Tea
- History Fix Podcast
- 9 hours ago
- 21 min read
Episode 163: How an Ancient Medicinal Drink Helped Brew a Revolution
1846 lithograph depicting the Boston Tea Party titled "The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor"
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Tea has a long and rich history dating back to ancient China. But, when you think about where in the world they drink the most tea now, one country in particular probably comes to mind. It does for me anyway: England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, whatever you want to call it. Those guys. They really do love a cuppa tea. Tea is notably absent, for the most part, however, in the United States where coffee reigns supreme. I mean, we have some ice tea drinkers here in the south and you may have a cup of hot tea every now and then, especially in the winter time. But there is no arguing that tea is anywhere near as popular as coffee in the United States. Why? Well, to answer that question we have to go back over 250 years to a time when revolution was brewing and tea was not. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This episode is launching on Patreon on July 3rd and for everyone else on July 5th and so we’re really dancing around the important date, July 4th. July 4th is an incredibly significant date in the US, for anyone not well versed in US history, because it is the date that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. This document declared that the 13 colonies were now independent, and no longer under British rule. Of course they’d have to get through the Revolutionary War first, which had already started over a year prior in April of 1775. I don’t think a lot of people realize that. The war started before the Declaration of Independence was signed. I think people think they signed it and that’s what started the war. No, it was already going on. But this year, this July 4th is especially significant because it marks the 250th anniversary of the signing on July 4th, 1776 which is seen as sort of the birthday of the United States of America. So, I’ve decided to dedicate the month of July to some stories from around this time, tea being one of them. Because tea, which really means almost nothing to us now in the US, tea played a surprisingly large role in inciting the revolution and American independence back in the 1700s. And to figure out why that was, we have to go all the way back to ancient China.
Tea, dried leaves brewed in hot water to create a beverage, this concept of tea comes from China originally. There is a Chinese myth about the origins of tea that says that in 2737 BC, a very precise year for what is essentially an urban legend, anyway the myth says that in that year, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting beneath a tree while his servant boiled some drinking water nearby. Suddenly a gust of wind blew some leaves from the tree into the boiling water. Shen Nung was a renowned herbalist and so he decided to try this new infusion that his servant, with the help of the wind, had accidentally created. Now this tree that he’d been sitting under happened to be a Camellia sinensis tree which is the type of tree that virtually all traditional teas come from. So when Shen Nung tasted this strange new infusion, he was drinking tea for the first time. Now, is this story true? Probably not. But that’s how the legend goes. What does the science say? The archaeology? Well, we know they were drinking tea in China at least by the 200s AD because we have found containers that once held tea in tombs dating back to the Han dynasty from that time period. We know that by the Tang Dynasty from 600 to 900ish AD, tea was so loved in China that it became something like a national drink. A late 8th century writer named Lu Yu even wrote a book about it called Ch’a Ching. Yes, Ch’a Ching, which means Tea Classic. The Chinese called tea, ch’a. Soon after that book was written, tea made its way to Japan, likely brought by Japanese Buddhist monks who had traveled to China to study. It soon became a big deal in Japan as well.
But, for a very long time, well over a millennia at least, tea remained in the east. Europe had no concept of tea. Now, in the Americas they did have a concept of tea, developed separately from what was happening in China, I want to point out. The Indigenous people of what is now the eastern US, made yaupon tea for thousands of years, using the leaves of the yaupon holly tree which still grow rampant where I live. But Europe, while they made medicinal infusions using herbs and whatnot, didn’t have actual tea for drinking until the late 1500s. That’s when we get the first mentions of tea coming from the Portuguese, some of whom were living in the east at the time as traders and missionaries. It’s likely these Portuguese traders and missionaries brought samples of tea back to Portugal with them. But it wasn’t until the 1600s that tea actually started to be imported into Europe as a trade good, by the Dutch, not the Portuguese. By the turn of the century, the Dutch had encroached on Portuguese trade routes in the east and established a trading post on the island of Java in Indonesia. Today we associate Java with coffee, but we are talking about tea here. In 1606, these Dutch traders shipped the first cargo of tea from China, through Java, and on to Holland. Once in Holland, tea started to catch on among the Dutch but it was very very expensive and so it was strictly enjoyed by the very wealthy.
