Hoyt Tea

The Origins of Tea

Tea is one of a handful of plants that has shaped the world. Across cultures and centuries, tea—and the traditions that surround it—has been continuously adapted and reinvented. Today, tea is steeped in both history and cultural identity. As tea drinking became popular throughout the world, its accompanying rituals followed. For tea connoisseurs worldwide, enjoying tea has remained a richly provocative experience— an act of cultural performance full of imaginative possibility. No matter how they take their tea, each culture has its own unique history of tea drinking tastes and traditions.

China: The Serendipitous Beginnings of Cha

Tea was first discovered in China around 2700 BC. It originated in the mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan, and according to legend, Emperor Shen Nung first sampled the drink during one his travels in China. In accordance to Shen Nung’s health conscious edicts, his servants were boiling drinking water when a gentle breeze blew some unidentified leaves from a nearby bush into his pot of hot water. Finding the new concoction so aromatic and refreshing, Shen Nung was inspired to further explore this newfound creation. He spent years wandering the country recording the effects of infusions made from the leaves and berries of various plants. The Emperor’s love and understanding of the drink deepened when he discovered that tea had medicinal properties. Tea cured him of a stomachache that he contracted as a result of drinking a toxic herb.

Whether the Shen Nung legend was apocryphal remains uncertain. The fact that the tea plant is native to China easily allowed for tea consumption to spread throughout Chinese society once it gained acceptance. Tea drinking became an elaborate art form during the Tang Dynasty (616-907 AD). This was the heyday of the Chinese Empire— a time when traders journeyed to China from the Middle East to obtain silk, porcelain and tea. In 800 A.D. Lu Yu, an orphan raised by Buddhist monks, wrote the first definitive book on tea, the Ch’a Ching, which codified the various methods of tea cultivation and preparation in ancient China. The influence of Yu’s book projected him into near sainthood within his own lifetime and made tea a cultural tradition that extended into every aspect of Chinese society. The style of tea service promoted in his book was strongly influenced by the Buddhist monastery and was the type of tea ritual that was later introduced to Japan.

Japan: ‘Cha No Yu’

The first tea seeds were brought to Japan by one of its own Buddhist priests, Yeisei, who had studied in a Chinese monastery. Known as the “Father of Tea” in Japan, Yeisei had seen the value of tea in enhancing Buddhist religious practices in China. Tea received almost instant imperial sponsorship and spread rapidly from the royal court and monasteries to other sections of Japanese society.

In Japan, tea was elevated to an art form. Japan developed a highly ritualized Tea Ceremony, the “Cha-no-yu” or “the hot water for tea.” Perhaps the best early description of this complex art form was written by the Irish-Greek journalist-historian Lafcadio Hearn, one of the few foreigners ever to be granted Japanese citizenship during this era. He wrote from personal observation, “The Tea ceremony requires years of training and practice to graduate in art… yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.”

America: Ingenui-Tea

The Dutchman Peter Stuyvesant brought the first tea to America in the 1650s. At this time the city now known as New York was a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam. The Dutch opened Tea Gardens in the city, centering them on natural springs, which the city officials equipped with pumps to facilitate the burgeoning “tea craze.” One of the more famous of these “tea springs” stood less then two miles from where the World Trade Center stood, where Ninth Street becomes Christopher Street, and where Sixth Avenue meets Greenwich Avenue. The tea gardens persisted in popularity even when the Dutch colony was taken over by the British, who changed the city’s name to New York City. The residents were confirmed tea drinkers, and, on acquiring the colony, the English found that the small settlement consumed more tea at that time than all of England put together.

By 1720, the tea trade was centered in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. However, the colonial people were disgruntled by the tough taxes imposed on tea by the British. Their resentment reached a boiling point in December 1767, when the men of Boston dressed up as Indians, openly purchased smuggled tea, and threw hundreds of pounds of British tea into the port. These events went down in history as the Boston Tea Party and precipitated the American Revolution.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Americans invented iced tea, now a popular summertime beverage. At around the same time, a New Yorker named Thomas Sullivan first invented the eminently practical concept of tea bags. These days, tea is enjoying a revival in popularity with health conscious Americans, but is secondary to the American staple brew of coffee.

England: A Spot of Tea

The first samples of tea reached England between 1652 and 1654. Tea quickly proved popular enough to replace ale as the national drink of England.

