As the old Jack Buchanan song goes: “When the clock strikes four, everything stops for tea!”.

But – why does it? In this posting, we’ll be looking at the history of, arguably, the world’s most popular beverage – tea – and everything that goes along with it. What tea is, where it comes from, how it came to be, the customs surrounding tea and its consumption, and the utensils and paraphernalia used around the world in the consumption of tea!

Due to tea’s extensive history and variations, there’s no way that I’ll cover everything in just one posting, so I may do another one at a future date. So if something you wanted to read or know about isn’t included here, then it may be included in a possible follow-up posting later down the line.

Not for All the Tea in China!

Tea as we think of it today, was first cultivated in China as early as 4000B.C., but it was not harvested for its beverage qualities – instead, it was eaten as a vegetable! Tea was not consumed as a beverage until sometime between 300-500A.D. However, the first incarnation of tea was prepared very differently from how we think of it today.

During the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618-907A.D.), the accepted practice was to crush and grind tea-leaves in a pestle and mortar. The crushed leaves were beaten and ground up until they had been reduced to powder. This allowed the powdered leaves to be compressed into bricks or cakes, which would be easier to pack, and easier to transport, keeping their flavour for longer over long trade-journeys, which in those days could take several days, weeks, or even months!

When it came time to drink the tea, the cake or brick was simply crumbled into powder again, and water was added on top to dilute it. In Chinese, this was known as “mocha”. When the Japanese adopted this practice, they also took the Chinese loanword along with it, and ‘mocha’ became the Japanese ‘Matcha’. This remained the norm until the 1300s, when the practice changed yet again, to steeping dried tea-leaves, instead of tea-powder, much as how we do today.

Tea on the Move

For centuries, tea remained a largely Chinese secret. Tea was traded, along with silk, porcelain and valuable spices, around Asia, and along the fabled Silk Road network. However, things started to change in the 1500s and 1600s, with Dutch sailors exploring the Far East. It was at this time that Europeans were first exposed to the beverage of tea.

Like anything new – tea, coffee, chocolate, kale juice and quinoa – tea was first consumed for its medicinal properties, either real, or imagined. In Europe, where the main beverages were beer, ale and wine, due to how polluted the water was, tea was a welcome and surprising change, and slowly, it spread around Europe.

Enjoying a Cuppa

Tea is believed to have been brought in England in 1661. Why such a precise date? Because that’s when a Portuguese woman named Catherine of Braganza sailed from her homeland to wed England’s King Charles II. Famously barren, Catherine produced no children, and this left Charles unable to sire a legitimate heir to the throne, however, the queen did give birth to something arguably much more important than children – British tea-culture!

As part of her dowry, Catherine brought to England, not only gold, silver and jewels, but also exotic spices and expensive teas. Noble families, wishing to ingratiate and imitate their new queen, took to copying her drinking habits, which included consuming tea – but not only consuming it, but also enjoying it, and making an event of it – We have Queen Catherine to thank for the very British custom of ‘taking tea’.

In its early days, tea was extremely rare in Britain, and prohibitively expensive! China had a stranglehold monopoly on the substance, and the one-and-only port in China which was open to foreign traders, and therefore, the only port open to exporting tea, was the port of Canton in southern China.

Because of such restrictive trading regulations, the amount of tea that Britain (and other European countries) could import each year was very small, and this drove the price up to such an insane level that only the nobility could afford it. Tea was drunk sparingly, and the whole custom of preparing, and serving tea was a ritual presided over almost exclusively by the women of a household. Servants were rarely, if ever, permitted to touch tea, and the dried tea-leaves, imported all the way from China, were locked inside elaborately decorated tea-caddies, lined with foil paper to protect the flavour, and which were made of anything from wood inlaid with ivory, to tortoiseshell, and even – if you could afford it – solid silver!

The Word ‘Tea’

‘Tea’ is believed to have been a corruption of ‘te’, the word used for the beverage in the Chinese port of Xiamen, one of the first to open to trade with the West (particularly, the Dutch, who were the first to import tea to Europe). In most Asian languages (including Chinese and Japanese), the word for ‘tea’ is ‘cha’.

China from China, What Else Could be Finer?

What else, indeed?

