My last post shared what I learnt about tea and the temperance movement. In this post, I want to share what I learnt about the tea adulteration (a pretty scary concept) because it’s got a much longer history than I imagined.

The first time I realised that tea wasn’t as straightforward as I thought was when I read Tea with Jane Austen, where I learnt that people would create fake tea “made with ash tree leaves that were dried, baked, “trod upon until the leaves are small, then lifted and steeped in copperas, with sheep’s dung, after which, being dried on a floor, they are fit for use.”” That was pretty scary, and then I read For All the Tea in China, which revealed to me that the Chinese were, at one point in time, adulterating their teas by dying it with Prussian Blue to make it appear greener and hence appealing.

A Thirst for Empire put things into context by revealing how “[p]erhaps to an even greater degree than today, foods and drinks evoked public concern in mid-Victorian Britain.”Although laws punishing the adulteration of tea and coffee had existed since the eighteenth century, people didn’t seem to be as concerned (perhaps we’re more like those long ago tea drinkers than we realise). Advances in chemistry meant that food experts, amoung many others, believed that “[i]f adulteration and other forms of commercial trickery disguised the commodity, chemistry promised to reveal the true nature of things.” They turned adulteration into “a health issue, a moral failing, and a crime“.

Unfortunately, this resulted in people stoking anti-Chinese sentiments, as people accused the Chinese of not only adulterating teas, but also counterfeiting them. Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely), there wasn’t as widespread a consciousness that people back in England were doing the same thing – there was a form of tea that was “a mixture of pigments added to beech, elm, oak, willow, poplar, hawthorn, and sloe leaves and genuine tea or tea dust.” And that isn’t the only fake tea concoction. An 1843 report from the English Inland Revenue Office reported that at least eight manufactuerers in London took used tea and dried them before “facing” them, a term that means mixing the dried, used leaves with gum, rose pink, black lead, or similar items.

All that sounds disgusting, not to mention dangerous to health. Which might explain the decline in popularity of green tea, as people compared green tea to opium.

This scare gave opportunists like John Horniman a chance to grab a piece of the tea market, as he marketed his Chinese teas as having been overseen from the time they were plucked, thus being absolutely free of contaminants and hence absolutely healthy.

By the way, if you’re thinking that this is all ancient history, you might want to know that as recently as 2012, a company in Zhejiang was investigated for selling used tea leaves as new (source). In addition, the Indian Food Safety and Drug Administration seized 1 tonne of adulterated tea dust in August, 2018 (source). All this means that the history of adulterated and fake tea is still being written.