Asia puts the kettle on

Three thousand years ago the people of Yunnan province first began picking, processing, and boiling tea leaves. Tea was desirable from the very beginning. Caked bricks of tea were used as a form of currency and given as tribute.

A thousand years ago tea began to spill into Japan and Korea. It trickled down from the aristocracy to become a staple amongst the gentry.

Tea meets sugar

A few hundred years ago King Charles II had his first sip. Soon it was all the rage amongst European nobility. These posh plutocrats stirred in another rare and fashionable seasoning: sugar.

The sweet substance came from sugar cane plantations in the new world. Brutal plantations worked by slaves.

Chinese tea fused with New World sugar to make a delicious immoral concoction.

Tea in, slavery out

Tea arrived on the cusp of the industrial revolution in Britain. Thanks to Britain's global empire everyday workers could afford the beverage. Sweet tea was the perfect replacement for the beer and cider the working people had relied on. Unlike alcohol, caffeine heightened rather than dulled the senses. In addition, sugar provided the necessary calories to operate newfangled industrial machines from sunup until sundown.

Industrialization drove demand for tea. Tea drove demand for sugar. Sugar drove demand for slaves.

Speaking of slavery...

America's Smugglers

The American colonies consumed millions of pounds of tea each year. They had inherited a love of tea from the British.

Britain sought to recoup the cost of protecting the colonies by giving themselves a monopoly on tea. They then taxed that tea expecting huge revenues.

This only served to create a black market. Smugglers such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams got rich buying cheaper tea from Dutch merchants and undercutting the Brits. Yep, those noble founding fathers were running criminal empires.

Tea party or market manipulation?

These founding fathers lead boycotts against British goods. Not because of high minded ideals but because they stood to make money.

With unsold tea piling up and debts mounting, Britain refunded the tea tax and dropped middlemen requirements. This horrified the smugglers. Cutting the price of British tea in half would destroy their lucrative lives of crime.

Samuel Adams got to work spreading disinformation. He lied that Britain was raising the price of tea, riling up mobs to harass British merchants. When three ships chock full of cheap British tea arrived in Boston harbor a suspiciously well-organized group boarded the ships. They threw the tea overboard, ensuring demand for the smugglers. Unsurprisingly smugglers employed quite of few of these patriots.

Some of these guys were paid to do this

These smugglers used American colonists love of tea to manipulate them into supporting a revolt. Thankfully at no other time in history did capitalists lie to Americans to start a war that lined their pockets.

One drug for another

But the Brits had bigger problems than some breakaway colonies. While they had slave labor to provide sugar from the West, China was getting rich from its lucrative tea production in the East.

China had little interest in goods from Britain. The only currency China accepted was silver and there wasn't enough to match the insatiable demand for tea.

British merchants turned to the one product that had high demand in China, opium. Though the Emperor banned opium many times, British merchants sold chests full of opium by the ton to Chinese drug smugglers. Just as the British had trouble stopping colonial tea smuggling, the Chinese government could not stop the flow of opium.

Opium addiction exploded.

In an open letter to the queen, the Chinese government begged the English public to halt the opium trade. When his plea fell on deaf ears, the Emperor took more direct measures. Heavy penalties were introduced. Chinese soldiers seized and destroyed entire warehouses of opium.

The British did not take kindly to this...

War brewing

This began a series of opium wars in which the British empire first forced China to pay "reparations" for the destroyed opium, open more ports to opium trade, and eventually to completely legalize opium.

The demand for tea caused what China calls its century of humiliation.

Tea heist

Britain needed to keep China hooked on opium to ensure the steady flow of tea. At least until British businessmen sent in undercover Scottish botanist Robert Fortune.

Undercover botanist Robert Fortune

Fortune snuck deep into China's tea growing regions disguised as a Chinese merchant. He transported seeds and expertise to British-controlled India. Assam black tea began as a covert operation to break China's monopoly. Industrialization later allowed Indian tea exports to exceed that of China.

The tea

To recap:

• Tea was given as tribute from the start
• Tea then drove demand for sugar and therefor slavery
• Tea fueled the industrial revolution
• Tea helped kickstart the United States of America
• Tea resulted in drug trafficking and war in China, something China is angry with the West about to this day
• Tea secrets were stolen from China in an undercover mission

So next time you are sipping on a cup of tea, know you are drinking a brew so powerful it shaped modern life. Often for the worse.