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By Root 193 0

outskirts of the city, planted there to serve the emperor’s court as well as the capital’s magnificent Buddhist temples. The Japanese made their teas according to the fashion in China during the Song and Ming dynasties, when tea first made its way from China to Japan. The leaves were ground into a powder, whipped to a foamy froth in individual serving bowls, and passed around in an elaborate, formalized ritual that has come to be known as “the Japanese tea ceremony,” first codified by Sen Rikyu in the late sixteenth century. Rikyu used the ritualized presentation of tea as a lesson in wabi-sabi, the observation and appreciation of everyday objects. For centuries, Matcha served according to these rituals was consumed mostly by royalty, then the warrior class of samurai, who adopted the contemplative philosophy aligned with the tea ceremony called Chado: “the Way of Tea.” For the samurai, serving tea with full awareness provided physical and spiritual fulfillment, to both the giver and the receiver. Though the feudal government has long since fallen away, as a reflection of that smaller island’s remarkable cultural stability, the nation continues to steam-fix its teas, many Japanese still drink powdered Matcha tea, and some still practice the tea ceremony.

Meanwhile, the far more turbulent nation of China established its own tradition of tea-making innovation. Tea became a truly national drink there in or around the third to fifth centuries AD, when it finally lost its bitterness. Tea makers realized that steaming the leaves after harvesting made the tea much more palatable—and popular. Tea soon commanded the attention of emperors, who began demanding the best teas as tribute teas. Having a tea selected as a tribute tea guaranteed tea makers a fortune. Competition for the emperor’s attention proved a great incentive for the invention of new teas, a tradition of innovation that has lasted hundreds of years. As tea makers competed for imperial attention, white tea first emerged in the Song dynasty (960-1279); loose tea during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644); black tea and then oolongs in the early part of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Today, China still boasts the greatest variety of tea plant cultivars. The country’s Tea Research Institute lists 650—almost twice as many teas as the number of cheeses in France. By comparison, 90 percent of Japanese tea farms grow one cultivar called yabukita. And while the Japanese still steam their teas, as the Chinese did 1,200 years ago, Chinese tea makers have long since abandoned steam for hot air, woks, and wood fires.

Tea did not arrive in the Western world until the seventeenth century. As the first and second Europeans to make landfall in South Asia, the Portuguese and later the Dutch brought back the first teas to Europe. Tea became popular among the British aristocracy in the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the drink became indispensable to the British economy. Amid that century’s industrialization, poor members of the working class used tea and milk as a cheap vehicle for that other recent colonial import, sugar. Tea became yet more popular in the later part of the nineteenth century when the British temperance movement promoted it as a substitute for alcohol. Some conspiracy theorists posit that the temperance movement was a creation of the East India Company, the largest corporation in history and for many decades holder of the monopoly on Great Britain’s tea export business.

The East India Company’s work in China, to the Eastern country’s detriment, proved far from peaceable. With the benefit of hindsight, some of its actions seem downright despicable. Nonetheless, the rough turn of events ultimately proved beneficial to the world of tea: The East India Company’s voracious need for the dried leaves led to an explosion in the number of varieties available to us today.

In the early 1800s, as Japan had closed its doors to international trade, China was the world’s only source for tea. Thus, “all the tea in China” meant all the tea in the world.