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Nowadays India takes a back seat in tea production to the nation where the whole tea thing got its start – China. But India can take solace in knowing that the Assam region, in the northeast area of the country, is the single largest growing region in the whole world.
Tea: A Text Book Of Tea Planting And Manufacture
The British started growing tea in Assam as a reaction to China’s near total domination of the tea trade in days of yore. Tea production began getting underway in Assam in the 1830s and grew quite rapidly over the next half century or so. By the time David Crole wrote his Tea: a Text Book of Tea Planting and Manufacture, in 1897, tea production there was quite well established. Read the free online edition of the book here.
There’s not much info available on Crole nowadays, apart from his book. Early on, he notes that his expertise in the tea trade came from his work in Assam. He also mentions an affiliation with the Jokai Tea Company, which doesn’t appear to have survived to this day. Before leaving Assam to move back to England Crole also spent time in other tea growing regions in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he added to his fund of tea knowledge.
As the title suggests, Crole’s book is a very practical one. He opens with a chapter that looks at the tea plant, which he refers to as “the great rival of alcohol.” Along with the nuts and bolts information in this chapter are some thoughts on how to properly prepare a cup of tea (fresh, cold water – only Indian or Ceylon tea, etc.).
From here it’s on to two chapters on the history of tea. Crole refers to these as the two most difficult chapters in the book to write, because it was so hard to arrive at “actual facts.” Crole claims that tea was originally from Assam and later imported into China. While he deals with the latter country, a good chunk of this chapter is devoted to tea history in India and Assam. Chapter three finds Crole tackling tea history in Ceylon and a few other miscellaneous tea growing nations.
From here on out it’s pretty much nuts and bolts stuff all the way, with various chapters devoted to different aspects of tea production and processing. One chapter that’s somewhat out of the ordinary for this type of historical text bears the not so terribly politically correct title The Coolie: His Ways and His Worth. It’s a not so enlightened look at labor practices of the day which might raise a few eyebrows with modern readers.
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When it comes to tea books of yesteryear, it seems that China and India get much of the attention. That’s based on my own decidedly casual and unscientific observations, and it’s not really surprising, given that they’ve been the world’s top producers for a long time. But it also led me to the tentative conclusion that old tea books about Japan are fairly few and far between.
Japanese Tea Ceremony
Of course, the best known of such books is Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea, an influential work that has been in print continuously for more than a century. The Preparation of Japan Tea, by Henry Gribble, is decidedly more obscure, but this 1883 publication provides some interesting insight into perceptions of Japanese tea in this particular day and age.
It’s actually something of a stretch to call Gribble’s work a book, since the actual text is rather brief (but informative). Gribble makes up for this by including a fairly extensive selection of interesting illustrations to help round things out.
Early commentators on tea tended to either love it or loathe it, and Gribble counts himself among the former group. He addresses this issue early on, giving an overview of some early attitudes toward tea and remarking, “it is amusing to record the imagined danger felt by our forefathers for the beverage which cheers us all, for the innocent drink which gives occasion for an afternoon gossip, for the refreshing cup which renews the energies of a midnight student.”
In the very next sentence Gribble goes on to give an indication of the size of the tea industry in Japan, noting that it was supplying 35 million pounds of tea a year to the United States alone. He goes on to sketch a brief history of tea in Japan, from its supposed introduction from China in the ninth century to its increase in popularity a few centuries later and up to the present day. Interestingly, Gribble notes that early on, much as was the case in many European countries, tea was an expensive luxury that was accessible only to the wealthiest members of society.
From there it’s on to a discussion of more practical matters, such as the botany, chemistry, cultivation and processing of tea, among other things. Gribble pays particular attention to the last of these before moving on to some remarks on Japanese black tea from a Mr. James Green and then on to his concluding remarks. There’s more on the Japanese tea trade in the appendix and then sections on the chemical composition and artificial coloring of tea by another guest commentator, Edward Divers, and then it’s on to the illustrations.