Now, when we think about tea today, it’s a very British thing. Tea is very British. But up until the mid 1600s, the Brits were sleeping on tea hard. China had been drinking it for possibly thousands of years. The Dutch and the Portuguese were into it. France got into it. Britain really could care less about tea. They were known to dismiss these continental trends. You know, Britain is on an island and so they kind of did their own thing, set their own trends. It wasn’t until 1658 that we get the first mention of tea coming from a London newspaper called Mercurius Politicus. It referred to tea as a quote “China drink called by the Chinese Tcha, by other nations Tay, alias Tee,” end quote. And it said that it was currently on sale at a coffee house in London called Sweeting’s Rents. Now, coffee wasn’t huge in Britain yet either. The first coffee house had just opened in London in 1652, so 6 years before this tea announcement in the newspaper. But even at this time, it’s obvious tea is very unfamiliar to the readers of this newspaper and it’s something like a novelty really.
1662 marked a turning point though. England, Ireland, and Scotland’s King Charles II, newly restored to the throne after his father was executed and the monarchy destroyed for a minute there, he married a Portuguese princess named Catherine of Braganza in 1662. And Catherine was a big tea fan. Remember, the Portuguese had been at least dabbling in tea since the late 1500s now because of their trading and missionary work in the east. Catherine was a great lover of tea and when she came to Britain to marry King Charles II, she was quite disappointed to find that it wasn’t really a thing in Britain, tea drinking. When her dowry arrived, Portuguese ships loaded with goods that were her dowry, essentially payment to the monarchy, there was a chest of tea leaves included. Catherine is responsible for popularizing tea drinking among the English nobility which caused it to spread throughout the rest of the country.
So now the English, at least the wealthy ones, are falling in love with tea drinking, just as Catherine had in Portugal. And, when it comes to trade goods, where there is demand, there is money to be made. Enter the East India Company. This was a trading company that, since about 1600, had had a monopoly on importing goods from outside of Europe. If it was brought in from elsewhere, it was brought in and sold by the East India Company. So after Catherine popularized it in the 1660s, the East India Company started importing tea into Britain. The first order was placed in 1664 for 100 pounds of tea shipped from Java. And that is where it all began but it is far from where it ended.
Tea absolutely took off in Britain after that, still just among the wealthier folk because it was expensive. The working class could not afford tea. But why was it so expensive? It’s just dried leaves. They shouldn’t be that expensive. Well, it wasn’t because tea was rare or hard to grow or hard to get or anything like that. I mean it was kind of hard to get. It was hard to get to China from England in those days. But it was mostly expensive because of taxes. Tea was heavily taxed by the government. Originally, they tried to tax tea by the liquid cup but that didn’t really make sense because they weren’t importing liquid cups, they were importing pounds of dried leaves. So in 1689 they switched to taxing tea by the pound of dried tea leaves. The initial tax was 25%. But this was so high it almost stopped sales of tea completely. It was catching on but the Brits weren’t addicted to it yet, right. They weren’t going to pay absurd amounts, yet. You gotta get um real good and addicted to caffeine first, right, then you can levy whatever kind of insane tax you want. That’s the trick with selling drugs right? So this initial tax was way too high. In 1692 they lowered it from 25% to 5%. But, as the addiction grew so too did the taxes back up higher and higher over the years.
