The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [59]
By the mid-nineteenth century, the British were drinking more tea than they could pay the Chinese for. As part of a larger series of events, Great Britain sent industrial espionage agents who literally stole tea plants—as many as a few hundred—to see if they could be grown in their new colony of India. After much trial and error, by the end of the nineteenth century they had established immense plantations in the Indian substates of Darjeeling and Assam as well as the small island of Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka). Those same envoys who stole the plants also snuck into Chinese tea-making regions to observe their ancient methods of growing, harvesting, and shaping small batches of tea entirely by hand. The first British tea planters adopted these Chinese techniques but found they took too much time, labor, and money. So the British tea men, proud products of the Industrial Revolution, created more efficient, entirely mechanical ways to make teas, essentially inventing a new class of brew. These machine-harvested, machine-processed black teas appeared in heretofore unseen quantities, darker and brisker than any teas before them. They are discussed in “British Legacy Black Teas,” page 121.
These new plantations proved such a success that by 1906, the British were buying from China only 5 percent of the tea they had bought thirty years before. All the tea in China was now, for the most part, stuck in China. In no small part because of this catastrophic collapse in trade, by 1927 the once flourishing state of China had collapsed into civil war, with a new Communist regime emerging as the victor. The Communists initially proved disastrous for China’s teas, placing thousands of small farms under largely inept state management and then isolating the entire country under an international trade embargo after the Korean War. In retrospect, the world of tea in fact benefited from these years of isolation. China’s ancient tea-making traditions survived intact, when they might otherwise have been sacrificed to modernization. Western plantation methods did a fine job making certain basic styles of black tea, but they would have ruined the refined ancient teas of China.
China’s traditional methods were preserved as well on the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), a hundred miles across the straits from Fujian province, to which some tea growers immigrated in the mid-1800s to establish a flourishing tea industry. Today, Taiwan produces some extraordinary teas, discussed in the chapter on oolongs, page 75.
It is remarkable how long some things endure. Popular myth still holds that the world gets its teas from India and China by way of Great Britain. I frequently get asked if Harney & Sons is a British company, as if that were proof of our quality. The truth is when British tea companies were evicted from India and Sri Lanka after World War II, the British brought tea to their colonies in Africa, primarily Kenya. Today, tea is grown in over thirty-five countries, including Indonesia, Turkey, and South Africa. Over 40 percent of the tea drunk in Great Britain comes from Kenya, while about 40 percent of the tea drunk in the United States is grown in Argentina. Most of those teas are destined for teabags (if not instant iced tea powder) and are not very good. The best teas available today—and with one Kenyan exception, all the teas in this book—come from Asia: China, Japan, and Taiwan, as well as what we now call the British Legacy Teas from the former colonies of India and Sri Lanka.
APPENDIX
Tea Sources
As interest in tea grows, more and more tea importers and tea shops have emerged. Here are the suppliers