The Chinese had been creating hard-paste ceramics…what we call ‘porcelain’ today…since at least the 6th century. Hard-paste porcelain was tricky to make – it required a very high firing temperature, and the mixture of various powders used to form the paste from which the porcelain was made had to be carefully measured and prepared. The best quality porcelain-clay preparations were often left alone to age…in many cases, for several decades!

After the maturation or ‘souring’ process, during which the clay-mix had been left to rest, the clay had to be rehydrated before it could be worked. To do this, potters simply opened their flies and pissed into it! The urine reintroduced moisture into the clay and made it more plastic, which made it easier to shape and mold into whatever it was that you were trying to make!…Don’t worry, the firing process killed off any bacteria in the clay, rendering the porcelain clean and sterile when it was removed from the kiln.

Chinese porcelain was heavily imported by Europeans in the 1600s and 1700s, along with tea, but transporting porcelain such long distances was expensive, if only for the fact that trying to transport crates of chinaware on a rocking, rolling sailing ship is a recipe for disaster. Because of this, there were numerous attempts to recreate Chinese-style porcelain in Europe – particularly in Britain, and the Low Countries.

Actual porcelain ceramics are made using a mixture of fine clay powder, sand and a tiny amount of the secret ingredient – soapstone – basically talcum-powder. Working this mixture created a type of porcelain which could be shaped, and fired and made into ceramics which were crisp, white, incredibly thin to the point of translucency…and, most importantly, where tea is concerned…shatter-resistant!

One of the reasons why European attempts to recreate Chinese porcelain failed was because of this one element. They had no resistance to thermal shock – the sudden change in temperature caused by pouring boiling hot tea into a cold, porcelain tea-bowl or teacup. People who couldn’t afford fine china bought the cheaper, lower quality ceramics, which the wealthy bought the more stable, thinner, stronger and more suitable expensive china. This is the supposed origin of poor people adding milk to their tea first, whereas wealthier drinkers added milk afterwards…or not at all! The cold milk took the sting out of the heat of the tea when it was poured into the cup, so that the porcelain wouldn’t crack under the temperature-change.

Eventually, Europeans did manage to create their own form of porcelain, independent from Chinese ceramicists – it was called bone china. Depending on the recipe used, bone-china clay was comprised of china-stone powder (a type of granite), china-clay (kaolinite), and, depending on the formulation of the recipe – anywhere from 30-60% bone…as in actual bone. The bones of dead animals were cleaned, crushed, ground up into powder, and this was added to the mixture. The translucency, thinness and strength of bone china (four bone-china cups can hold up a car, in case you’re wondering), are all due to the addition of bone-powder into the clay mix.

Types of Teaware

When the custom of tea-drinking was introduced to Europe in the 1600s, Chinese porcelain came along with it, and these were the vessels first used to prepare and drink tea. The earliest European teaware, manufactured in the 1700s, closely imitated Chinese teaware, both in size, style, and even decoration. Transfer-printed imagery (engraved on a copper plate, covered with ink and then transferred onto thin paper which was then pressed onto the finished ceramics before firing) often featured Chinese-style motifs, such as gardens, pagodas and flowers.

European Teaware

The earliest European teacups imitated Chinese ones so much that they did not come with handles – instead, they resembled the Chinese ‘chawan’ (‘tea-bowl’), varying from them only in decoration and size. The Western practice of putting a separate handle on the side of a teacup would not become common until the early 1800s.

In time, the practice of adding milk, and later, sugar, to tea, spurred the creation of the traditional three-piece tea-set, of teapot, milk-jug or creamer, and sugar-bowl. Like tea, sugar in the 1600s and 1700s was very expensive, and was imported largely from Caribbean and South-American sugar-plantations, where it was extracted from sugar-cane crops. Because of the expense of sugar, some people added honey to their tea instead.

Asian Teaware

Chinese, and other Asian teaware has hardly changed in centuries. Teacups have varied in style and decoration, but hardly ever in terms of size, or shape. Since most Asian people don’t add anything to their tea, their teacups are generally smaller than European ones, and their tea-sets are less elaborate – comprising of just the teapot and a set of teacups, and perhaps a matching tea-tray or more likely – a tea-board, to catch spills, or to rise and wash the teacups between uses.

Apart from this, the Chinese teacup did evolve in one way: The creation of the ‘Gaiwan‘.

‘Gaiwan’ literally translates as ‘lidded bowl’ in Chinese. ‘Gai’ is lid, or cover, and ‘wan’ (or ‘woon’, in Cantonese) is ‘bowl’.

