Table Of ContentEmpire of Tea
Em pir e of Te a
The Asian Leaf that
Conquered the World
Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton,
Matthew Mauger
reaktion books
For Ceri, Bey, Chelle
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2015
Copyright © Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger 2015
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers
Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn978 1 78023 440 3
Contents
Introduction 7
one: Early European Encounters with Tea 14
two: Establishing the Taste for Tea in Britain 31
three: The Tea Trade with China 53
four: The Elevation of Tea 73
five: The Natural Philosophy of Tea 93
six: The Market for Tea in Britain 115
seven: The British Way of Tea 139
eight: Smuggling and Taxation 161
nine: The Democratization of Tea Drinking 179
ten: Tea in the Politics of Empire 202
eleven: The National Drink of Victorian Britain 221
twelve: Twentieth-century Tea 247
Epilogue: Global Tea 267
References 277
Bibliography 307
Acknowledgements 315
Photo Acknowledgements 317
Index 319
‘A Sort of Tea from China’, c. 1700, a material survival of Britain’s encounter with tea in the late
seventeenth century.e specimen was acquired by James Cuninghame, a physician and ship’s
surgeon who visited Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698–9 and Chusan (Zhoushan) in 1700–1703.
Remarkably, some of the hand-rolled leaves retain vestiges of their original green hue.
Introduction
We encounter ‘Vegetable Substance 857’ on a visit to the Darwin
Centre at the Natural History Museum in London. It occupies
a boxboard container about six inches long, lined with white
card, covered in black fabric. rough the glass lid, we can just make out
an ounce or two of dried leaves: on opening the box their curled forms and
brittle textures, mottled with hues of green and brown, emit the faint ghost
of an odour. Half-buried in this tiny heap are two scraps of paper inscribed
in dark-brown ink by an eighteenth-century hand. One explains that this
vegetable substance is ‘A sort of tea from China’, the other provides its
classifying number, 857. What we are viewing is instantly familiar – yet it
is a source of wonder. Here, within the temperature-controlled airlock of
the Special Collections Room, is a sample of tea prepared for market in
China around 1698. Intended for immediate consumption, it nonethe-
less survives into the twenty-first century, a passage of over 300 years. As
such, Vegetable Substance 857 is a unique physical remnant of a com-
merce that has shaped the patterns and practices of global modernity.
e collection of Vegetable Substances to which this tea belongs were
compiled over many decades by the Irish physician and natural historian
Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). From a total of 12,523 boxes, around two-
thirds are extant. Beginning with specimens he gathered on Jamaica in
the 1680s, Sloane eventually collated plant life from across the known
world. His method was to store items of botanical interest such as seeds
and fruits, as well as vegetable products in which he perceived potential
utility for trade or medicine. e Vegetable Substances, spectacular in
their range, were nonetheless just one component of Sloane’s trove of
antiquities, books and natural rarities – all bequeathed to the public as
the inaugurating repository of the British Museum (and later the British
Library and Natural History Museum). Today, the Vegetable Substances
share a section of the Darwin Centre’s eighth floor with Sloane’s vast
herbarium, also known as a hortus siccusor ‘dried garden’. Its samples
7
empire of tea
of flowers and leaves were dispatched from Europe, Africa, Asia and
the Americas before being mounted and pressed in London into leather-
bound folios (each of which now claims its own Perspex-enclosed shelf).
Within these volumes, curator Charlie Jarvis locates cuttings from the
tea shrub Camellia sinensis, taken variously in China and Japan around
the turn of the eighteenth century. Reading the Vegetable Substances and
Sloane Herbarium together, we begin to understand Sloane’s intellectual
desire to assemble, systematize and understand the whole of nature.
The presence of centuries-old tea gradually becomes less surprising,
more enlightening.
For many decades, Sloane’s Vegetable Substances were scattered
miscellaneously in drawers and cabinets across museum backrooms, but
recent work by Jarvis and researcher Victoria Pickering means that the
contents can now be readily searched and retrieved. is enables us to
situate item 857 in historical context. e smaller, numeric label in our
box cross-refers with an original manuscript catalogue, which advises
that this ‘sort of tea’ came ‘from M.r Cunningham’. Further investiga-
tion among Sloane’s correspondence and scientific papers at the British
Library confirms that this is James Cuninghame (d. 1709), a Scottish ship’s
surgeon who twice travelled to China. It is not clear whether this tea is
the produce of the hill country of Fujian, acquired when Cuninghame
joined a private trading voyage to Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698, or the local
manufacture of Chusan (Zhoushan), where Cuninghame accompanied
an abortive East India Company settlement in 1700 and found wild tea
trees growing amid other evergreens. But we do know that Cuninghame,
the first Briton to examine Chinese plants in their native habitat, was a keen
and attentive natural historian who was fascinated (like Sloane) by their
characteristics and uses. Tea, he recognized, remained sufficiently unusual
to appeal to his friends at home in London: it was both an object of curi -
osity for students of medicine and botany, and of immense interest to men
of trade and lovers of exotic novelty. In this way, Cuninghame reminds
us that Britain’s incipient relationship with China was not simply about
the commercial trans mission of commodities, but formed a conduit for
intellectual and cultural exchange. Early importers of tea to Britain, among
whom Cuninghame sailed, brought with them precious knowledge of the
beverage’s origins and consumption in the orient.
e hot infusion of the oxidized and prepared leaves of Camellia
sinensis was an extraordinary innovation when discovered by British
drinkers in the seventeenth century. ere was no language to describe its
flavour, and few directions about how to consume it. Encountering tea
for the first time was a creative and experimental process of curiosity and
habituation. Grasping for analogies, a physician described tea as being
‘somewhat like Hay mixt with a little Aromatick smell, ’tis of a green Colour,