Nobility provided the necessary stamp of approval to insure tea’s acceptance into British culture. King Charles II had married the Portuguese Infanta Catherine de Braganza in 1662 while he was in exile during the suspension of the monarchy. As a Portuguese princess, Catherine was no stranger to tea, and Charles himself had grown up in the Dutch capital of the Hague and had acquired an enduring taste for the beverage.

With the re-establishment of the monarchy, both King Charles II and his Portuguese bride strongly advocated tea in England, and fortunately they already had access to Asian trade. As part of her dowry, Catherine de Braganza’s marriage to Charles gave the British the territories of Tangier and Bombay. This provided England with two important bases of operation for importing tea. Subsequently, tea mania swept across England as it had earlier spread throughout France and Holland. Tea importation rose from an annual average of 40,000 pounds in 1699 to 240,000 pounds by 1708. With the increase in tea imports, the price was soon affordable enough for all of British society.

Prior to the introduction of tea in Britain, the English had two main meals—breakfast and dinner. Breakfast was ale, bread and beef, while dinner was a long, massive meal at the end of the day. It was no wonder that Anna, the Duchess of Bedford (1788-1861), experienced a “sinking feeling” in the late afternoon. Adopting the European tea service format that she had observed in Holland, she invited friends to join her for an additional afternoon meal at five o’clock in her rooms in Belvoir Castle. The menu consisted of small cakes, bread and butter sandwiches, assorted sweets, and of course, tea. Afternoon tea has remained an English institution and continues to be an icon of England’s social and gastronomic culture. Following Anna’s preferences, the English serve tea with milk and add sugar to taste.

India: Chai from Darjeeling and Assam

The credit for creating India’s vast tea empire goes to the British, who discovered tea in India and cultivated and consumed it in enormous quantities between the early 1800’s and India’s independence from Great Britain in 1947. The Scottish adventurer Robert Bruce discovered tea plants growing in Assam in the 1820’s. At this time no one thought that tea existed in India; however, Major Bruce discovered the plants growing wild in the jungles controlled by the tribal chiefs.

In 1834, a British tea committee was appointed to investigate the possibility of cultivating tea in India. After a thorough investigation and study of the crop, the first commercial batch of tea ever produced outside of China came from Assam in 1839.

Two of India’s major teas are the Darjeeling and the Assam. India’s famed Darjeeling is named after the summer capital of the Government of Bengal, where tea is cultivated at altitudes of 4,000-10,000 feet in the Darjeeling hills. India’s other major tea, Assam, is named for the district in which it is grown, which lies in northeast India along the border between India and Burma. This region produced more black tea than any other area in the world, with the exception of some parts of China. Assam—a strong, dark, and rich tea—is a component of many standard blends, including Irish Breakfast. Today, India is responsible for cultivating much of the world’s tea, and Indian varieties such as Darjeeling, Assam, and Nilgiri are amongst the most popular.

Russia: Zavarka

The Russian interest in tea began as early as 1618 when the Chinese embassy in Moscow presented several chests of tea to Czar Alexis. Tea was ideally suited to Russian life: hearty, warm, and sustaining. By 1689 the Trade Treaty of Newchinsk established a common border between Russia and China, allowing caravans to cross back and forth freely. Still, the journey by land was not easy. The trip was over 11,000 miles long and took over sixteen months to complete. Camels were the only pack animals capable of enduring the difficult trek. As a result, the cost of tea was prohibitive, an indulgence only the wealthy could afford. By the time Catherine the Great died in 1796, however, the price had dropped, and tea was spreading throughout Russian society.

The Russian caravans were exposed to more than a year of continual campfires, and as a result, this added a distinctive smoky quality to most of the teas imported. With the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1900, the overland caravans were abandoned. Nevertheless, a preference for strong and smoky teas persisted and has remained an integral part of the Russian tea tradition. The Russians also prefer their tea generously sweetened, adding sugar, honey, or jam. Early importation practices not only contributed to the taste of Russian tea, but also to the style of tea accoutrements. Tea in Russia is usually taken in clear glasses with silver holders, very similar to Turkish coffee cups. Russia’s traditional combination teapot and water heater is called a samovar. As tea became the national beverage (along with Vodka), the samovar became the center of the Russian home. It has the capacity to run all day and serve up to forty cups of tea at a time, each of them made strong and sweet.