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Like this:
Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral (1839) by Sigmond, George Gabriel
I wasn’t able to turn up much background information on George Gabriel Sigmond, author of Tea; Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral. There are a few other books of his floating around in the great digital cloud, one about drama and another about medicine. In this book he’s identified as “Professor of Materia Medica to the Royal Medico-Botanical Society [of Londteon].” The book, which first saw the light of publication in 1839, was apparently based on a lecture Sigmond gave to that society to recognize the discovery of “the Tea Plant” in British-controlled India.
Commentators of yesteryear tended to be of mixed opinions about tea, with some reviling it as something close to a lethal poison and others praising it as perhaps the greatest thing to happen to humankind since the wheel, the lever and agriculture. Sigmond kicks things off in fine form, with ringing praise for tea that includes such unambiguous statements as “our national importance has been intimately connected with it, and that much of our present greatness, and even the happiness of our social system, springs from this unsuspected source.” And so the author goes, in a somewhat verbose style that rarely settles for one word when fifty would do.
The author praises tea, among other things, for being a viable substitute for alcoholic beverages, though his opinions on this sort of thing are perhaps a bit more moderate than many of the temperance advocates of yesteryear. Also offered, a great deal of background on the history of the plant, focusing mainly on China, and a thorough discussion about the botany and cultivation of tea, as well the methods for processing it to make a drinkable beverage. From here it’s on to the topics promised in the title and Sigmond takes a quite extensive look at the so-called medicinal and moral effects of tea on human beings.
While it appears to contain a good bit of information about tea as it was known in Sigmond’s day, there are a few significant drawbacks to his book. The author’s wordy style is not unusual for writers of his day, but a much more problematic issue is the fact that the book is presented as one large block of text, devoid of breaks, chapters, table of contents or index. Which makes for tough going for anyone not wanting to work their way through the entire text to find out what the author thinks about a specific topic, but there’s plenty of interesting information here even so.
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Like this:
The Way of Tea: Reflections on a Life with Tea
In the course of several years spent writing about tea at this site, at my own site, and various others, I’ve read and reviewed quite a few tea books and have encountered a lot of other titles in passing. On the whole they seem to fall into a few main categories. There are the broad overviews about tea, which attempt to summarize the whole story of the beverage and culture in one handy volume. It’s a feat that some authors have managed to pull off quite nicely. There are also those books that are more geared to delivering recipes, whether for tea-based drinks or dishes made with tea as an ingredient.
Another main category consists of those less numerous volumes that deal with the spiritual (for lack of a better term) aspects of tea drinking and tea culture. One of the earliest of these, dating from more than a century ago, is Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea. Another volume with a decidedly Asian bent is The Chinese Art of Tea, which was published in 1985, by the prominent Asian scholar John Blofeld.
More recently, in 2011, we’ve seen the release of an interesting work by Asian scholar Daniel Reid, who wrote The Art and Alchemy of Chinese Tea. It follows hot on the heels of The Way of Tea, by Aaron Fisher, which was published the year before. While the title of the latter volume does not indicate any particular slant toward Asian tea culture, it does approach its subject matter from that direction, as do the other books mentioned here.
Like Blofeld and Reid, who were both noted for their writings on the Asian tradition of Taoism, Fisher also takes a look at the links between this particular way of life and tea. In his opening chapter, The Tao of Tea, he notes, “drinking tea with Tao is about letting go all our ‘stuff’ and just being ourselves as we really are, in our true nature.”
You’re not going to find a whole lot of information here on tea history and the more nuts and bolts type of information that other authors of tea books focus on. Which is not surprising, given that the sub-title of Fisher’s work is “Reflections on a Life With Tea.” It’s a relatively brief book overall, combining an introduction with twelve short chapters of the author’s thoughts on the more esoteric aspects of tea. The other chapters in Fisher’s book, Calm Joy, Quietude, Presence, Clarity, and Completion, are indicative of the approach he takes toward tea and tea culture.
If you’re looking for a tea-related thought worth remembering, then try this one, which the author offers near the end of this volume, “there is so much that just cannot be said, though it can be shared in a cup of tea.”
