Tea (Camellia sinensis)
THEACEAE, Tea Family
Tea (Camellia sinensis) likely is the mostly widely used nonalcoholic beverages around the world, or certainly a close second to coffee. Cultivation of tea goes back at least to 2000 B.C. in eastern Asia, where brews of tea were used for medicinal purposes. Its documented use as a social drink dates from the 5th century in China. Therefore, tea was brought into cultivation in Southeast Asia, most probably in the region of southeastern China, former Indochina, or Assam.
Tea is a species of the genus Camellia, which includes the cultivated camellias. This species is an evergreen shrub to small tree that can only be grown where frost is totally absent and where the temperature never gets very high. This means that tea is best grown on tropical hills in China, India, and Sri Lanka, where the annual rainfall is 60 to 200 inches. More than half of the world production comes from China, often from small plots, but tea is being grown around the world wherever the climate is right.
On tea plantations, the individual plant is pruned to less than two meters in height, often low enough to reach over the canopy. Leaves are harvested on the new growth. Generally a worker only plucks the terminal two leaves, because these have the best flavor. A person can harvest 40 to 80 pounds of leaves per day.
The variety of tea is indeed very large, but these forms can be categorized simply as black tea, green tea, oolong tea, and brick tea. Black tea, which is the typical "Western" drink, comes from fermented leaves. Leaves are withered indoors for 24 hours, after which they are rolled and broken or chopped, which permits oxidation of the phenolics in the leaves. Fermentation must occur in cool, moist rooms; therefore, tea processing traditionally has occurred in tropical uplands. Finally, the fermented tea is fired, hence blackened, for 20 minutes to reduce leaf tissue moisture to 3%. Green tea is made from unfermented leaves, which are dried immediately, rolled, and dried again, whereas oolong tea is partially fermented. Brick tea is made from cheap, twiggy, coarse plant materials that are fermented and pressed into briquets.
Although tea drinking is the hallmark of Great Britain, and formerly in the expansive British Empire, this beverage was only introduced to Europe in 1610 by the Dutch East India Company and only arrived in London in 1664. Tea first arrived in Boston in 1714. From your American history, of course, you are reminded that England attempted to establish a monopoly in the tea trade of the British East India Company to the American colonies. In late colonial days, Americans were consuming more than 1.5 million pounds of legal tea annually, which meant great profits to Mother England, a wonderful way to pay for soldiers living in America. However, colonists were interested in paying lower prices, so up to 75% of total tea consumed (of perhaps 5 million pounds) was tea smuggled into New York by the Dutch, undercutting sales by the British and paying no duties. King George III and his Parliament attempted to force the colonists to purchase tea at high prices from the British East India Company, and the American colonists eventually produced a big splash in the Boston harbor on 16 December, 1773, which contributed to the birth of the United States.
In the 18th century tea use in Britain was fairly low, because coffee was the national social beverage. However, the coffee industry in British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) crashed because of coffee leaf spot, a fungus disease (Hemileia vastatrix), after which Ceylon was replanted with tea. England and the East India Company spread tea use throughout the British Empire after plantations were established in India (1818-1834). Indian plantations were started from a tea plant brought by a British soldier from the India-China border. So, during the reign of Queen Victoria, nearly a quarter of the world's population became indoctrinated as tea drinkers, all to the glory of the treasury in London.