Reading Passage 1: The History of Tea
After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink on the planet, enjoyed every day by billions of people from busy city offices to remote mountain villages. Yet for most of its long history it was a local product, known only in a small region of what is now south-western China and the neighbouring hill country. The plant itself is an evergreen shrub that thrives on misty hillsides with plenty of rainfall and acidic soil. Left alone, it can grow into a tree more than ten metres tall, but on plantations it is regularly cut back to around waist height so that pickers can easily reach the young leaves and buds at the top.
The earliest users seem to have valued tea as a medicine rather than as a pleasure. Leaves were chewed raw or boiled together with other ingredients such as ginger, onion and salt, producing something closer to a soup than to the clear drink familiar today. Written sources from roughly two thousand years ago mention tea as a remedy for tiredness and poor digestion, and archaeologists have found traces of leaves in tombs, where they appear to have been placed alongside food, tools and other goods intended for the dead.
Tea became an everyday drink across much of China during the Tang dynasty, between the seventh and tenth centuries. At that time, freshly picked leaves were steamed, pounded and pressed into hard cakes, which were easy to store and to move over long distances. To make a drink, a piece was broken off the cake, roasted over a fire, ground into a fine powder and then stirred into boiling water. In the eighth century a scholar produced the first book devoted entirely to tea, describing in remarkable detail how the plant should be grown, which water gave the best flavour, and even which kind of bowl displayed the colour of the liquid to the greatest advantage. Many historians believe that this book did more than anything else to turn the preparation of tea into an art.
Methods changed again in the centuries that followed. Under the Song dynasty, powdered tea whisked into a pale green froth became fashionable among the educated classes, and it was this style that travelling Buddhist monks carried to Japan, where it eventually developed into the formal ceremony that is still practised there. In China itself, however, powdered tea gradually went out of fashion. By the fourteenth century, whole leaves steeped in a pot had become the usual way of drinking it, partly because the imperial government stopped demanding compressed cakes as a form of tax, since they were slow and expensive to produce. This simpler method is the ancestor of most tea-drinking around the world today.
Tea did not only travel by sea. For centuries, traders carried bricks of compressed tea on the backs of mules and human porters along narrow mountain paths to Tibet, where the drink was mixed with butter and salt and became an essential part of the diet in a region where few vegetables could be grown. In return, Chinese officials obtained strong mountain horses for their army. Further north, camel caravans took tea across the grasslands of Mongolia towards Russia, a journey that could take well over a year to complete. Along these routes, tea bricks were so highly valued that in some places they were accepted in payment for goods, much like coins.
Europe came to tea relatively late. Portuguese and Dutch merchants brought the first small shipments in the early seventeenth century, and for several decades the leaves were an expensive luxury, sold by chemists as a tonic that was claimed to cure a variety of illnesses. In Britain, tea was at first taxed so heavily that smuggling became a large and well-organised business; according to some estimates, more tea entered the country illegally than legally during parts of the eighteenth century. When the tax was cut sharply in the 1780s, prices fell, smuggling almost disappeared and tea rapidly became the national drink, consumed by rich and poor alike. Later, fast sailing ships were built to race each season's harvest back from China, since the first tea of the year to reach the market fetched the highest prices.
For a long time China was the only large-scale producer, and it guarded its knowledge of cultivation and processing carefully. In the nineteenth century, however, plantations were established in north-eastern India, at first using a variety of the plant that was already growing wild in the region, and later in Sri Lanka and parts of East Africa. Production on an industrial scale changed the character of the drink: the strong black teas grown on these estates were well suited to being taken with milk and sugar. In the twentieth century the tea bag made preparation quicker still. Today more than six million tonnes are produced every year, yet the basic process of picking a leaf, drying it and soaking it in hot water would still be recognisable to the very first people who drank it.
