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Serendipitea: A Guide To The Varieties, Origins, And Rituals Of Tea (stock image)

It’s a bit of a misnomer this time around – that title. As I was doing research for the last edition of this column I ran across several books that weren’t in the recent and upcoming category but that I didn’t recall encountering before. So, without any further ado, here are a few of these titles.

Aaron Fisher is probably better known for The Way of Tea, which I reviewed here last year. But in 2009 he also published Tea Wisdom: Inspirational Quotes and Quips About the World’s Most Celebrated Beverage. As the name suggests it’s a collection of all of those clever things about tea that you wish you’d said. Much like Fisher’s The Way of Tea, Solala Towler’s Cha Dao: The Way of Tea, Tea as a Way of Life, first published in 2010, also takes a more contemplative look at tea and tea culture than most volumes. See a review here.

It’s hardly recent, given that it was published about fifteen years ago, but Serendipitea: A Guide To The Varieties, Origins, And Rituals Of Tea is worth a look even so. Author Tomislav Podreka is the founder of his own tea company and in this volume he “elucidates the history and characteristics of teas around the world in this truly lovely little book,” among other things. Speaking of contemplative, you can’t get much more of said quality than in poetry and in The Hut Beneath the Pine: Tea Poems (2011), award-winning poet Daniel Skach-Mills devotes the entire volume – 32 poems worth – to sketching his thoughts about tea.

The Meaning of Tea: A Tea Inspired Journey, is a 2009 companion volume by Phil Cousineau and Scott Chamberlin Hoyt to the documentary film The Meaning of Tea. Which featured numerous intereviews with people from all segments of the tea world. For those who might be looking for a handbook-styled overview on the topic of tea there are many such works out there, including the Little Book of Tea (2001), by Kitti Cha Sangmanee.

Unless you only drink single-estate teas, there’s a good chance that much of the tea you’re drinking is blended from a number of varieties. If you’d like to take a crack at doing this yourself, you might find some value in Tea for You: Blending Custom Teas to Savor and Share (2009), by Tracy Stern. Last up, is Tea & Etiquette: Taking Tea for Business and Pleasure (2009), by Dorothea Johnson and Bruce Richardson. As the publisher’s description promises, it “is filled with advice that will guide you through planning your next social and business tea.” Pinkies up!

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Scots Magazine article “Chinese Method of Preparing the Different Sorts of Tea” (screen capture from site)

Have you ever found yourself wishing for an article that was translated from French into English and published in a Scottish magazine on the topic of how the Chinese prepare tea? Well, funny you should mention it. I’ve got just the thing for you.

The Scots Magazine got underway in 1739 and it still publishing to this day, though there have been a few lapses along the way. As of 1795, they were rather well-established and were known as The Scots Magazine; Or, General Repository of Literature, History, and Politics. It was in this year that the magazine published a translation of an article called Chinese Method of Preparing the Different Sorts of Tea.

The article was written by a French scientist, Alexis-Marie de Rochon, who was also known as Abbé Rochon. He kicks things off by describing the tea plant itself, which in China was being harvested three times a year in those days. The author claims that there are those who prefer Japanese tea to Chinese but doubts that there is any real difference.

Rochon goes on to devote a section to the three kinds of Bohea tea, a variety that he says takes its name from a mountain in “Fokien” province. He claims that this tea when steeped should impart to the water a yellow color, “inclining a little to green” and remarks that only old tea produces a red color in the cup. Which is actually a term (red tea) that the Chinese sometimes use to refer to what we call black tea.

Next it’s on to a section on green tea, which is “brought from the province of Nankin.” Some of the author’s notions about green tea seem bit peculiar by today’s standards. He points out that they “ought also to have a burnt or scorched smell, not too strong, but agreeable.” Then he goes on to note that the French like to find in their green teas “an odor similar to that of soap.” Which doesn’t sound all that appealing to me but as I’ve said more times than I can count now, we all like what we like.

If you’re interested in taking a look at this one you won’t have to invest too much time in reading it. Click here to access it.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Writers of yesteryear were hardly known for being economical when it came to their book titles and Alexander James Wallis-Tayler was no exception. His 1900 work, Tea Machinery, and Tea Factories: A Descriptive Treatise on the Mechanical Appliances Required in the Cultivation of the Tea Plant and the Preparation of Tea for the Market, might not have been the record holder for this sort of thing but it sure is a mouthful.

