Tea: ‘the best substance in the world’, according to British comedian Billy Connolly, and a cornerstone of civilisation which dates back 5,000 years.
According to legend, it was Chinese Emperor Shen Nong who accidentally discovered the joy of tea in a fable which parallels Newton’s discovery of gravity.
One day, the Emperor was sitting in his garden when a leaf from the Camellia Sinensis (now known as the tea plant) dropped into a pot of water which was being boiled for drinking. Emperor Nong, a renowned herbalist, enjoyed the infusion so thoroughly that tea drinking in China preceded the West’s intrigue by several millennia.
Fast forward to the 1600s. Quite a critical time for Europe as many historians view this era as ‘the rise of Western Civilization’. This century saw the Thirty Years ’War, the English Civil War, the Age of Science (second shout-out of the article to Newton) and European politics undergoing a rise in religious conflict. Nations divided, game changing discovery in motion, and Cromwell cut Christmas in the UK.
Thankfully by this point (because you can’t beat a cuppa under duress), tea had made its way via a complex network of trading routes in the East (headed up by the Portuguese and the Dutch) to Europe and the UK. In 1664, with the demand for tea booming across Britain, the East India Company placed an order for 100lbs. By 1750, annual imports were pitted at nearly 500,000 lbs.
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