Tea's Journey West: Clipper Ships, Smugglers, a Stolen Plant and the Paris Blend That Took Over the World
For about four thousand years, tea was Chinese. The plant, Camellia sinensis, grew in the hills of Yunnan and Sichuan; the Chinese learned to steam, roll, dry, ferment and press its leaves into every form from green cakes to black bricks; and the rest of the world either did not know about it or could not get it. Then, in the space of two centuries, a leaf that Europeans first encountered as an expensive medicinal curiosity became the drink of the English working class, the cargo that financed a trading company more powerful than most nations, the pretext for an American revolution, the reason for the fastest sailing ships ever built, and the target of one of history's great acts of industrial espionage. This is how it traveled west, and how a Paris house decided what to do with it once it arrived.
The first cups in Europe
Portuguese traders reached the China coast in the early 1500s and Jesuit missionaries wrote home about a hot infusion the Chinese drank for health. The Dutch brought the first commercial shipments to Europe in the early 1600s, via their base in Java, and sold it in Amsterdam at prices that made it a drink for the very rich. It arrived in England in the 1650s, sold in coffee houses as a tonic, and was popularized at court by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese princess who married Charles II in 1662 and brought her tea habit with her. For the next hundred years, tea in England was a luxury taken in small cups from Chinese porcelain, and the English still could not grow a leaf of it.
The Company and the smugglers
The East India Company held a monopoly on English trade with China, and tea became its most profitable cargo, paid for with silver because China wanted nothing else Europe made. The English crown taxed the tea heavily, at times over a hundred percent, which created the largest smuggling economy the country had seen: by the 1770s, more tea entered Britain illegally than legally, landed on Cornish and Kentish beaches and carried inland by gangs. Smuggled tea was cheap, and it is smuggled tea that turned tea from an aristocrat's drink into a national one. When the tax was slashed in 1784, smuggling collapsed overnight and legal imports quadrupled. The nation of tea drinkers had already been made, illegally.
Boston, 1773
The Company's other problem was a glut. To move surplus tea, Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773, which allowed the Company to ship directly to the American colonies, undercutting local merchants and, in the colonists' reading, establishing Parliament's right to tax them without consent. In December, a group of Bostonians boarded three Company ships and threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor. It was a protest about who governed whom, but the cargo was tea, and the drink became politically suspect in America for a generation; coffee's hold on the United States dates, in part, to a decision not to drink what the British drank.
The theft
By the 1840s Britain wanted to stop paying China for tea and grow its own in India, where the Company now ruled. The problem was that nobody outside China knew how tea was made, and China did not export the plants or the knowledge. In 1848 the Royal Horticultural Society's plant collector, Robert Fortune, entered the interior of China disguised as a Chinese merchant, with a shaved head and a queue, and over three years collected some twenty thousand tea plants and seedlings, along with a small team of experienced Chinese tea workers who agreed to emigrate, and shipped them to the Himalayan foothills at Darjeeling. Most of the plants died. Enough lived, alongside a native Indian tea plant discovered in Assam, to found the Indian tea industry, which within fifty years supplied more tea to Britain than China did. Darjeeling, the most prized black tea in the world, is the descendant of that theft.
The clippers
The first tea of the season fetched the highest price in London, and in the 1850s and 1860s shipowners built the fastest sailing vessels in history to carry it: the tea clippers, long, narrow, heavily canvased ships that ran from the Chinese ports around the Cape of Good Hope to London in under a hundred days, racing one another with the season's cargo and with fortunes wagered on the result. The Great Tea Race of 1866 saw two ships arrive in the Thames on the same tide after ninety-nine days at sea. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the rise of steam ended the era within a decade; the Cutty Sark, launched that same year, is the last one left.
The French blend
France never became a tea nation the way England did, and that may be exactly why Paris did something with tea that London did not. In 1854 two brothers from a family of merchants and traders, Henri and Édouard Mariage, founded a tea house in Paris, and over the following century Mariage Frères developed the idea that tea could be composed like a perfume: black and green teas blended with flowers, fruit and spices into named creations, sold in colored tins, with the same seriousness a wine merchant brings to a cellar. The house's Marco Polo, a black tea scented with fruits and flowers of China and Tibet, became the most famous flavored tea in the world, and our guides to Marco Polo and to why Mariage Frères is worth it pick up the story there. England put milk in it. France put flowers in it. Both were right.
What the history explains
Why the English drink black tea with milk: because the black teas that survived long sea voyages were strong and tannic, and milk softened them. Why Americans drink coffee: partly Boston harbor. Why Darjeeling tastes the way it does: Chinese plants in Himalayan air, from Fortune's theft. Why a Paris tea comes in a tin with a name: because France treated the leaf as an ingredient in a composition rather than a commodity. And why tea is still sold by the ounce at a shop like ours: because for most of its history in the West it was worth its weight in silver, and the good ones still are. The Mariage Frères tins and the rest of the tea shelf are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Our guide to loose leaf will tell you how to brew what arrived.
