Tea For Two

The tea we drink and know so well is actually a camellia, Camellia sinensis.

First discovered as a tea, or, dried leaf tip that could be added to boiling water as a drink.

Its discovery was due to the ancient Chinese culture of herbal medicine and is traditionally attributed to Shen Nong, said to have lived about 2.500 years ago.
Teas origin was as a medicinal herb, used to “clear the mind” and was promptly adopted by scholars and Buddhist monks during meditation.

Although tea had been widely prepared as a drink throughout China for over 2000 years, we must remember that China, to the Europeans was totally unknown, except for very minor reports and references in books, i.e. from a Persian traveller in 1559 who mentions tea as a wonderful antidote to fever, headache and stomach ache!

It was, however, the Dutch who first imported tea into Europe in 1610 as a purely medicinal drink, but by 1637, tea was being imported into Holland as a hot drink with an increasing popularity. Holland, at this time, was the tea drinking country, not England.

Tea was drunk in England, on a small scale, however, tea arrived in England with a new vigor via the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, with the return to England of Charles ll, who had lived in exile among the tea drinking Dutch.

But it was via Portugal that tea drinking in England received its real boost. The Portuguese had, throughout the 15th century been Europe’s leading sea power, with a vast and adventurous merchant fleet trading between Lisbon, India and the southern Chinese port of Canton. Portugal had been the very first to encounter tea having a virtual control of trade to Asia until about 1600.

Portugal had been the first foreign power to be granted a trading concession by the Imperial Chinese government, with imported goods, hardly known in Europe, including silks, porcelain, lacquer ware and tea, establishing Lisbon as an important and wealthy city.
By the middle of the 17th century, tea was the drink of choice at the Portuguese court.

In 1661 a political union was established between England and Portugal and as was the style of the day, the political union was followed by a Royal marriage between England and Portugal, which symbolized the union between the two kingdoms.

In 1662 Princess Catherine of Braganza was sent to England to be the Royal bride of Charles ll. Catherine, now Queen of England, further promoted tea at the English court. The new Queens passion for tea firmly established tea drinking at court, which very quickly spread throughout high society.

Today, tea is an inexpensive drink enjoyed by anyone who wishes to drink it, but it was not always so. Tea in the 17th and 18th century was very expensive, indeed, a luxury drink enjoyed only by the wealthy classes.
We can still see preserved posters from Thomas Garway’s London tea and coffee shop, with tea priced at 16 to 60 shillings a pound! And in 1664 a poster, advertising tea at £4 5/- shillings for a little over two pound weight. In 1664 this was a vast amount of money, well beyond the purse of the average family.

By the early 18th century, the fashion for tea was gaining new ground and the price for standard grade tea had dropped to about 12 – 14 shillings a pound, a sum of money equal to the average weekly income of a master craftsman at the time.

With tea being a privilege of the rich, it soon became something to show-off about and the tea ceremony began to develop. This allowed the host to give a lavish display of wealth and status, in the 18th century, your wealth and social standing was something to display and the grander the display, the better.

The tea table became a social centre and to extend hospitality to guests could be an expensive exercise, we find a London magazine of 1744 reporting that it could cost more to maintain a fashionable tea table than to keep two children and a nurse!

Both English and Continental porcelain makers and silver smiths vied with each other to produce the most elegant tea wares for the fashionable tea table. Fine furniture makers, produced beautiful tea table furniture and tea caddies, where the lady of the house could safely lock the tea away from servants with sticky fingers!
In fact, it was a perquisite, or privilege of the senior footman to salvage the tealeaves from the tea pot, dry them in the sunlight and reuse them for himself, or, even sell them.

In the 18th century, tea was usually served, mid afternoon, after dinner, which was served in the early afternoon. The lady of the house presided over the ritual of the tea table, which by now had become almost a ceremony, with rules of etiquette specific to “taking tea”.

By example, there is a Thomas Rawlinson cartoon; named “The French Visitors”, The Frenchmen are seen, cross legged and red in the face, obviously, desperate to relieve themselves, written in the balloon shape coming from their mouths’ is “Please, Madam, no more tea!!” The joke, in 18th century terms, was that they did not know the tea table etiquette which required a guest to place his / her spoon in the tea cup to indicate to the hostess, no more, thank you.

This generous hostess had kept refilling the French visitor’s cups and they too polite to say, no more, thank you.
As the 18th century began to fade into the early 19th century, tea, now being grown by the British in India and Ceylon, became less and less expensive, eventually to become a staple of the poorer classes. Of particular benefit, although not understood at the time was the fact the drinking water was now being boiled, so that the many diseases spread by contaminated drinking water began to decline.

The tea, that we know today, is a very inexpensive drink, enjoyed by millions, the elegant ritual of the tea table, now reduced to a mug and a tea bag.