Tea Machinery, and Tea Factories: A Descriptive Treatise on the Mechanical Appliances Required in the Cultivation of the Tea Plant and the Preparation of Tea for the Market (Photo source: screen capture from site)

Clocking in at a mere 452 pages, the book itself is something of a whopper as well and while it might not tell us everything we’d want to know about tea machinery in this particular day and age I’d wager that it comes close. As for the author, judging from some of the other volumes in his bibliography, including works on sugar machinery, industrial refrigeration, and bearings and lubrication, it appears that his area of expertise was more in machinery than tea.

As the author notes early on, this is “the first work published in book form dealing specifically with the Machinery utilized in tea factories.” Or so he says. What you can’t really argue is that the notion of using machines in the production and processing of tea was still a relatively new idea at the time.

Things kick off with a chapter on devices used to cultivate the soil, which are probably not confined to the tea industry. Those in the next chapter, which deals with tea plucking machines, are. Then Wallis-Tayler moves to the processing of tea, with a chapter devoted to tea factories and eight more on the wide variety of machines used to carry out the many tasks performed therein.

All of this processing machinery is well and good and it’s a critical part of the process but it doesn’t amount to much if the tea never gets in the hands of those who are going to drink it. With that end in mind the next three chapters, one on packing machinery and two titled Means of Transport on Tea Plantations, are rather important as well. The rest of the book is devoted to miscellaneous and rather dry (Pitch of Cutter Teeth, etc.) technical material.

One of the high points for me, as in many of these books, are the illustrations. There are quite a few here and while the novelty might wear a bit thin after the two hundredth drawing of a machine it’s an interesting complement to the text, even so. Find a copy of it wherever free electronic books are “sold,” including here.

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If you want to get an idea of the history and customs of certain countries (especially India and China) during certain periods of time you could do a lot worse than to read some of the many books about tea that have been written over the years. I’ve reviewed many of these books in these very pages and as more keep turning up I can’t help but being amazed at their sheer numbers.

The latest such tome I’ve run across is one with the snappy title, On the Tea Cultivation in Western Ssŭch’uan: and, The Tea Trade With Tibet viâ Tachienlu. It was written by one A. De Rosthorn and published in 1895. Like several of the works I’ve run across lately it’s a brief one and probably doesn’t even merit being described as a book. But it’s an interesting look at tea production and trade in Tibet and the western part of China known as Sichuan, one that many of us here in the West may know better as Szechuan.

On the Tea Cultivation in Western Ssŭch’uan: and, The Tea Trade With Tibet viâ Tachienlu (Photo source: screen capture from site)

From his introduction, in which he presents the spectacle of “endless caravans of yacks, laden with the elongated package called ‘bricks’, trundling along over roads which defy description”, Rosthorn moves on to a General and Historical section. He notes that tea was grown “extensively” in the province and with equal success in “the North, South, East, and West”, but points out that it wasn’t of particularly high quality and not much it was exported, except to Tibet.

The author also takes a look at the size of the tea market and trade in the region, probably in more detail than a lot of modern-day readers will want to know about. Next up is a section on Administration and Revenue, which delves even more deeply into this sort of thing. While one tends to skim over the drier bits of these sections, there are plenty of interesting tidbits to liven things up, including the revelation that the region had an official known as the Tea and Salt Commissioner (which sounds like great work if you can get it).

From there it’s on to sections on Production, Manufacture, Transport and Sale and then things wrap up a mere forty pages later with a Summary and a Conclusion. Read this bite-sized gem for free in all the usual places, including this one.

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It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure.

We know it best as the slogan for the United States Navy. But it probably could have worked just as well about a century and a half ago for those hardy Britishers who left their homeland and made their way to India to become tea planters. One of the themes that frequently crops up in books that chronicle this lifestyle is how difficult it could be.

Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah (Photo source: screen capture from site)

The latest such volume that came my way was Tea Planting in the Outer Himalayah, by Alexander Thorburn McGowan. It’s an 1861 work that the author describes as “a brief sketch of a tea plantation in the Himalayahs.” No false advertising there, since, at just under 75 pages, this one is actually quite brief by the standards of these older works about tea.

An assistant surgeon with the British military, McGowan wrote the book on a number of visits to Indian tea plantations that took place while he was on leave. Just getting to one of these locations was something of an adventure and the author’s descriptions of the heavily laden camel and mule trains and gangs of servants needed to make it all go smoothly are as well suited to a travelogue as to a book about tea.

