If tea culture blooms again in this country, it will not be the tea we know—but something else entirely
It was that chronicler of the plague, Samuel Pepys, who was likely responsible for the first mention of tea in the English language. Writing in his diary in 1660, he recounts a business meeting where “afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.” Europe was then in the grips of Sinomania—tea was just the latest craze in a long line of Chinese exotica that fascinated the west. Out of the ports of Canton and Amoy flowed not just tea, but raw and woven silks, bright porcelain and decorated ceramics. Soon the British were so obsessed that it wasn’t enough to merely trade these items: they became producers. Potteries were set up in Staffordshire; on the slopes of West Bengal, tea was planted. The district’s name became a byword for luxury: Darjeeling…
