Tea's History
In the Beginning …
It is nearly 400 years since tea was first enjoyed in Europe or almost anywhere else outside the immediate neighborhood of China, the original homeland of tea. In fact, tea had already been in use for more than 4,000 years before non-Asians got to take their first sip. The tea to which we Westerners were first introduced in the 1600s had been slowly evolving in the East. It began as a medicine and was later taken as a tonic. Starting about the time of Christ, its popularity as a beverage began to spread throughout China along with Buddhism, for the Buddhists are to tea in Asia what the Catholics are to wine in Europe and it is not entirely far-fetched to think of tea as Buddhist communion.
The earliest tea was manufactured into cakes and, to be brought to perfection as a drink, these required boiling, after other elaborate preparation. This is the form of tea described in the world's first tea book, the Cha Ching, written by a Buddhist-trained tea master named Lu Yu around 780 AD. Later on, cake tea was ground into a fine powder, which could be whipped in hot---not boiling---water with a split-bamboo tea whisk. The frothy liquid was then drunk with the tea particles suspended in it. This form of tea was copied by the Japanese and is perpetuated in the Japanese tea ceremony to this day. Only after 1300 did the Chinese discover how to manufacture tea in loose-leaf form, best prepared by steeping. This is the form of tea that the world knows today. All the various kinds of tea that have ever been developed continue to be produced and enjoyed in China, but loose leaf tea which is prepared by steeping, gradually seeped throughout the whole world to become mankind's most popular beverage except for water itself.
The trade in tea, outside of China, has always been a business like no other. China was the source of the world's tea until well after 1839, when it was first produced in India by the British. During the centuries of the China monopoly, tea was handled by specialty purveyors like Twining, who set up business in London in 1715 with 18 different teas, priced and sold by type and quality, straight from the chest. Not until 1826 was the first packet tea - a guaranteed net-weight of blended tea in a container bearing a trademark and a retail price - introduced by the honest English Quaker, John Horniman.
The tea that British India began producing in the mid-1800s was entirely different from anything seen before. This was plantation-grown, machine-produced black tea derived not from the China-type tea plant but from the tea plant which had been discovered growing wild in India called Assam jat ("type"). Assam jat, like the colonial monoculture method of growing it and the industrialized Orthodox Manufacture method of producing it, eventually spread to every new tea-producing country around the world. By 1890, over half of England's tea came from India. Before long, colonial tea had replaced China tea decisively in the West as British, colonial-built industries took root in one new tea land after another, all producing black tea and nothing else. It was a uniform, standardized product ideal for packet tea blends and it could be mass-marketed more profitably than any other agricultural commodity. The mass marketing of this kind of tea is best exemplified by Thomas J. Lipton's worldwide brand, a success that has hardly been equaled since he bought his first Sri Lanka estates in 1890.
Tea Advertising
Brands based on a mass-produced and mass-merchandised commodity did not prevail overnight. Loose tea sold from the chest in England's grocery shops continued to outsell Horniman-style packet teas right up until 1914. Local tastes in the USA continued to provide regional markets for Formosa oolong and Japan green right up until the outbreak of World War II. Since that time, the large corporations have been spectacularly successful in convincing the consumer, both in Britain and the United States, that tea is merely a brown beverage made from powdered black leaf, usually packaged in teabags—a commodity with about as much variation or personality as oatmeal or sugar.At the same time, the tea trade has witnessed a race-to-the-bottom as each brand constantly sought to fill its teabags with ever cheaper tea. Over a third of all the tea the U.S. consumes today comes from Argentina, a machine-harvested, machine-made and utterly nondescript ersatz. Most Americans would not even notice, you might think, since iced tea comprises over 80 percent of all tea consumed in the U.S. And yet...
In the 1980s, although the mass-marketers had succeeded in making tea an undifferentiated commodity fit for mass distribution and consumption, and with commodity-like pricing, something unexpected began to happen. The market segment that these corporations had labeled "specialty tea"—as if teabag tea were the world standard—began to take off. Where there were fewer than a dozen "specialty tea" firms in the U.S. in 1982, there are many more than a dozen-dozen today and, moreover, their customers know their products as "premium teas." Discriminating people are once again buying tea by origin, type and quality, not just by brand name. Here is precisely where the phenomenal growth in the U.S. tea market since 1982 has occurred, in the high-quality niche where "tea" is understood in the plural and many distinct teas may be identified by region and even estate of origin, type of processing, price and specialized or even unique purpose.
And here, at the gateway to the premium teas of the world, is where The G.S. Haly Co. has always been found, ready to supply your particular tea needs.
