That led me to a hunt for some of the missing facts, in various books I happened to have at home, and I found a few that certainly give one pause:
Braudel (in The Structures of Everyday Life says that "the first cargoes of tea are thought to have arrived at Amsterdam [from Macao to Java] in 1610... in France, the new drink is not mentioned until 1635... café proprietors of London launched the fashion in about 1657 [at Garraway's Coffee House]... European tea consumption did not become considerable until 1720-30 when direct trade between Europe and China began..." (pp. 249-251)Another source says that in 1664 2 pounds 2 ounces of tea was given to Charles II by the Est India Company; by 1700 tea imports to England totalled 20,000 pounds, by 1731 to 1.8 million pounds (a revenue of L358,000 --though lots of smuggling...), and by 1800 20 million pounds. It was not until about 1870 that tea production in India and Ceylon started to cut into the dominance of China as the source of most of the British tea supply. By 1961, imports seem to have risen to more than 500 million pounds --an apparent consumption of nearly 10 pounds per person per year, only a tiny proportion of it from China.
Clearly we need to know more about this glowing example of China's inclusion into the world system. Annie has a number of interesting items, and an OED search a few weeks ago produced an array of words associated with tea. Where else might we look? JSTOR doesn't (somewhat to my surprise) yield much in the East Asian journals, but the Economics journals include this:
The Consumption of Tea and Other Staple Drinks
C. H. Denyer
The Economic Journal, Vol. 3, No. 9. (Mar., 1893), pp. 33-51.
This article includes the following, which hasn't much to do with Chinese tea (but a greta deal to do with the Indian and Ceylonese product that displaced Chinese tea in the latter half of the 19th century):It is to be feared that the average Englishman is a very bad judge of tea. His sole criterion of its quality is its colour and strength; its delicate flavour he drowns in sugar and milk. These latter are not to be despised, for they constitute no inconsiderable portion of his food; but they certainly help to put him at the mercy of the tea dealer. Strong cheap teas (and cheap teas are now as a rule the strongest) have taken the place of the older and weaker Chinese blends. (Denyer 1893:38)
The expansion implies a number of things for China, not least of which is the obvious necessity to expand production to meet the vast increase in demand. Gardella's Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757-1937 (1994) is the missing piece, and analyses the evolution of "commercial dependence upon volatile world markets" and "rise of global competition for alternative sources of supply" (Gardella 1994:7) that marks the evolution of export crops.
Tea is an upland crop, generally occupying hillsides. Produced for at least 1500 years in southwestern China (Yunnan and Sichuan), tea really took hold as a cash crop and a national obsession only during Tang times (Lu Yu's Classic of Tea was compled around 780), when it was first taxed ("fiscalized", in Gardella's term). A brisk barter trade with northwestern nomads (tea for horses) developed in the Sung, and continued as an export caravan trade that brought brick tea as far west as Russia.
"Between 1719 and 1833 tea comprised 70 to 90 percent of all cargos outbound from Canton." (Gardella 1994:33), which implies an enormous flow of (mostly) silver, and made for a two-way interdependence:
By the 1770s the Canton hongs were becoming financial wards of the East India Company, dependent on it for cash advances to secure their annual tea consignments. With the steady expansion of the tea trade over the next half-century, the Company became the hongs' principal support in the Canton tea market as well as their major creditor... Most hongs simply operated as brokers or, more commonly, as contractors who took delivery of tea for resale and export. Their suppliers... were black tea wholesalers of Fujian teas or their counterparts, the green tea merchants from neighboring Huizhouh in Anhui. (Gardella 1994:35)Mountain areas, especially in northern Fujian, experienced a period of intense development, largely dependent on migrant labor and rented land, mostly on small plots (and not plantations), and sold through rural markets, bulked in larger market towns, and then concentrated eventually in the hands of large urban tea brokers who then dealt with European and American purchasers. Here's a Chinese description of the mid-19th century state of things:
Before the treaty ports were opened to trade, all tea was exported via Guangdong, and merchants from all over China gathered there. The prices were set by Chinese, and foreigners could not control them... From the opening of the treaty ports, the profits from dominating the marketplace have been entirely the foreigners'. Tea and silk are China's main products. When tea is produced, crowds of barbarians come to buy it; once the price is determined, it can't be raised. If [Chinese dealers] refuse to sell and wish to raise the price, then after a week it is lowered ten percent, after a second week, twenty percent... the foreigners thus command the fate of our merchants, who are like crows in a basket, subject to their captor's whims (Gardella 1994: 57)The Tea Boom produced ecological degradation, overheating of local economies (and thus rising rents), overdependence on the cash crop, migratory labor (generally exploitative conditions), a broadening of the market for opium... and then the bottom fell out of the China coast tea trade in the late 19th century, with the substitution of Indian and Ceylon teas (and competition from Taiwan) and consequent decline of tea prices. Emigration of Fujianese to Southeast Asia rose dramatically. An 1890 description by the British consul in Fuzhou:
The decay of the tea trade at this port is affecting all classes. The authorities complain bitterly of the falling off of the ...inland tax on tea, the revenue derived from which was largely expended on government works, which now in consequence are in a great measure neglected. The native merchant cannot afford to spend so much on articles of dress and luxury as he formerly did. The artisan cannot find employment for his workmen, who during previous tea-sasons were busily occupied in making, lining and decorating tea chests and boxes. The boatmen and coolies cannot all find work; only half of them are now required for shipping off the tea. Thus the number of people out of employment is very great, and much misery meets one at every turn... (Gardella 1994:113)