Green Gold: The Empire of Tea.

Introduction: An honour and privilege.

     In a few months the book which I wrote with my mother Iris Macfarlane, called Green Gold; the Empire of Tea will be published in a Chinese translation. I cannot think of any better place to launch this book, so to speak, than here in the distinguished University of Peking. I thank you for inviting me to talk and for attending this talk. I also thank Xiaoxiao Yan for translating this talk as I speak.

     Nor is there a better place to launch a book on the history and influence tea on world civilization than the capital of the greatest tea nation in history. Tea and China are almost synonymous. Indeed, for a westerner to bring a book on tea to China seems rather audacious, as there are many already. But I hope to bring a different perspective to the study of your favourite drink, a drink which has united Britain and China for good and for bad for nearly three hundred years.

     I don’t know whether it has occurred to you that tea both made, and almost destroyed, China. It has been the secret source of much of its greatness, but in the end, through the craving it induced and the strength it gave, it led to terrible disasters from which China is only now recovering. Let me explain.

How the tea led to industriousness.

     Tea (camellia sinensis) originated in the hot wet jungles of the Eastern Himalayas, in the Burma, Assam and Yunnan triangle. By the time of the unification of China in the third century B.C. it was already known in the monastic gardens and aristocratic households of part of China as a wonderful medicine and drink that helped in Buddhist meditation.

     It became a national and universally admired drink around the time of the rise of the Tang dynasty. Its spread coincided with the great move southwards of Chinese civilizations in arguably China’s most glorious period, the late Tang and Sung empires from the ninth to thirteenth centuries.

     One suggestion we make in our book is that the sudden rapid growth of population numbers and economic wealth at this time, linked to the spread of intensive rice cultivation in the Yangtze delta, may have been made possible by tea.

     Tea helps in two ways. Firstly it gives extra energy in farming. The caffeine in the tea relaxes and invigorates and gives better muscle use and brain concentration. Just as the Japanese were to find in their great medieval expansion from the time of tea introduction in the thirteenth century, tea makes possible the grinding work of wet rice production on minimal diets. Likewise the British were also to discover in their great spurt, the industrial revolution from the late eighteenth century, that tea helps overcome fatigue and makes complex and difficult work possible. If we subtract tea from the Tang-Sung period I suspect the effort would have been seriously diminished.

     Secondly, as the population of China increased rapidly, as it was also to do later in Japan and England, it soon faced one of the greatest obstacles to human progress. The huge cities and crowded countryside of the Sung, the late medieval period in Japan, and the industrial cities of England, produced a huge amount of human waste – excrement. This polluted the water supplies. The danger of dysentery and later cholera and typhoid increased. Infants are likely to die soon after birth, adults to be constantly sick. What can people do to avoid this almost certain disaster?

     In China, Japan or England there was no obvious alternative to drinking polluted water. Milk is equally dangerous before Pasteurisation and in any case there were not enough milking animals to supply the population with their main drink except, perhaps, in England. Beers or wines use too much of the grain crop to be the staple drink to provide an average of 2-3 pints of liquid a day per person. Coffee had not spread by this time.

     By one of the great accidents of history, it was discovered that by infusing an easily grown leaf in boiling water it was possible to make a very cheap drink which could safely (and pleasurably) be drunk all the time.

     It was the safest of all drinks for two reasons. Firstly there is the obvious fact that the boiling of the water killed many bacteria. If the boiled water was drunk straight away, having been boiled for at least five minutes, and the cup was fairly sterile, it would be safe. But more surprisingly, there was another protection.

Learning from the Chinese.

     In the early Chinese books on tea, and those in Japan when it was introduced there, tea is described as a medicine, like ginseng. It is said to have a bitter taste which reveals something which is good for many diseases, among them ‘drinking water sickness’. It was believed to have some kind of anti-septic content.

     When I read this, it gave me the clue I needed. I followed the chain from the water-borne diseases through drink and discovered that of the many chemicals in tea, the most abundant is what is called ‘tea tannin’, which is another term for what is technically called ‘phenolics’. Phenolics are one of the most powerful antiseptics known to man. They were the basis of the carbolic disinfectants which Lister used in the nineteenth century to revolutionize the cleanliness of hospitals.

     When the microscope developed in the late nineteenth century and bacteria were discovered, it became possible to test the effects of tea. Experiments showed that typhoid, dysentery and cholera bacilli were all destroyed when put into a solution of cold tea. It was not the boiling that killed them, but something in the tea. So when people drink tea they do not just drink sterilized water, but a substance what cleans out the mouth and the stomach. Early experiments in England in the early C18 had shown how frogs legs immersed in cold tea remained normal, while those put in cold water quickly developed gangrene and putrefied.