Unlike some of the previous accounts I’ve discussed in these pages, McGowan’s book obviously tackles the subject from the perspective of an outsider, as opposed to those books which were actually written by tea planters or others in the industry. But it’s an interesting variation on the topic, nonetheless, and a work that combines equal parts of tea history, sociology and the aforementioned travelogue type observations.

Like all of the old tea books that I discourse upon here, this one is available in a free electronic edition from a number of sources. As an interesting aside, the volume I used was scanned from a copy held by the University of California Library. If you need any proof that obscure tea-related works from yesteryear don’t exactly fly off the shelves, consider the circulation card in the back of the book that shows that it was only checked out three times, twice in the Forties and again in 1977.

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I have to confess that my Latin is a little rusty (as in almost non-existent), but through the miracle of the Internet I was able to determine that Defensio Non Provocatio roughly translates to “Defense No Recourse.” Or perhaps that online translator gadget is dead wrong and it doesn’t actually. Another source I found suggests that it means “Defence not Provocation,” so take your pick.

A History of the Sale and Use of Tea in England (Photo source: screen capture from site)

In any event, I don’t suppose it’s critical that we know the meaning of the phrase, which is part of the title of an 1870 work on tea called Defensio Non Provocatio: A History of the Sale and Use of Tea in England. To call this one a book would be stretching a point, given that it’s only about sixteen pages. Authorship of the work is credited to the Licensed Victuallers’ Tea Association.

While it’s obvious that you can’t provide too thorough of a history of English tea culture and consumption in such a short space, the authors give it the old college try. They take a few pages to speculate on the origins of tea in China and it’s later use in such countries as Japan and Russia and then Europe. They quote one source that suggests that a pair of English Lords were the first to bring it to their own country, importing a small quantity from Holland in 1666, but proceed to mention a number of advertisements for tea from the decade prior to that date.

On the topic of which of these origin stories are the real one, the authors don’t seem completely clear. But they are apparently a little more certain that tea was initially sold in England in taverns and coffee houses, with grocers being slow to catch on to its potential as an item of commerce. The next eight pages or so are devoted to a rather dry recitation, with plenty of facts and figures (and the occasional snippet of verse), that details how tea gradually acquired a firm foothold in England over the course of the next two centuries. In retrospect we know, of course, that tea eventually became so popular in England that it was as much a national symbol as a beverage.

All of which is pretty worthwhile stuff from a historical perspective. But I’ll give my standard disclaimer and point out that for contemporary readers this probably won’t make for the most riveting reading. Be that as it may, you can check out a free electronic edition of the work online.

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When setting out to pen a book on tea, writers of previous centuries didn’t really concern themselves much with coming up with a snappy title. I’ve written about a number of such tomes in the past here and the subject of this article is hardly no exception. Then again, perhaps a title like The Past and Present State of The Tea Trade of England, and of the Continents of Europe and America: and a Comparison Between the Consumption, Price of, and Revenue Derived From, Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Wine, Tobacco, Spirits was considered to be rather snappy back in the day.

“The Past and Present State of the Tea Trade of England,” by Robert Montgomery Martin (Photo source: screen capture from site)

In any event, the book was written in 1832, by one Robert Montgomery Martin, who apparently wrote a number of other books on commerce, history and whatnot. If you guessed that this one is not a real gripping read, you’re right. That’s the case with many of these dusty old electronic tomes, but they do provide valuable and occasionally interesting insights into tea history.

After kicking things off with an introduction that seems to be as much about politics as tea, Martin moves on and gets underway with the book. The first chapter, Rise and Progress of the Tea Trade, obviously considers the historical context of that trade, mostly in Europe and the United States. Chapter two takes a look at the consumption of tea in Europe, America and England (which, the way I learned it in school, is actually part of Europe). He also considers the “erroneous opinion” that tea is capable of supporting life (oh, darn).

As the title of the book indicates, some of what follows takes a look at other such substances as coffee, sugar, wine and more in chapters that can be a bit dry. But there are several more interesting chapters that take a closer look at the tea business in China, mostly with regard to the East India Company, the big player in the industry in Martin’s day. Needless to say most of the trade discussed herein is with China, since in 1832 the British were still in the very earliest stages of preparing what would eventually become a booming tea industry in India.

Not a beach read, but worth a look for fans of tea history. For a free electronic edition, look here.

© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.