| When tea was first introduced
to Britian, tea was a luxury. The rich had it, everyone else
wanted it. And was not very long before they got it.
In the early days of European imporation, tea
was sold largely on the basis of its supposed medicinal properties.
Originally it was green tea that was imported
into Europe.Because green was easy to adulturate with cheaper
lookalike materials like grass, the market switched to black
leaves.
Britian and Russia became the became the leading
European aficionados of tea, and they remain so today.
Early on Americans were keen tea drinkers but
the events leading up to and including the Boston Tea Party
in 1773 changed all that. Today they remain staunch coffee
drinkers.
The China tea trade reached its zenith in 1886.
The Opium War and Taiping Rebellion coupled with a general
decline in Ching Dynasty fortunes and power helped result
in a drastic decline in exports so that by the 1940s India
and Japan were the leading tea merchants to the rest of the
world.
The Opium Wars grew out of the British public's
love affair with tea. British coffers were draining away to
China for payments of imported leaf, but the British had nothing
compelling to offer to the Chinese in return. The Brits wanted
to even up the trade imbalance, which they did by introducing
opium from British India. With some two million people addicted
to "foreign mud", Chinese outrage resulted in attempts
to restrict the import of opium, and the Opium Wars resulted.
Tea, which needs to be kept dry, did not benefit
from the wet, salty voyages. The faster the clipper ship,
the earlier arrival of better tea, which added up to higher
prices. Tea spurred the development of European shipping technology.
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