Here's a bit of trivia for you: what's the most popular beverage in the world? You might be surprised to find out it's not that soda which comes in a red and white can. "Tea is the most popular beverage in the world," Beatrice Hohenegger, author of Liquid Jade: A History of Tea from East to West says. "There are 3.2 million acres of tea plantations worldwide and I did a little calculation based on world production. Human beings drink about 3.8 billion cups of tea per day."

Hohenegger has been researching the history of tea for the last eight years. She is also curating a museum show about tea culture and the history of tea for the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

Drawn to tea through opium

Hohenegger's interest in tea came in a roundabout way. "What got me interested in tea was opium. Their history is connected in that it's a pretty dark chapter of English colonial history. During the 18th and 19th century, the British were importing large amount of tea from China. They wanted to trade with other goods but the Chinese did not want to trade and wanted to just be paid in cash for their tea shipments," she explains.

Because China was an old culture with an inventive technology, Hohenegger says, they didn't need anything from the British. This lead to a serious trade imbalance between the two countries that the English wanted to rectify.

"The English started looking for an item they could sell into China that would sort of fix this trade imbalance and this item, believe it or not, was opium. They were not the first ones to do this. The Dutch did it too, but the English were the ones who turned a fairly small business into a huge drug empire. They started setting up opium plantations and processing plants in Northern India and they were shipping the opium to China through independent traders. It became a huge, huge business."

Beatrice Hohenegger has been researching tea culture and history for the past eight years. (Image: John Livzey, reprinted by permission)

While tea may not have been the direct cause of the resulting Opium Wars, it was definitely the trigger for the trade imbalance that fueled it. "In the larger historical context at the time, this was when you could characterize China as a waning empire. It was an empire that had lost touch with the rest of the world. The Chinese kept thinking they were the center of the world when all sorts of other things were happening in Europe."

"At the time, the English had become the most powerful economic and and military power in the world. The English were in expansionary colonial mode and were not used to being told no. The Chinese, on the other hand, thought of the English as mere little merchants who were supposed to kowtow in front of the Emperor. They were definitely on a collision course."

It was her initial interest in this period, particularly in the Opium Wars, that started Hohenegger on her pursuit of the story of tea. "It was one of those yarns that I could not let go because the history of tea is so interesting."

A brief history of tea

But how did people discover tea? "The origins of tea as an agricultural crop are definitely Chinese. As a crop, it is at least two thousand years old. By some accounts, it is even three thousand years old or more."

Hohenegger recounts a famous Chinese legend about the beginnings of tea. "According to the legend, Shennong, one of the mythical fathers of Chinese civilization, was, among other things, a herbalist. One afternoon, his servant was boiling water because they already knew that only boiled water was safe for drinking. The wind blew some leaves into this water and the water colored."

"Because Shennong was always experimenting with different kinds of herbs, he thought he would try this concoction. He liked it, found it refreshing and interesting and decided it was a good beverage to give to his people. That's the beginning of tea."

The journey to the west

Tea probably spread first to the Middle East from Arab traders who traded over the land routes, Hohenegger surmises. "What really made a difference and brought tea to the European countries was the beginning of maritime trade in the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s. The first official import of tea from China into Europe is by the Dutch in 1610. The Portuguese were the first to enter China, and they probably brought tea first, but it went unrecorded."

The Europeans were not searching for tea, though. "These maritime traders did not know what tea was. They went for spices such as nutmeg and mace, for silk and these kinds of profitable commodities. They brought tea first almost as an afterthought. There are funny stories about how tea was used when people didn't know what it was and how they were supposed to prepare it," Hohennegger recounts.

One such story was about a Portuguese sailor who brought tea leaves home to his mother. "The mother did not know what it was. The sailor left the house and the mother boiled the tea and served the actual leaves to her guests. They certainly didn't like it. When the sailor came back, he asked his mother about the tea. Told that the guests did not like what they were served, the sailor asked what his mother did to the water. The mother, all aghast, replied, 'The water? Why in the world would I save the water when the stuff itself was so dreadful? I threw it away, of course!'"

In the second part of the article to be published next week, we will learn more fascinating facts about tea, including some misconceptions surrounding this most delicious of refreshments.