The Dutch East India Company began importing tea (in exchange for sage) in the early seventeenth century. The first tea drinkers in Europe were mainly the upper class. Nadine Beauthac writes in her essay "Tea Barons," tea might have been the earliest food fad: "like other herbal 'decoctions,' tea was essentially appreciated for its therapeutic properties, even though there was no universal agreement over this."
Like subsequent fads, commercialism played a large role in the introduction of tea to the Western palette. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Europe was engulfed in tea mania--produced by a thirst for Oriental commodities and penchants for the rare and exotic. As Beauthac notes, the continent was awash in conspicuous consumption of Asian imports: "just as a pagoda became an indispensable part of every respectable landscape garden, so chocolate, tea and coffee were served in all the best homes of Europe."
Soon, the tea business was booming. Once English merchants began to capitalize on the tea trade by importing massive quantities, the government caught on and starting levying the infamous tea tax.
But China's trade relations with Europe became strained under the weight of global demand. At the time, the Qing Dynasty was fiercely xenophobic and isolationist, and Western merchants chaffed at restrictions on market access that they deemed unfair. The main trade port, Canton, was the main base of the Dutch East India Company, yet local laws alienated white traders, relegating them to the harbor outside city limits. All deals were brokered by a special monopolistic organization known as the Co-Hong, commissioned by the government to govern trade with the West.
So the English embarked on a plan to tip the balance of trade in their favor. Fortunately for them, they had already conquered another fertile country, India, which could mass produce a commodity as desirable to the Chinese as tea was to the West. By the 1770s, the English were funneling Indian-grown opium into China, and soon, the Middle Kingdom that once so jealously guarded its tea and its borders was losing both to the forces of Western imperialism. The Opium War was one of the great debacles of the Qing dynasty, resulting in devastating concessions that gave the British authority over Hong Kong and other territories as "treaty ports."
But by the 1800s, China was no longer needed as a tea supplier, for England had already launched a massive effort to transplant tea cultivation to India. Robert Fortune, leader of the British Tea Committee, embarked on an extensive research tour of China's tea plantations to "steal" the secrets of Chinese tea production. He traveled from Shanghai to Canton, learning the intricacies of the tea industry, and gathered samples of different tea varieties to replicate in the balmy plains of India.
From them on, tea became a bona fide international phenomenon. Once it caught on in Europe and England, the American colonies caught tea fever as well, and within years, a revolt against the British tea tax turned into the American Revolution.
Over a few centuries, tea played key roles in the near-total collapse of late-imperial China, the rise of a new British empire, and the secession of the United States. But perhaps one of the greatest conquests of the modern era was the dramatic seduction of the world by tea itself.
The history of tea proves that the beautifully simple, yet wildly complex pairing of hot water and the fragrant leaf is, indeed, very strong stuff.