I’m done with the longest book on tea that I have ever read! The Tale of Tea by George van Driem is a whopping 864 pages and chock-full of information. To commemorate reading this book, I filmed my first ever video review (note: I made a mistake and said that Lu Yu belonged to the Song dynasty in the video. He actually lived in the Tang dynasty, my bad!)

If you don’t like to watch a video, I’ve got you covered. The Tale of Tea can be divided into the following sections:

1. The Primordial Origins of Tea
2. Tea Spreads to China
3. Tea Arrives in Japan and Korea
4. East Meets West: the Intrepid Portuguese
5. Dutch Capitalism and the Globalisation of Tea
6. The English Take to Tea: Wars in Europe
7. Interlude: Coffee and Chocolate
8. Taxes vs Freedom from Oppression
9. Tea Transformed: Wars in Asia
10. Tea Terroir and Tea Cuisine
11. Tea Chemistry and Fanciful Concoction
12. Tending the Tea Garden

Personally, I found the chapters on the origins of tea, the history of tea in China, Japan, and Korea, and the later chapters on the history of tea in countries such as Brazil, Georgia and the Azores to be the most helpful to me. I took so many notes in the first three chapters and I even did a blogpost on the history of scientific nomenclature of camellia sinensis because it was fascinating!

Some things I learnt, so you can have a taste of what the book talks about:

• Robert Fortune did not discover that green and black tea came fromthe same plants. There was a misconception going around, but in the beginning, when tea first arrived in Europe, the botanists there were pretty clear that it was by the same plant.
• Other Chinese hanzi that were contenders for the word “tea” include: 茗 (ming) and 荼 (tu), among others! These words are no longer in use, so it was actually pretty difficult to write them using the Hanyu pinyin keyboard!
• “Border Road Tea 路边茶” that was exported to Tibet, Turkestan, Mongolia and other regions, “met lower standards of quality than the tea that was to be consumed in China, and transportation was difficult.” 
• The British weren’t the only ones to tax tea. Acording to the book, “the sudden thriving trade in tea inspired Zhao Zan, a powerful official in the spendthrift Tang government of emperor Dezong to impose a 10% tax on the production of tea in 782. The Tang government soon found, however, that it was not able to apply the tax effectively because local potentates in Sichuan would exact the tax but then withhold the revenue from the court or merely pay a quota.”
• The difference between Chinese and Japanese tea contests: “Whereas the Chinese tea tasting contests focused on determining which tea was the best, the Japanese contests originated as a competition in order to identify which tea came from the superb tea garden at Toganoo in Kyoto and so to distinguish honcha (本茶 ‘true tea’) from hicha (非茶 ‘false tea)’ originated from other tea gardens.” Very soon after inception of the tea contests in Japan, the tea from gardens at Uji came to be denominated as Honcha

There was a lot that I liked about The Tale of Tea. As you can tell, it’s full of information, a lot of it new to me, and the coverage was truly global. Although only the first three chapters focused on tea in Asia, the information in there was much more detailed yet wider in scope than most other books I’ve read. I also appreciated the fact that many small tea-producing countries were discussed because we don’t normally hear about them.

I also liked all the myth-busting done. Apart from the myths of Shennong and Robert Fortune, van Driem also deals with the story of how tea was popularised in England. In contrast to the commonly told story of how Catherine of Braganza popularised tea in England, van Driem argues that Catherine was “notoriously conservative in her culinary preferences” and that “records of the period attest neither to her drinking tea before her arrival in England nor to her bringing tea with her to Britain.” Instead, he points out that having been in exile in Netherlands and Paris, Charles II would have been familiar with tea which was a trendy beverage in those two countries.

Another point of note was the origin of the practice of afternoon tea in England. George van Driem differs from Erika Rappaport in that he doesn’t think that the practice of afternoon tea started with the temperance movement, rather, he argues that it’s a practice imported from the Dutch. It’s in the section on how the English take to Tea and I’d recommend reading that if it’s something you’re interested in.

This is a very minor detail, but I was also delighted to find a footnote about the origin of TWG and its lawsuits with Mariages Freres. It’s something that I’m always surprised more people don’t know about, so I appreciated the long footnote about the whole thing.

On the other hand, van Driem has a tendency to go on long tangents, which is probably why the book is so long. The chapter on Taxes vs Freedom from Oppression was my least favourite because it digressed into discussions on gay tea parties and McCarthyism (interesting but is camellia sinensis actually involved in this?), Edward Snowden, and the modern American tea party. It seems like a stretch to connect these topics to the tea plant and I wasn’t convinced about the merits of this chapter.

So, is this book worth it? On Amazon.com, The Tale of Tea costs USD$299 (I might have made another mistake in the video) which converts to over SGD$400. That’s a lot. On one hand, there’s a lot of information in here and the book is definitely very highly researched. On the other hand, the book isn’t without its flaws (see: point on digressions).

Personally, my opinion is that this book isn’t for people who are just getting into tea. It’s more for people who are looking to go deep into the history of tea, in which case, as a researcher this book may be worth it for you. But if you can find a copy of the book in the library or in a friend’s house, you should definitely try to borrow it.