By the 1700s, the extremely high cost of tea had created a whole nother unforeseen problem - smuggling. People wanted to drink tea, but they simply could not afford it. And so people started smuggling tea into the country to avoid the tax which allowed them to sell it at much more affordable prices. According to the UK Tea and Infusions Association, quote “What began as a small time illegal trade, selling a few pounds of tea to personal contacts, developed by the late eighteenth century into an astonishing organised crime network, perhaps importing as much as 7 million lbs annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million lbs! Worse for the drinkers was that taxation also encouraged the adulteration of tea, particularly of smuggled tea which was not quality controlled through customs and excise. Leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried, were added to tea leaves. Sometimes the resulting colour was not convincing enough, so anything from sheep's dung to poisonous copper carbonate was added to make it look more like tea,” end quote. It’s nothing we haven’t seen with other drugs, but it is wild to think about this sort of smuggling happening with tea which seems so proper and innocent. But, tea, rich in mind altering and addictive caffeine, is, in fact, a drug, just like coffee, just like sugar honestly. These covert drugs we don’t like to think about as drugs.
So it got to the point where they were smuggling more illegal tea into Britain than the East India Company was importing legally, 7 million pounds vs. 5 million pounds. So now you’ve got this affordable smuggled tea or this super expensive legal tea. People were buying the affordable stuff. Because otherwise it meant no tea. The taxes had gotten so high that they could not afford to buy the legal stuff. This caused a lot of problems for the East India Company who, by the 1770s, was stuck, because of all the smuggling, they were stuck with 21 million pounds of unsold tea, a four year supply. They could not sell their tea because it cost so much more than the smuggled tea which was absolutely everywhere. Also, they owed the British government 1 million pounds. So their profits were dropping, they had this surplus of unsold tea, and they were in debt to the government. They were in trouble. They were coming close to bankruptcy. And the government didn’t want the East India Company to go bankrupt before it paid them that one million pounds. So, something had to be done. Until now, the East India Company has not been allowed to export anything, including tea, directly to the American colonies. They could take it to Britain and then from there, merchants would take it and sell it in the colonies. So the East India Company, in an attempt to avoid going bankrupt now by the 1770s, goes to the British government and asks for permission to export directly to the colonies. And the British government says yes because, remember, they want that one million pounds they are owed. So the Tea Act of 1773 allowed the East India Company to export tea directly to the colonies, and colonists would pay a 3 penny tax per pound. Now this wasn’t a crazy amount. This wasn’t a crazy high tax. It was actually less than people were paying in Britain. And so it’s likely that the British government did not foresee this being a problem. But it was a problem. It was a huge problem. Not because it was a high tax, because it was a new tax, and the colonists were already near a breaking point with all the taxes.
So to understand why this new tea tax was so badly received by the colonists, we have to go back to the 1760s. In the 1760s, Britain had just finished fighting the French and Indian War which had been very expensive. They spent a lot of money fighting this war and so they were essentially broke. To remedy that, they had passed a series of new taxes including the Stamp Act on paper goods in 1765 and the Townshend Acts in 1767 which taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. So there had been a lot of new taxes of late and the colonists were becoming more and more disgruntled over this. Because they were paying all this tax money to the British government, and yet they had no representation in the British government. They had no say over how any of this tax money would be spent. Would the king use it to pave new roads in the colonies, or would he throw a lavish feast, build a new vacation home, that sort of thing. They didn’t get a say. They didn’t get to weigh in, and yet it was their money. And that was bothering them more and more with each and every new tax, “no taxation without representation.” And so the Tea Act of 1773, while not absurd financially, was salt in the ever growing wound.
Now, there’s an argument to be made that it wasn’t just about no taxation without representation, though. It wasn’t just about justice and fairness. It was also about business. Because, if you think about it, the Tea Act didn’t just levy a 3 cent tax on each pound of tea, it also allowed the East India Company to export directly to the colonies for the first time. The East India Company was a notorious monopolizer. It had literal monopolies on trade left and right. So if you think about it, if you’re an American merchant, an American trader, and now the East India Company is allowed to come in and do business in your ports? You can’t compete with the East India Company. No one can. So it was about justice, representation and whatnot. But it had to have also been about business, about money, as most things are.
