A History of the World in Six Glasses

By the end of the 18th century, Britain had become the most powerful nation on the planet. The British Empire covered a huge amount of territory in such places as New Zealand, Canada, India, and Australia. Tea, Standage argues, linked all these areas together.

Tea was invented in China, supposedly by the Emperor Shen Nung. The Emperor considered tea a medicinal brew, capable of waking people and curing them of depression. Tea is an infusion of dried leaves and flowers from the bush Camellia sinensis, which is native to the Himalayas. It’s believed that this plant was first widely popularized in China by Buddhist monks in the 6th century BCE. Likewise Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, considered tea an important part of a balanced life. His example, along with that of Shen Nung and the Buddhists, may have helped to make tea China’s defining drink.

Like many other drinks, tea was used as a form of currency in China: it was popular and commonly consumed to the point where anybody would accept it as a valuable thing. Tea became so popular during the Tang Dynasty that it was heavily taxed. In spite of taxes, tea remained popular in the succeeding Sung Dynasty, which lasted until the 13th century.

Tea drinking was also popular in Japan. Japanese tea drinking ceremonies were complex, almost mystical rituals that took many hours to complete. The tea had to be ground perfectly, boiled at the right temperature, and stirred the proper number of times. The culture of tea drinking in Japan became so complicated that tea-masters had to educate the young in the subtleties of the beverage.

Tea reached Europe in the 16th century, when European sailors first arrived in China, then the most populous nation on the planet. Europeans were dazzled by Chinese sophistication and power: the Chinese had invented gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. Indeed, Chinese sophistication exceeded Europe’s in almost every way. Nevertheless, Europe struck up a productive trading system with China—Europeans brought tea, along with rice and silk, back to their homes from China. Tea wasn’t popular in Europe in the 17th century because it was expensive. Still, many doctors recommended it for its medicinal properties.

For various reasons, Britain became the nation most heavily associated with tea. The British began their world-famous love for tea in the 1660s, when King Charles II celebrated his marriage to Catherine of Portugal by serving tea—then a highly exotic beverage—at his wedding. Court poets wrote volumes about the merits of tea. Later on, the British East India Company, a large corporation backed by royal authority, began trading in tea with Holland. Gradually, tea shifted from an elite beverage to an everyday one—by the 1700s, commoners drank tea almost every day.

In the 1730s, England became filled with tea gardens—public spaces where women and men could drink tea together. The tea garden was popular with women in part because it provided a gender-equitable alternative to the coffeehouse. Tea consumption trickled down through English society, to the point where, by the late 18th century, all foreigners visiting England were struck by the country’s love for the drink.