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Once upon a time, you could safely say that the art of tea and the Chinese art of tea were the same thing, given that the Chinese are credited with being the first people to drink our beloved beverage. But even though tea drinking eventually spread to other countries it’s worth noting that the Chinese culture of tea drinking is still a strong one. There’s also the fact that the Chinese are the world’s top producers of the stuff, including a number of varieties that are considered by many to be among the best available.
The Chinese Art of Tea
Over the course of the last decade or so the Western world has seen a considerable rise in interest in tea and tea culture, be it Chinese or otherwise. But this was not the case in 1985, when lackluster tea bags still ruled the roost in many parts of the West and the notion of drinking tea that was actually recognizably Chinese would have been considered very exotic.
It was in this landscape that John Blofeld published his pioneering book, The Chinese Art of Tea. A scholar who lived in and traveled extensively throughout Asia, Blofeld published a number of books on Buddhism, Taoism and other aspects of Asian religion and culture, with this particular volume the last of his works to be published in his lifetime.
It’s a work that would have been considered impressive even today, when tea scholarship is arguably a more common thing, but in Blofeld’s day it was quite a striking accomplishment. He starts off with a chapter on Tea in History and Legend and then explores such classic works as The Emperor Hui Tsung’s Treatise on Tea and A Ming Dynasty Tea Manual. There are chapters devoted to tea gardens and teahouses and also the relationship between tea and ceramics.
On the more spiritual side of things are chapters devoted to Poems and Songs of Tea, A Manual for Practising the Artless Art, and Tea and the Tao. Blofeld winds up things with a chapter devoted to tea’s potential health benefits, a chapter that predates much of the flood of interest in tea and health that we’ve been deluged with over the last decade or so.
Blofeld’s book was an important pioneering work on tea and tea culture in China, but it’s interesting to note that it was hardly the last such work. In 1990, authors Kit Chow and Ione Kramer released the appropriately titled All the Tea in China. More recently, in 2011, Daniel Reid, another noted scholar of all things Asian, released a volume titled The Art and Alchemy of Chinese Tea. For more on that work, look here.
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Are there more poems devoted to the joys of tea than to its cousin in the hot beverage field, coffee? I haven’t done the research and thus concede that I might be wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that there are. There’s just something about tea that inspires devotion and praise in a way that few other beverages can match.
Nahum Tate: Great hair style!
Take Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea in Two Canto’s. It’s a work that was published all the way back in 1700 by one Nehum Tate (1652-1715). Tate had just been appointed the poet laureate of England in 1692 and ended up holding that spot for more than two decades. One of the earliest of arguably one of the most substantial paeans to Camellia sinensis, Tate’s poem is readily available these days in various electronic editions, thanks to the miracle of the Internet age.
One slight downside to reading this hymn to tea is that most of the editions that are available (or at least the ones I found) tend to be laid out in an odd manner. Add to this the fact that the English language was quite a different creature 300 years ago and the challenges are compounded a bit.
But if you’re brave enough to forge on ahead you’ll find the praises of tea put forth in a lofty manner eminently suited to the poet laureates of this age. As the poet notes, early on, of a group of tea drinkers who have recently imbibed:
With silertt Wonder mutually they Trace
Bright Joys reflected on each other’s Face.
Then thus the Bard—Fear no Circæan Bowls,
This is the Drink of Health, the Drink of Souls!
Later in the work, which runs to nearly forty pages in the electronic edition, Tate concludes:
Tip Tea sustains, Tea only can inspire
The Poet’s Flame, that feeds the Hero’s Fire.
Well said, sir. If you’re ready to try out one of the electronic editions of Tate’s poem you might want to start with the Google Books version.
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John Coakley Lettsome
As I noted in a recent article in these pages, the massive Google Books archive is a treasure trove for anyone with an interest in history, casual or otherwise. That includes tea lovers too. That article took a look at a volume from 1882 called The Tea Cyclopaedia. But there are tea books in the Google archive that go back farther than that, including The Natural History of the Tea-Tree, by John Coakley Lettsom. It originally appeared in 1772, not much more than a century after tea was first introduced to England.
