I was curious as to what the actual answer for this is, so finally giving something back to the Dope community, I did the required googling.
According to this site, China was the world’s leading tea producer in 2010, with approx 1.4 million tons produced.
Meanwhile at close of play 2010, the commodity price of tea was about $3.50 per kilogram, according to this site.
Which works out as $4.9 billion.
(As a disclaimer, a couple sites listed the price of tea as being a tenth of this price. e.g. here. But overall the majority of sites are roughly in line with my figures).
You beat me to it. That price does seem a little high though, The average of the three auctions tracked by the World Bank was $2.90 a kilo in December last year.
Funny, I was just the other day [del]listening to the album[/del] perusing the study where Professor C. Wilson [del]covers that[/del] offers reinforcing evidence for that claim:
Yeah it seems to have peaked in 2010 and come down quite a bit since then.
But 2010 was the most recent year I could find tea production figures (the guy who walks round and counts all the teabags hasn’t finished the 2011 batch yet), so I was being consistent with that.
I thought I’d add to the debate by suggesting that the phrase is not referring to China, the country, but china as tableware.
In Hiberno-English, where I believe the phrase originated, ‘china’ is commonly used to mean ceramic cups, dishes and plates. Also, it would be very rare to drink tea (until recently) out of anything except a ceramic cup.
After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world, and has been traded since the 15th century.
If we take this meaning, then the phrase is referring to all tea, as a valuable commodity, not just that tea which originated in China, the country.
