Translate

Friday, 19 October 2018

It Was Time For Tea

Tea has been drunk in England for hundreds of years. It even retained its ancient Chinese Mandarin name in the UK right up until the mid 20th century.

Chá Drinking Goes Back A Long Way
Chá Drinking Goes Back A Long Way ....

Any WWII British war film is likely to have a reference to 'a cup of Cha' (pronounced Char), which comes from the Mandarin Chinese term for tea 'Chá'.

The first Europeans that we know of who drank tea were Portuguese priests and merchants in China during the 16th century called chá. An Italian, the Venetian writer Giambattista Ramusio, who recorded the existence of 'Chiai' in 1545, in a volume of his work 'Delle navigationi e viaggi' (Of the navigation's and journeys), which was an early traveller book to various destinations then opening up to the Western World.

But the first recorded European shipment of tea was when the Dutch bought their first assignment of tea, which was from Hirado in Japan, to be shipped to Europe in 1609, where tea became a fashionable drink in the Netherlands. Us Brits were somewhat late to the tea party - the East India Company office in Japan was moving tea by 1615. It was described as "the best sort of chaw" by Richard Wickham, who ran the East India Company office at that time.

Tea was finally sold in a coffee house in London in 1657, and Samuel Pepys tasted tea in 1660. Tea, however, was very expensive until the latter part of that period, and was not widely consumed until the price dropped in the 18th Century. By then, British drinkers preferred to add sugar and milk to black tea, and so black tea overtook green tea in popularity in the 1720's.

Jan Josef Horemans the Younger, 'Tea Time'
Jan Josef Horemans the Younger, 'Tea Time'

However the great stately homes and houses of England had already developed some serious interest in tea, from much earlier in time than had been previously thought. The curator of Temple Newsam House, near Leeds, has recently uncovered a bill for 'medical ingredients' dated 1644. The itemised bill indicated that bottles of the "China Drink" had been purchased, at the then price of '4 shillings'.

In 2017, the relative value of 4 shillings from 1644, using the Retail Price Index, is between £32 and £34, which makes the China drink a very expensive medicinal drink for the time. As this is most certainly not the first time that 'the china drink' had been purchased by this house, nor in Britain, it appears that regular imports were under way a lot earlier than had previously been presumed.

2 comments:

  1. It's interesting you say that black tea overtook green tea in popularity in the 1720s because I understood that there was no green tea in Britain before due to the long voyages that were necessary to transport the plant from China. I thought too that it was the long voyages which created black tea.

    I do know that there was no tea in India before some daring botanic espionage by the British liberated its cultivation from the Chinese in the middle of the 19th Century.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your right that all Tea is made from Camellia Sinensis leaves, and Green tea is made from leaves that have not undergone the same withering and oxidation process used to make oolong teas and black teas. All my research says that green tea was exported from China and introduced in to the coffeehouses of London shortly before the Stuart Restoration in 1660.

      I was aware that like silk and porcelain production, tea production was protected by the Chinese but eventually stolen or discovered by the West, thus breaking the monopoly China had held.

      Thanks for the comment as usual.

      Delete

All comments are welcomed, or even just thanks if you enjoyed the post. But please make any comment relevant to the post it appears under. Off topic comments will be blocked or removed.

Moderation is on for older posts to stop spamming and comments that are off topic or inappropriate from being posted .... comments are reviewed within 48 hours. I don't block normal comments that are on topic and not inappropriate. Vexatious comments that may cause upset to other commentators, or that are attempting to espouse a particular wider political view, are reviewed before acceptance. But a certain amount of debate around a post topic is accepted, as long as it remains generally on topic and is not an attempt to become sounding board for some other cause.

Final decision on all comments is held by the blog author and is final.

Comments are always monitored for bad or abusive language, and or illegal statements i.e. overtly racist or sexist content. Spam is not tolerated and is removed.

Commentaires ne sont surveillés que pour le mauvais ou abusif langue ou déclarations illégales ie contenu ouvertement raciste ou sexiste. Spam ne est pas toléré et est éliminé.

Followers

Blog Archive

Its a Pucking World

Its a Pucking World
Dreamberry Wine Cover

About Me

My photo
A middle aged orange male ... So 'un' PC it's not true....