A member of the Royal College of Physicians, Lettsom was also a philanthropist and abolitionist. The full title of his tea book is The Natural History of the Tea-Tree, with Observations on the Medical Qualities of Tea, and Effects of Tea-Drinking, and it provides an interesting snapshot of what he calls the “fashionable custom of Tea drinking.”
Though it had only been a part of the English diet for a little over a century, Lettsom estimated that about three million pounds of tea a year were being consumed. He bemoaned this to some extent because of his view that the “laboring people” were spending their scant and hard-earned dollars on tea rather than food. He also notes that a few of the many tea plants that were smuggled out of China were still surviving in their new English homes, an interesting aside, given the lengths the British would later go to obtain Chinese tea plants to cultivate in their new tea gardens in India.
At just under seventy pages, Lettsom’s book makes for a pretty quick read, though the background on the botany and botanical history of the plant itself might drag a bit for anyone without a specific interest in this sub-topic. Ditto for the section on Soil and Culture. But the chapters on the Origin of Tea, Drinking of Tea, and Gathering the Leaves help pick up the pace a bit.
The latter section of the book is devoted to a fairly in-depth examination titled The Medical History of Tea. Unlike some other commentators who wrote about tea in this era, Lettsom gives tea a passing grade, for the most part, when it comes to health benefits, a foreshadowing of what was to come in future centuries.
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Kambaa Estate tea
Say what you want about Google’s ambitious plan to digitize every book in the known universe (and perhaps in all parallel universes too), but you can’t say that it hasn’t been a boon to tea historians and anyone else who has an interest in seeing how tea used to be produced and consumed. A cursory search of the vast Google archive shows a number of interesting tea-related works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a few that go back as far as the late seventeenth century, the same century in which tea was introduced to Europe.
One of the more interesting works I ran across as I browsed this archive was The Tea Cyclopaedia, which first appeared in 1882. In keeping with the fashion of the times, its rather wordy full title is The Tea Cyclopedia: Articles On Tea, Tea Science, Blights, Soils And Manures, Cultivation, Buildings, Manufacture, With Tea Statistics. It’s unclear exactly who the author of said work is, as he (presumably) is identified merely as ‘The Editor of the ‘Indian Tea Gazette,”‘ which had offices in Calcutta and London. This is significant because, as noted in a recent article in these pages, the British began producing tea in India in the early nineteenth century and the output there had grown considerably by the time this book came out.
The Tea Cyclopaedia
As the title suggests, the book contains a lot of detailed technical information which is likely only to be of interest to tea growers and producers of the day. But if blights, soils and manures aren’t the sort of thing you consider to be riveting reading, there’s still plenty of interesting information to be had. You’ll have to skim around the book’s nearly 400 pages to get at these not so technical bits, but it makes for good reading nonetheless.
Among the highlights, the first section, which provides a brief overview of some of general facts about tea, at least as they were perceived at the time, including some thoughts on caffeine content and tea’s “Medical” properties. There are also sections encompassing Tea In India and other countries, such as Java, Japan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Cultivation and manufacture come in for a look, and there’s a miscellaneous section that looks at topics like Brick Tea, “Creamy” Indian Tea, and tea consumption in England and China.
In addition to the various other goodies contained therein, the book closes with a listing of some of the publisher’s other works, including one on tea, and advertisements for such high-tech gadgets (for the time) as a Stylographic Pen and a handheld Roller Copying Press.
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Time to visit with another person who has been in the “tea trenches” for many years. Another dedicatee to the Camellia Sinensis plant (the tea bush) and to processing it for a variety of tastes. Someone who contributes daily to the enjoyment of tea by people the world over. Another unsung hero, a veteran in the world of tea: James Norwood Pratt.
What is it about people who spend decades of their lives working with and learning about tea? They always seem so full of joy in their photos. Pratt is no exception. Even in photos where he is not smiling broadly he seems totally passionate about the subject of tea.