In response to the Tea Act, many colonists decided they would just flat out refuse to pay the 3 cent per pound tax on tea. They just wouldn’t do it. But the East India Company, desperate remember to avoid going bankrupt, pressed on with their plans nonetheless. They loaded 4 ships full of tea and set sail for Boston Harbor in the fall of 1773. It would take several weeks for these ships, called Dartmouth, Eleanor, Beaver, and William, to actually reach Boston. And in that time, the colonists sprang into action concocting a plan. They know these guys are coming to sell them tea with that 3 cent tax and they’ve already resolved that they will not pay it. So what are they going to do when the ships arrive? According to the Massachusetts Gazette newspaper, there was a meeting called in early November in which colonists decided that number one, they wouldn’t buy any tea that they had to pay those taxes on, and number two, anyone who helped the East India Company in any way would be considered a quote “enemy of America.” Which seems extreme. But it’s like, they’re just reaching a breaking point, okay? There were several of these heated meetings in the time it took the ships to reach Boston and even attacks on the warehouse where the tea was destined to be stored, if it was bought.
The Dartmouth was the first of the four ships to reach Boston Harbor on November 28, 1773. When it arrived, the customs officer completed the necessary paperwork for the import of the tea which meant that legally, the ship could not set sail again for Britain with the tea still on board. But, then the people of Boston refused to bring the tea ashore if they had to pay the tax. So the Dartmouth is stuck in Boston Harbor. It can’t leave with the tea onboard and the colonists are refusing to take the tea. Another ship, the Eleanor, arrived a few days later followed by the Beaver… same situation. All three ships get stuck in Boston Harbor, unable to leave with the tea still onboard, unable to get rid of the tea. The fourth ship, William, ran aground near Cape Cod so it never actually arrived in Boston, but the other 3 are stuck. The UK Tea and Infusions Association writes quote “...there was deadlock. The townspeople would not allow the tea to be brought ashore without an agreement that no duty would be paid on it. The Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson (whose sons were to have been agents of the East India Company for the distribution of the tea), refused to let the ships leave port without paying duty on the tea. An armed guard of patriots was posted at the wharf to prevent the tea coming ashore, while a naval blockade of the harbour prevented the ships from leaving. Mass meetings were held by the resistance leaders, Samuel Adams and Josiah Quincy, and the Bostonians were further buoyed up by messages of support which they received from all over New England,” end quote.
So the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, he was a loyalist. He was loyal to England’s King George III. And, as mentioned in that quote, his sons stood to profit from this tea being imported into Boston. So he’s on the side of the East India Company. But the colonists have stationed armed guards to ensure that the tea doesn’t come ashore. They’re prepared to take it a step further too. On December 16th, over two weeks after the first ship arrived, as many as 7000 townspeople met at the Old South Meeting House to figure out what they were going to do. Two of the three ships that were stuck in the harbor were owned by an American named Francis Rotch. And he attended the meeting. He was in a tight spot. He would face the wrath of his fellow colonists if he brought the tea ashore, plus he couldn’t what with the armed guards. But he also worried that, if the ships tried to leave the harbor illegally without unloading the tea, they would be confiscated or sunk by the navy. So Rotch, of all people is desperate for a solution. This meeting sends Rotch 7 miles away to Governor Hutchinson’s country house where he’s somewhat holed up probably waiting for this drama to blow over. Rotch goes to see him and asks for the governor to allow the ships to leave the harbor, go back to Britain, with the tea still on board. Governor Hutchinson refuses. Rotch goes back to the meeting house and he’s like “he said no. He won’t do it. He won’t let the ships leave with the tea.” And there was this patriotic uproar in response. They have tried to solve this problem the right way and have been denied, now they are forced to take drastic measures.