The compound word of ‘gaiwan’ refers to a specific type of Chinese teacup-set, comprised of a teacup or bowl with a wide, flaring lip, small base and sloping sides, a matching, circular lid with a lifting-knob on top, and a matching saucer underneath, into which the base of the teacup fits snugly.

Gaiwan have been around for centuries, and their creation dates back to the Ming Dynasty, sometime in the 1400s. Gaiwan were used, either for brewing tea, or for drinking it. The lid served to either stir the tea to help it brew, to cool it down before drinking, or to hold back the loose tea-leaves while drinking from the cup. The lid also stopped the heat of the boiling water from escaping, keeping the tea warm for a longer time between sips.

Russian Teaware

Another country famous for its teaware is Russia, where the practice of taking tea is possibly more different than anywhere else on earth.

Russia was the land which originated the tea-preparing device known as the samovar – literally – ‘self-boiler’ – a large (usually brass) tea-urn comprised of a central cistern, fire-tube and chimney, drip-tray and teapot.

In most cases, the Russian practice of tea-drinking was to fill the samovar’s cistern with water. The chimney or firebox was filled with paper and wood-shavings, and then set on fire. Refueling the samovar was simply a matter of dropping kindling, or pine-cones down the chimney. Ash was removed through a little door underneath the firebox. A stand set on top of the chimney allowed a teapot with tea-concentrate to be placed over the fire, keeping it hot. The tea-concentrate was very, very, very concentrated tea, with multiple spoons of tea inside a relatively small pot filled with hot water.

The drinker would pour a small amount of the concentrate into their teacup or tea-glass, replace the pot on top of the samovar, and then, using the spigot on the front of the samovar – fill the rest of their glass with boiling water. This would dilute the tea-concentrate, making it more mellow, and pleasant to drink.

Like with other countries with a tea-culture, in Russia, it became popular to make an event out of drinking tea, and tea was often consumed along with sweet pastries, cakes and cookies. The practice of using a samovar spread widely throughout eastern Europe and around the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, leading to regional variations and different national styles and designs.

The Art of Taking Tea

Since earliest times, the practice of drinking or ‘taking’ tea has always been surrounded by rituals and customs. Gradually, early tea-drinking habits developed into regional customs and traditions, and these led to a wide range of ways to enjoy tea all around the world.

In China, and Asian countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the tradition of ‘yumcha’ still exists today – where people gather for lunch or a morning or afternoon meal, consisting of tea, and eating dumplings, buns and rolls. The words ‘yum cha’ literally mean ‘drink tea’. Going out for yumcha is usually a special occasion, done with family and friends, or visiting relatives and takes place at specialised yumcha restaurants.

In Britain, and many former British colonies such as Canada and Australia, the tradition of ‘afternoon tea’ is a longstanding tradition dating back to early Victorian times. It was said to be invented by Anna Maria Russell, the Duchess of Bedford, a longtime personal friend of Queen Victoria.

Frustrated by the long wait between luncheon and dinner (which in Victorian times, could be taken as late as 8:00pm), the Duchess took up the habit of having a light meal in the late-afternoon, around three or four o’clock, consisting of tea, cakes, sandwiches and scones. This, the Duchess hoped, would hold her over until dinner, which could be anywhere from two to four hours later in the day. She enjoyed this custom so much that it started spreading throughout the court, and it became fashionable to invite friends over for afternoon tea – a quiet time in the middle of the day when one could relax with a light snack, a drink, and a chance to catch up on the gossip of the day. Afternoon tea remains a popular custom in the Anglosphere to this day.

Tea Today

The beverage of tea, as well as the meals and events that it inspired, remain as popular today as they ever were. Even when we have other drinks like coffee, or soda, milk, and a wide range of flowery and herbal infusions – tea remains one of, if not the, most popular beverage in the world. Hotels from as far afield as the Ritz in London to the Windsor in Melbourne, or the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, still serve high tea and afternoon tea today. In Malaysia and Singapore, you can buy my personal favourite type of tea: ‘Teh Tarik’ (‘Pulled Tea’) – which is black tea mixed with condensed milk and sugar…and which is then poured repeatedly from mug to mug, over and over again to froth it up and cool it down, leaving you with a rich, sweet, warm, frothy drink! Mmmm-mmmm!