But Pratt was not always a devotee of the leaf. He started with an enchantment for the fruit of the vine: grapes and the wine made from them. His first book, published in 1971, was The Wine Bibber’s Bible which is out of print now. The other surprise is that Pratt is from North Carolina, a part of the U.S. that imbibes “sweet tea” the way others take in colas and other soft drinks. Pratt is a true phenomenon, expanding beyond that one method of enjoying tea to encompass about every tea style there is, from British to Asian and everything in-between.
From writing books and articles to giving lectures and conducting tea sommelier courses, Pratt has a full agenda. He also manages to keep up with tea friends as they begin their own tea adventures, including opening tea rooms, and with other tea veterans such as the dynas-TEA of the Harney family of Harney & Sons.
Books:
- Tea Dictionary, pub. 2010 — see randomly-selected terms and definitions on this tea blog.
- New Tea Lover’s Treasury, pub. 2000 — a greatly amplified and updated edition of the original book.
- Tea Lovers Treasury, pub. 1997 — the original version, full of history, anecdotes, and information to enchant tea lovers, along with information on a wide variety of teas available and what makes a quality cup of tea.
- The Tea Lover’s Companion: The Ultimate Connoisseur’s Guide to Buying Brewing and Enjoying Tea, pub. 1996 — the ultimate guide for true tea lovers to tea types, histories, legends, lore, brands, retail and mail-order companies, etc.
- Reading Tea Leaves, pub. 1995 — I’m not sure how seriously to take this one. It seems to have been written more in fun and could be interesting on a level with other games.
Articles:
- Lu Yu & Tea: A Mirror of Soul —Introduction for Santa Fe Opera premiere production of “Tea—Mirror of Soul” by Tan Dun
- Four Thousand Experience Tea At Slow Food Nation — A Report by James Norwood Pratt, from The Tea Room News
- An Exercise in Excellence
- Sisters Under The Skin: The Languages Of Wine And Tea
- In the News—Tea Pilgrimage
- The Ancient and Best Way to Brew Loose-Leaf Tea
- The U.S. Tea Renaissance and How It Happened
- How It Is With Tea and Me
- The Dutch Invent “Orange Pekoe”
Whew! When you’re done reading all that, you’ll need a couple of pots full of tea. Maybe even three!
A final note: Don’t bother with the Wikipedia page about Pratt. It is noted as being written more like a marketing or advertising piece than an objective article. It is also practically word-for-word the same as an article on Teacourse.com.
© 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.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve never written a poem about tea and I have a feeling that I probably never will. But I can see how it could happen. Every once in a while a tea comes along that’s sufficiently amazing that it could conceivably inspire a few lines of verse. And for that matter the whole of tea and tea culture is a worthy subject for at least a poem or two.
If you guessed that tea’s merits have already been celebrated a time or two or more in the form of verse, then you’d be absolutely right. The poetry columnist for The Observer, a British paper, recently took a look at this topic, in a review of Ten Poems About Tea - “a mini-anthology” on the topic which is available from The Observer’s online bookshop.
Among the luminaries whose tea-inspired verse makes it into this modest volume are Thomas Hardy, with a work called “At Tea.” Most of the other poets whose work turns up here are not as well-known but if you’re looking for poetry about tea it’s obviously not a bad place to start.
Yorkshire Gold Tea
Over at the Yorkshire Tea blog not so long ago they posted a piece of verse from a reader (and Yorkshire Tea enthusiast) that begins “Shall I compare thee to any other TEA.” Okay, so it ain’t quite at the level of old Will Shakespeare but you take what you can get. If that’s not quite enough tea poetry for you or if you’re looking for something perhaps a bit more timeless, take a look at this collection of tea-related poetry. It also contains links to even more tea poems. It’s a fairly extensive collection and a great place to get started.
And while it strays just a bit from the topic at hand, how about a classic story from a classic author of horror and mystery. It’s a tale in which green tea is portrayed as a substance that wreaks all manner of unrest and difficulties and which includes a very bad monkey that may or may not be real. That would be Green Tea, by the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and you can read the electronic version for free, at Project Gutenberg.
