally. It doesn't; it was bought there They also talk about, as part of their ethical concerns, visiting regularly all their 'tea gardens' - a name that gives an image of little plots of land with a variety of flowers and tea plants, rather than the actual plantations spreading across the hillsides with loads of women picking the tea. Where did that nice cuppa come from?Tea originated in China. The demand for Chinese goods (particularly silk, porcelain, and tea) in the European market created a trade imbalance. China only accepted gold silver or copper as exchange for their tea. And they were not interested in buying anything of ours.

Opium Warehouse                              Chinese tea plantation

The East India Company Corporation that changed the world, was the most powerful corporation world has ever known. The EIC makes Monsanto look like a Choir of Angels. It had its own army and grew 100,000 acres of plantations of opium.in India.

The East India Company sold opium to traders who would take it to China in order to trade with their Tea. But the Chinese got fed up of a lot of their population being drugged for us to enjoy our nice little caffeine drug, and so set light to a years supply of the stuff in Canton. This led to the British Navy to use this as an excuse to attack in the Opium Wars around 1840-50.

"the point here is this: of the tea being drunk in the West-at Methodist and antislavery meetings, in fine drawing rooms and poor cottages-nearly all of it was bought with opium. (Teamuse)

They were really more interested in opening up the market to Western entrepreneurs, which they did to good effect. The Chinese didn't stand a chance and had to cede Hong Kong and open up ports like Shangai to Western access as well pay out millions in silver and allow Europeans to run several other ports - all in the name of Market Economics (See Seeds of Change Henry Hobhouse The Folio society 2007. Chapter ‘Tea’.)

The Chinese have not forgotten this bit of their history, In a trip to China in 2015, they asked our government delegation not wear the red poppies, which our delegation were wearing to respect our dead, But it was like waving a red poppy at them - the sign of opium.Poppies that make opiumRole of Robert Fortune

The way to stop this dependency on Chinese tea was to grow it ourselves. So we stole some of their

seeds A Scotsman called Robert Fortune set off in 1845 on a 2 year trip to China. He asked for some protection (small arms) for himself and was told 'take a stick'. He was attacked by pirates, by bandits, and encountered all kinds of disease and storms, and he also went in Chinese disguise, dressed up as if he were a wealthy Chinese merchant,. He managed persuade the East India Company to give him small arms proved very sensible as he had to use it. He managed to get seeds from China to India, and the impact on the tea trade was immense. From Wiki..Fortune disguised himself as a Chinese merchant during several, but not all, of his journeys beyond the newly established treaty port areas. Not only was Fortune's purchase of tea plants forbidden by the Chinese government of the time, but his travels were also beyond the allowable day's journey from the European treaty ports. Fortune travelled to some areas of China that had seldom been visited by Europeans, including remote areas of Fujian, Guangdong, andJiangsu provinces.Fortune employed many different means to transport tea plants, seedlings, and other botanical discoveries, but he is most well known for his use of Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward's portable Wardian cases to sustain the plants. With the new Wardian cases, tender young plants could be set on deck to benefit from daylight and the condensed moisture within the case that kept them watered but protected from salt spray. Using these small greenhouses, Fortune introduced 20,000 tea plants and seedlings to the Darjeeling region of India. He also brought with him a group of trained Chinese tea workers who would facilitate the production of tea leaves. With the exception of a few plants which survived in established Indian gardens, most of the Chinese tea plants Fortune introduced to India perished. So once again our main growing area is based on less diversity of plants than the origin crop. How many plants is the Indian crop based on?Within his lifetime, India surpassed China as the world's largest tea grower and they have never fully recovered on the world market. See ''For all the tea in China' where it describes the ""greatest single act of corporate espionage in history". However he didn't see it as stealing, but believed plants belonged to everybody. More on Robert Fortune and how he did it Fortune's description of the journeyIndian TeaThe tea was regrown in Assam - perfect growing conditions according to Yorkshire Tea. And according to them they are to this day grown in 'gardens' not 'plantations'.. Other plantations were set up Ceylon - now Sri Lanka. In order to work the plantations, Tamil people from India became migrants there. See Tamil workers. Later, after many generations of Tamil workers (considered docile - get quote), President Bandranaika closed half the plantations and gave the land back to the local people - but local Sinhalese not the Tamils. They were upset and demanded their own piece of land, thus giving rise to the Tamil Tigers a notorious terrorist organisation Eventually they were massacred.

The power of tea, was also to play a major role in the histroy of America. The American war of Independence began when the tea in ships from EIC was thrown overboard in Boston as protest against 'taxes without representation'. Cowboy Hat and That Fuzzbox's version on Spotify.  Modern day Tea Party gets its name from that.