GMS shares the history of tea.
3 h ·
History of Tea ~ The Stolen Treasure
When tea trade started to blossom in 18th and early 19th Century with its popularity in Western countries soaring among the Royalty, rich and famous to the working class, the Western Empires started to feel the great impact of huge Current Account Trade deficits with China. These Western Empires started to sell addictive Opium bricks to China in the bid to balance their trade with China.
There were three main exports from China which were very much sort after: Silk, Tea and Porcelain ware (called China).
When the tea trade became so lucrative, the British East India Company started to plot the greatest theft of the century, stealing tea plants from China and tried cultivating these tea plants in their colony of India.
Tea plants were banned from export by the Qing Dynasty but the British was able to send its horticulturist Robert Fortune to work in China on behalf of Royal Horicultural Social.
Robert Fortune commenced covert operations to steal 20,000 tea plants and seedlings within his two and a half years stay in China by employing numerous methods of preserving and transporting them to Darjeeling of India, at the foot of Himalaya. He had even employed the portable greenhouse designed by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward to transfer these plants.
Robert Fortune had also brought a group of trained Chinese tea workers to Darjeeling to facilitate the production of tea leaves.
Although only very few of these 20000 Chinese tea plants survived after the transfer to Darjeeling, but this covert operation of "tea theft" had brought over the technology and knowledge of tea production to India, Sri Lanka and rest of the world in the later development of mass production of tea outside of China.
Beside Chinese tea plants, the British had also found a slightly different tea plant strain in Assam, which has bigger size tea leaves. Assam tea has a distinctive difference in taste from Chinese tea leaves.
Darjeeling has both different strains but Chinese tea plants still dominates.
Due to the soil, humidity and overall environment and modified tea processing methodology, tea produced in Darjeeling and other parts of India, as well as Sri Lanka are much stronger in strength and taste than their Chinese counterparts and they were much cheaper in price as well. Such stronger taste with lower price proved to be more popular to the Western World.
The "Stolen Treasure" has also created huge Tea companies like Liptons,
Lyons and Mazawattee etc.
Imagine if there was Intellectual Property Protection of tea production technology back then, we won't be enjoying such fine Ceylon Tea right now!
While Indian tea prosper, Ceylon tea had also taken a quantum jump in its development... That will be for another story another time.
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Photo: Darjeeling tea estate
