Why did tea become so popular? I enjoy the occasional drink myself but its not like I’d kill people for it.
I just heard a bit about the India Trading Company. At one point, this mega corporation commanded a private army of 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the standing British army at the time. Demand for tea was so powerful that it fueled the creation of a British-centered world market, and its taxation accounted for one-tenth of the Crown’s revenue. It also (in a convoluted way) led to the lopsided British victory in the first Opium War and inaugurated what is known today in China as the ‘century of humiliation’.
But why? I get that it might taste a bit better than plain water but they already had coffee so it couldn’t have been the comparatively light caffeine buzz. And I thought back in the day water was so bad that most people (even children?) drank beer. It couldn’t have tasted better or been more enjoyable than beer, could it?
I mean, reading about it’s widespread and sweeping popularity you would think they equated it to crack? So how and why did tea become such an obsession?
In Asia, it was reputed to promote good health (probably because you had to boil the water to make it). It became popular among the aristocrats.
It the 17th and 18th Centuries, European aristocrats had a fad for chinoiserie. They were fascinated with Asian culture (or at least the pop-culture stereotypes of Asian culture). Asian aristocrats drank tea, so European aristocrats wanted to try it. Once they acquired the habit, It became a lucrative trade good.
Tea was also more easily sold to the working class because preparation was little more than boiling water and steeping. Coffee beans were, until the mid19th century, roasted at home by the consumer, usually considered “women’s labour.” And it is easy enough to burn a batch of roasting beans. And beans could take on a smoky taste that W,as unpleasant. The beans then had to be ground and prepared. So it was more work than brewing up a nice cuppa and required a little more equipment and time, compared to tea. That made a difference when you got very limited breaks at work.
And the coffee you drink today is probably very different than the coffee of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. It would have been an acquired taste, while tea was already popular…and heavily supported by the government and tea companies. Some scholars have suggested coffee didn’t make its big “breakthrough” until the US Civil War, when it was part of the daily ration of Union soldiers, who had it several times a day. Armies have long been interested in psycho-active drugs!
Maybe it tasted better than the alternatives. It’s good for settling the stomach and it can have a general calming effect. Some of it has a little caffeine to pep you up. Boiling can may make the safer to drink than the same water unboiled.
Also, they didn’t have microwaves to boil water back then so they wouldn’t accidently turn tea into a horrid tasting and toxic substance if made from water boiled in the microwave as some tea drinking friends attempted to explain to me.
Also, it’s not the case that people drank beer because the water was polluted. Medieval villages and towns were built around clean water supplies and later, cities piped in clean water. Unless you brewed your own, you had to buy beer, and it was often taxed, so it would be expensive to hydrate properly with it. It was also pretty weak, and was more of a source of calories than intoxication.
Personally, I like the lower but still positive caffeine content of tea.
There’s a lot of regional variation in tea v coffee drinking. Map:
US and Scandinavia are coffee-centric. Latin America likes coffee, except Bolivia and Chile which have a weak preference for tea. Asia and the former USSR likes tea. Worldwide 3 cups of tea are drunk for every cup of coffee.
Note that most cultures had some sort of hot caffeinated drink; the choice was due to local conditions. Coffee and tea are most popular, but there was also chocolate and yerba mate in the Western Hemisphere (though tea and coffee have overwhelmed them).
Ha!
Curious, though, how do you drink it? Sweetened or just steeped alone. Because, sure, if I’m hot and swing into the local 7-11 and grab an ice cold Arizona Sweet Tea yeah, that’s going to taste good (I know, I know) compared to water but I don’t see the Civil War soldiers whipping up something like that.
As I understand it, in the beginning the most popular method of preparing tea involved grinding green tea leaves into a fine powder using a stone mill and mixing that with water. I admit I haven’t had Matcha but it doesn’t sound like something that would take over the world.
Tea was the drink of the upper classes in Britain, who threw huge amounts of money into creating a tea culture with gorgeous teapots and tea servings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a tea exhibit a couple of years ago
(If you can find a Tea Time magazine in a library, take a peak. The tea subculture in America is gigantic. It rivals most comic fandoms in intensity and spread.)
Although the Brits might hate my saying it, tea also became a way to introduce sugar into every meal, and between meals. Sugar is an addictive taste. Tea was a way of adding small bits of sugar regularly and acceptably without having to make batches of biscuits or cakes.
I find it unlikely that tea became popular among people who didn’t have reasonably clean water to drink. If there’s anything to the beer thing it probably grew from an exclamation at some wayside inn - “I’d rather drink the beer in this place than the filthy water they have here”.
I like wearing T shirts. I wouldn’t force a child to work 16 hours a day in a hot factory to make me one. That’d be insane.
It doesn’t take too much abstraction for me to be tacitly ok with all of that though.
Lots of people casually enjoying something can be profitable, and profitability can lead to horrific things. But we’re pretty good at ignoring unpleasant thoughts.