     So what the Chinese had discovered was an enormously powerful medicine, which they were also the first to note was effective in diminishing the likelihood of many other diseases of the brain, heart and body.

     So tea in a second way made possible the flourishing of Tang-Sung China. Likewise a few centuries later it enabled the flourishing of late medieval Japan, and even later, when it was introduced in bulk into mid-C18 Britain, the British industrial revolution. Our world was changed by this humble drink in the rapid growth of three of the great Empires in history.

How tea led to China’s miseries.

     Yet while tea could be said to have made the great expansion of china possible, in two other ways it may also have brought terrible consequences for China.

     The first is an hypothesis which we did not include in our book since the evidence is as yet thin, but perhaps I can float the idea before you so that you can give me further guidance.

     As you know, Tibet early on became one of the great tea drinking nations of the world, relying largely on exports from China. There is no way in which the Tibetans in the past or today could have had their high level of civilization without tea. Likewise tea was a stimulant and energy-giver on the massive trade routes on the silk roads. What interests me, however, is the possible effect tea may have had on other great pastoral nomadic groups on China’s borders, especially the Mongols and Manchus.

     If tea early on became a significant export to the Mongols and later the Manchus this could have had tremendous consequences. Tea, among other things, is a significant source of vitamin C. In its green form, a cup of tea has more of that vitamin than a cup of orange juice. In its brown form it has an enzyme which greatly helps to increase the vitamin C value of green vegetables. Hence it was early noticed to be effective against scurvy. In the vegetable scarce areas of the steppes, this was probably very important.

     Likewise the energy which tea gives, especially in cold climates through the caffeine, plus the protection it offers against various diseases, especially water-borne ones, are all significant.

     Can this growth in tea consumption be one of the factors behind the previously largely unexplained growth in the power of the Mongols in the twelfth century? Certainly, I gather from an exhibition we saw last year in Beijing, tea was widely consumed in some of the newly excavated border states. Certainly Chinese advisors discussed at an early period the possibility of punishing the Mongols by cutting off their brick tea.

     If this guess turns out to be true, then the invasions of China by Genghis and Kubla Khan and the establishment of the Ming Dynasty may have been connected to tea. Later the Manchu invasions and establishment of the Qin, may be equally unimaginable without the leaves of this little bush. All this is open to further research.

The later calamity.

     What is less in doubt is the third huge blow that tea gave to China. This came in two parts. The first was in the early nineteenth century. The British had become addicted to tea in the middle of the eighteenth century. The wealth of the great East India Company was largely based on importing tea. Huge fortunes were made and it is arguable that the British take-over of India and its victory over the French was dependent on tea fortunes.

     There was a large problem for the British, however. How was this addiction to be paid for? All attempts to transfer tea to an area which the British controlled failed until the 1840’s, so for the crucial period 1780-1840 as Britain went through the first industrial revolution in history and set up the largest Empire that the world has ever known, the British were dependent on Chinese tea.

     At first the tea had been paid for with silver, but as the quantities of imported tea rapidly increased the amount of silver needed increased also. The fact that the Mexican silver mines were cut off from the British by the Americana secession in 1776, the devaluation of silver, and the Chinese feeling that they had enough silver made this currency no longer effective. What else could the Chinese be induced to exchange for tea? It seemed appropriate to try a hard drug – opium – in exchange for a soft one, tea…

     So began the opium story with which I am sure you are very familiar. The three-way trade, opium from India to China, Chinese tea to Britain (and some silver as well starting to flow back), silver to India to pay for the opium. And the tragic sequel, the Chinese attempts to shut down the trade, the Opium War of 1839-42 and the huge reparations and treaty ports forced on China are well known. The destruction of the unchallengeable superiority of China was the start of the erosion of the Qin Empire. Tea and opium had together conspired to show its hollowness.

     The second disastrous effect was later in the century. The British were intent on obtaining the profits of tea for themselves. So they developed tea plantations in Assam and then Ceylon. By the 1880’s they had undercut the Chinese markets through the use of machinery and cheap transport. In 1897 in Amoy it was reported that 25 years earlier 65,800 piculs (some four million kg.) of tea were exported from this area alone. In 1897 only 12 piculs or 720 kg were exported. Four years later there was no tea being exported from Hankow (Wuhan). The great tea trade had totally collapsed. This sudden change was another source of that Chinese weakness which was the background to the tragedies of the twentieth century.

Other effects.

     I have spoken of two of tea’s great attractions – strength and health. But it has had a third feature which has had nearly as great an effect as these. This is related to the fact that tea is a very ceremonial drink.

