Empire of Tea

Empire of Tea Empire of Tea The Asian Leaf that Conquered the Wor ld 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 isbn 978 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 e encounter ‘Vegetable Substance 857’ on a visit to the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum in London. It occupies Wa 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 nonetheless 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 siccus or ‘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, introduction and tastes Sweet with a little Bitter’.1 It was also remarkably expensive: up to 60 shillings per pound for the best quality, ten times the cost of the finest coffee.2 Initially restricted to urban elites, the demand for tea and the number of its regular drinkers increased in Britain through the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, tea became closely associated with the British way of life, transcending distinctions of social class, national geography and cultural background: as early as the 1820s, commentators instinctively identified the British as ‘a tea-drinking nation’.3 Tea became a defining symbol of British identity in a period when it all came from China and Japan: it was not until 1839 that the first ‘Empire’ tea from Assam found its way to the London markets. So although the history of Britain’s obsession with tea is oen associated in the popular imagination with the nineteenth-century plantations of colonial India and the dramatic races between tea clippers, these aspects of its story were the effect – rather than the cause – of the widespread demand for tea. Moreover it was Britain’s appetite for this Asian leaf that led to its international adop- tion among its former colonies, becoming by one measure the world’s most popular beverage aer water. One crucial inference of the ‘Empire of Tea’ that this book narrates is therefore the trajectory of the British Empire. Indeed, tea was peculiarly central within the complex international currents of cash, commodities, people and ideas that drove British imperialism in the eighteenth century: as the bedrock of a highly lucrative trade with China, as a symbol of the mother country’s arbitrary disposition in North America, as the mainstay of agricultural colonization across South Asia, and as a partner of Caribbean sugar (the other non-native foodstuff with which it transformed patterns of British consumption) in so many humble cups. rough tea, Britain announced and experienced the strangeness of global connectedness, and the gratification of an emerging imperial con- fidence that flowed reciprocally between the state and the wider populace. Tea’s remarkable ascendance relied upon the capacities of British individuals and institutions to comprehend and deploy its exotic otherness – its botanical characteristics, its physiological effects, its social purposes, its cultural meanings. Yet this book is reluctant to understand tea merely as an inert material commodity in these processes, for it actively transforms those subjected to its influence. Victorian Britain was an ‘empire of tea’, but it was also a territory that had been conquered by tea during the preceding 150 years. Our title Empire of Tea embraces this suggestive and deliberate counter-history to examine and explain how tea – originally alien to Europe – inserted itself within Britain’s social and economic life. An illustrated handbill (or ‘trade card’) from the early 1790s implies that such an understanding was not remote from eighteenth-century imag- inations.

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