That very night, December 16th, a group of colonists assembled on a hill near the harbor. Some of them were dressed as Indigenous Americans, specifically from the Mohawk tribe, their faces darkened with soot. They whooped with Indian style war cries as they approached the harbor. Now, why? Why were they dressed this way? I think people like to think of it as like this homage to America, to the real Americans, right, the Indigenous people who lived on these lands for thousands of years. The OGs. It was very American. It was anti-British. And that’s a nice sentiment. I would be very surprised if that’s what they were going for though, in 1773. We view Indigenous people with a lot of respect and reverence now, that wasn’t the case in the 1700s. They were still very much seen as godless savages by white people in those days. So I don’t think they dressed up like Mohawk people to be very American. I think they did it to be intimidating, scary, savages. Who knows what they’ll do. Watch out. We’re crazy, that sort of thing. So I don’t think it was exactly showing respect to Indigenous people like we like to think it was in hindsight. It was a lot more offensive than respectful.
Anyway, they march down to the wharf all dressed up and disguised. They board the ships, one after another, all three ships, and in the span of about 3 hours, they split open the chests of tea, 342 chests of tea, and they dump them into Boston Harbor. Now despite all the whooping and the war cries and the costumes, this was not a violent protest. They’re pretty chill about it. The ship’s crew reported that nothing had been damaged or destroyed except for the tea and that the protestors even swept the decks clean afterwards. I don’t know if that was them being considerate or them trying to get rid of every last tea leaf. I don’t know. There’s another report in the Massachusetts Gazette that when it was realized that a padlock had been broken, which was the personal property of one of the ships’ captains, the men sent him a replacement. So, they’re clearly not like real criminals, these guys. They went strictly to dump the tea, they weren’t trying to cause any problems outside of that end goal.
In the end, these men, and we don’t know how many men there were who participated, anywhere from 30 to 130 were involved. But these men dumped the equivalent of up to $3 million in tea into the harbor that night. According to reports, there was still a lot of tea floating in the harbor the next day, so men went out in rowboats and beat the tea underwater with their oars to keep any of it from being salvaged. They were serious about this. This protest sparked other protests in other colonies as well. Tea being shipped to New York and Philadelphia was sent back to London. Tea offloaded in Charleston was left to rot in the warehouses, never sold. But it was the protest in Boston that would set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to revolution. A loss of $3 million worth of tea did not go over well with the East India Company or the British government. In order to punish the colonies, but mostly Boston, for this protest, Parliament passed a series of acts that were called the Coercive Acts in Britain and the Intolerable Acts in the colonies. There were four of these, officially. The first one closed Boston Harbor until colonists paid for the tea that they had destroyed which they obviously weren’t going to do. So this was crippling to Boston, now no goods could come into or out of the city. The second act put the Massachusetts colony under military rule giving all power to the British governor. The third act protected British officials who were accused of crimes in the colonies which had to have led to serious abuses of power right, they can do whatever they want because they have this immunity really. They are protected from being accused of crimes. The fourth act allowed British soldiers to stay in colonists’ homes if they needed to. So if that were allowed in the US today, it’s not thanks to the third amendment, but if it were, it would mean that some army dudes could just show up at your door one day and literally take your house from you. Just like “we need to live here and we need to use all your stuff and eat all your food and you won’t be compensated at all.” That’s what the 4th intolerable act allowed.
So this was really too much for the already disgruntled colonists. I feel pretty safe saying that Britain's response to the Boston Tea Party, with the passing of these Intolerable Acts is what incited the whole revolution. In direct response to this, in September of 1774, representatives from all over the colonies met at the First Continental Congress, including Samuel Adams from Boston who had been part of the Sons of Liberty group that planned the Boston Tea Party. He didn’t take part in the actual smashing of the tea that night we don’t think but he was a primary planner of the protest. The First Continental Congress met to come up with ways to resist the Intolerable Acts. It would be followed in May of 1775 by the Second Continental Congress which would eventually sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776 and the rest, as they say, is history. The Americans would go on to win the war for independence in 1783 becoming their own separate nation of mostly people who still refuse to drink tea to this day. I mean, coffee fully reigns supreme in the US. We’ve got our iced tea drinkers down here in the south, but as far as a cup of hot tea, like is enjoyed multiple times per day in the UK… That just isn’t really done here and I think a lot of that still stems from those pre-revolutionary conflicts over tea, which is pretty wild
But we can’t end this without finishing out the history of tea. We know pretty much all of this, arguably the formation of a new nation, was caused by high taxes on tea. And we know that those high taxes led to a lot of tea smuggling which hurt the East India Company because they couldn’t sell their more expensive tea, and all that. Well in 1784, just after the Revolutionary War ended, Britain’s new prime minister William Pitt the Younger, which like what is this ancient Greece? But this new Prime Minister lowered the tea tax from 119 percent to 12.5 percent. This made legal tea instantly affordable and tea smuggling stopped virtually overnight. I mean he fixed this centuries old problem they were having, this very serious problem, they lost their American colonies practically over this, he fixed it like that. Just boom. Lower the tax, now we’re good everybody chill out. And it worked so well. Tea revenue, legal tea revenue grew even higher than it had ever been and tea consumption in the UK absolutely skyrocketed.