     Most drinks are consumed very simply, poured into a cup or glass and then down the throat. With tea there is an art in the infusing of the leaves which the host or hostess can perform and there is a period in the brewing and pouring which is long enough for an elaboration of ceremonial.

     So around the consumption of tea has grown some of the most elaborate of social ceremonials which humans perform. These are the famous Chinese and Japanese tea ceremonies and the English afternoon tea party. The effects of the elaborate preparing and giving of hospitality have been widespread. Tea consumption and Buddhism were closely linked in China and Japan and tea and the non-conformist Christian sects like Methodism in Britain were centred round tea.

     Furthermore, the particular artefacts associated with tea became very important. The massively important developments in ceramics in China and Japan, pottery and porcelain, as well as the later developments in England with Wedgwood and others in the eighteenth century, were inspired by making beautiful tea-ware. Tea also influenced architecture through the simplicity of the tea house and its influence spread out into Japanese and Chinese painting and aesthetics generally.

     It would not be difficult to find other effects. The change in British mealtimes and their nature, in which the British gave up their heavy meat breakfasts for a lighter tea and bread breakfast and pushed back their evening meal, was a result of tea.

     The change in gender relations encouraged by the fact that ladies could now preside over a meal – tea – and go out or invite friends in for a non-alcoholic entertainment, is a very notable feature of eighteenth century Britain.

     It has even been suggested that the generally quiet, law-abiding and peaceful nature of Chinese and Japanese civilization, and of the British from the middle of the eighteenth century, is related to this soothing and calming drink.

Some concluding thoughts.

     In sum it would be difficult to imagine Chinese, Japanese or British civilization without tea. Later the same came to be true of India, which became a great tea-drinking nation from the 1920’s. Drunk by these nations and Empires, and by the British imperial territories (the Australians are the greatest tea drinkers in the world outside Tibet and East Asia), it is not difficult to see how tea has become (in terms of volume) the most consumed substance on earth, apart from air and water.

     That two thirds of the people on this planet take almost all of their liquid intake flavoured by a leaf containing over 500 chemicals, most of which we do not yet understand, has changed history.

     One way is to think of humans as domesticating and spreading the miraculous camellia sinensis to most parts of the globe. But we can invert this and see the tea bush as using the blind selective strategy which has stood it in such good stead and thereby creating a vast empire of tea.

     The tea bush attracts mammals to eat (or drink) it by containing the instantly rewarding caffeine. Humans, like monkeys before them, have fallen for this attraction. Furthermore the tea camellia evolved in the most competitive zone on earth, where the micro-variations in climate amidst the wet, warm, slopes of the Eastern Himalayas encouraged intense competition, not only with other plants, but with the viruses, bacteria and rusts that proliferated. So in its leaves tea contains many medicines to protect it against viruses and bacteria.

     These medicines have made it one of the few plants on earth, for example, which is not attacked by the deadly mosaic viruses and by many species of bacteria. It includes chemicals, including flavinoids and enzymes, which are now revealed to be effective against strokes, heart attacks, many cancers, eye disease, tooth decay, the stone, arthritis, scurvy and many other diseases.

     It may even be that the early evolution of the health-giving properties of the tea leaf conferred a selective advantage on the animals, including humans, who drank tea. So this made tea-drinkers more successful and they carried the plant with them. Certainly, at a larger level, the tea-drinking nations were healthy and like the Chinese, Japanese and British were very successful. To take one minor example, it seems likely that the British would have lost the first world war without the tea which sustained them in the trenches.

     The real problem came when two tea-drinking nations confronted each other, the Mongols and the Chinese or the British and the Japanese. Of necessity, one would be defeated after a bitter struggle.

     Once one starts to think about it in a systematic way, the influence of tea on world history seems very evident. Yet for the most part its importance and nature has remained almost totally ignored not only by historians but by most of those who drink it. Confucius is alleged to have said that ‘It would hardly be a bird that discovered air, or a fish that discovered water’. To this we may add, ‘Or a tea-drinking nation that discovered the importance of tea’.

     As the son of a tea planter, I had never noticed tea until very recently, quite accidentally, I started to think about it in relation to other problems and as Sarah Harrison and I built a Japanese-style tea house in our back garden in England. Suddenly I realized that tea was one of the great accidents of history, more important than penicilin, quinine, perhaps even than rice or potatoes. I realized that we are all subjects of the ‘Empire of Tea’. We are all caught up in our craving for the green gold which lightens and cheers our lives. It is the largest Empire on earth, yet almost invisible.