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Teas

Tea has always been used both as a hot beverage and as a medicine. Records indicate that tea drinking may have existed in China as early as 4,700 years ago. Tea use and other aspects of Chinese culture spread to Japan around 600 C.E. (abbreviation for Common Era, equivalent to A.D.), but it took 700 years for it to become fully integrated into Japanese life. In Japan tea became known by its Cantonese name, ch'a. In the 17th century, as the use of coffee was being introduced to Europe from Turkey, Dutch traders brought tea (originally called tee, from the Chinese Amoy dialect word t'e, pronounced "tay") back to their country. Despite its initial high cost, tea spread quickly throughout Europe and in some places displaced coffee as the beverage of choice.

Partly to reaffirm its status as a strong colonial ruler, in 1767 the British government put a special tax on tea and several other items. As a result, the colonists boycotted tea and began using substitutes, particularly coffee. They were urged on by some local doctors and clergy, who attributed an assortment of ills and evils to tea drinking.

The tea boycott became a rallying point for the growing colonial independence movement. Colonists began destroying cargoes of tea in harbors along the East Coast. In Boston on December 16, 1773, a group of citizens disguised as Indians boarded three moored ships and dumped their cargo of tea into the Boston harbor. This incident-the Boston Tea Party-and the British government's reprisals helped precipitate the American Revolution.

At first, the British did not realize the full significance of the Boston incident. Reports in London newspapers a month later focused not so much on the political implications of the event as on the effect of the tea on the unfortunate fish in the harbor. The fish, said one report, "had contracted a disorder not unlike the nervous complaints of the body." In fact, the large quantity of tea dumped into the harbor had given the fish a strong dose of caffeine.

At this time most tea came from China. Through the East India Company, the British had a near monopoly on the tea trade. When the company's commercial treaty with China expired in 1833, however, the British control of the valuable tea trade became increasingly insecure. During the rest of the 19th century, tea plantations were developed in the Indian subcontinent. But China tea did not grow well in India, and the plantations became successful only when the local Assam variety of tea was cultivated. As recently as the 1870s more than 90% of Britain's tea still came from China.

The insecurity of Britain's hold on the tea trade was not helped by a domestic tax on tea that, in the early 19th century, was 15 times higher than the tax on coffee. As a consequence, coffee use in Britain increased tenfold between 1800 and 1840, at which time the beverage overtook tea in popularity. A series of coffee-adulteration scandals, however, led many people to return to tea. To the distress of buyers and drinkers, chicory, roasted corn, vegetable roots, and baked horse liver were discovered as having been used to increase the bulk of ground coffee. Also, in the mid-nineteenth century, the taxes on tea were lowered. Thus, tea once again became the beverage of choice for the British.

Tea has magical powers. Tea consoles the lonely and unites the sociable. Tea stimulates in hot countries and heats the body where it is cold. Tea can alleviate or heal ailments of the body and the soul. Tea drinking is a many-faceted pleasure: it can cause us to dream, sharpen our minds, relax us, let us forget time and place, and heal our body, mind and soul. The ceremony of tea drinking is associated with warmth, pleasant fragrances and comfort. Tea seduces the senses. In these days of stress and hurry, more and more of us seek peace and contemplation in a cup of tea. The number of tea drinkers is growing.

Preparing tea from an amazing variety of plants has a long, long history, as does the tradition of using tea for meditative and spiritual purposes. The use of tea in the contemplative life was known to the sages of the Far East, the physicians of Arabia, the priests of ancient Egypt, the shamans of the North American Indians and of the rain forests, and the wise women of Europe. From the beginning, tea has served not just as a beverage but also as medicine. And tea carries with it the philosophy of all those who have brewed it and prescribed it. For these reasons, teas made of magic herbs offer a very special form of pleasure. They are messengers from the place of their origin and they tell us about history, lost civilizations, unknown cultures, forgotten customs, women's lore, erotica and exotica.

"It will never be discovered how human beings happened upon the pleasure of hot infusions, made of the leaves of a certain shrub or of the roasted and boiled seeds of another. Yet there must be an explanation for how these infusions became a vital necessity in the lives of entire nations. Even more amazing is the fact which - the wildest imagination could never have thought of - that we must ascribe their beneficial effect upon the human body to the exact same chemical component in both plants. Yet they happen to belong to entirely different botanical families and stem from two different continents." Thus wrote Justus Liebig about tea and coffee in 1842, in his groundbreaking work on organic chemistry, physiology and pathology.

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