50 years later, in 1834, another big change affected tea. The East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China ended. Before that, all the tea came from China. But after the monopoly ended, the East India Company, instead of dealing with competitors in trading Chinese tea, decided to start growing tea in India, which they had colonized and were essentially governing. I need to do a whole episode on the East India Company because I don’t really understand how this like import export company is governing a whole country. It was clearly much more than just a shipping company. It was a whole force. But anyway they start growing tea in India, in Assam. And then they started selling this new Assam tea in Britain and it was very successful. By the late 1800s, tea from India became more popular than tea from China in the UK. And with the end of the East India Company’s monopoly, there was now competition. And this led to the rise of the tea clippers. These were super fast ships, these clipper ships that competed to be the first to bring their tea to Britain. There was huge competition between British and American merchants especially which led to the clipper races of the 1860s. According to the UK Tea and Infusions Association quote “The race began in China where the clippers would leave the Canton River, race down the China Sea, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic, past the Azores and into the English Channel. The clippers would then be towed up the River Thames by tugs and the race would be won by the first ship to hurl ashore its cargo at the docks. But these races soon came to an end with the opening of the Suez canal, which made the trade routes to China viable for steamships for the first time,” end quote. And so it was a short-lived era, this era of the tea clipper races but, I don’t know, sounds kind of fun.
Today tea is still a very big deal in the UK where they have whole times of day set aside for drinking tea. According to statistics, the UK collectively drinks around 100 million cups of tea every day. This breaks down to roughly one and a half cups per person per day. If you live in the US, I’d like you to consider… when is the last time you even had a cup of tea? For me it was probably back in February when I had a cold and was trying to soothe a sore throat. That’s what tea has become in the United States, for most of us anyway. That is remarkable. I find it so interesting that a somewhat petty argument over a negligible tax 250 years ago is still affecting our entire nation’s preference for hot beverages all this time later. But, you know, it was so much more than that. It was so much more than a 3 cent tax on a pound of dried tea leaves. It was about control. It was about liberty. It was about the pursuit of happiness. And I really do think the British underestimated what the American colonists’ response to the Tea Act would be. I think they underestimated their passion and their determination to hold their own and to not let this tyrant across an ocean walk all over them. And really, that makes sense. Because you have to think about what type of person it takes to leave their homeland, cross an entire ocean on a wooden ship, and settle in a new and often hostile land, most of which was untamed wilderness. It takes a particular type of person to do that. And that’s who the colonists were. That’s who they came from. That’s who raised them. They weren’t just going to roll over now and pay the taxes. Because it wasn’t just a tax. It was Britain reclaiming the money they lost in the French and Indian War. It was Britain saving the East India Company to get back their one million pounds. It was Britain filling their coffers, all on the American colonists’ dime, money they worked hard for and forked over for what? Who knows. They had no say. And that wasn’t right. In the end, it wasn’t about tea and it wasn’t about taxes. It was about principle. It was about stamping out injustice. It was about scrapping the old corrupt system and starting anew, building a new system, a system built on liberty and justice and coffee for all.
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