I am a simple person. I see a book about tea, I read the book about tea. Even if it’s so academic I feel like giving up.

When I started Tea War, I was quite happy to find mentions of Wu Juenong, whose book An Illustrated Modern Reader of The Classic of Tea I read recently, and Erika Rappaport’s book, A Thirst for Empire. I’ve found that Tea War works as a complement for A Thirst for Empire. A Thirst for Empire focuses on tea in the British empire, pulling in the colonies where appropriate, while Tea War looks at the tea other way round, focusing on the tea industry in Assam and China and talking about the colonial powers in terms of their involvement in the industry.

What I liked about Tea War was that it centered Asian countries. Unfortunately, it’s also very academic and frankly, was pretty hard to read. To be fair, I am very rusty on political economic theory (I think I may have taken a class in uni but my economics degree focused on the internet most of the time) so if I was more up to date on that, I think I would have had a better time.

To compare it to another text I initially found academic, here’s a comparison of one passage summarising what the book is about from Tea War and A Thirst for Empire. This is how Tea War reads:

The modern history of tea was not a story of global homogenization nor of the uniform dissemination of ideas from the West to the Rest. Instead, world competition gave rise to a set of shared, mutually constitutive pressures and uneven rates of profit and accumulation. It thereby produced regionally distinctive tensions exacerbated by the marketplace and manifested through idiosyncratic labor practices and ideological forms. After all, it was precisely the divergent fates of Chinese and Indian tea, and the attendant desire to catch up with one another, that motivated firms and officials to critically scrutinize their rivals’ histories and behaviours.

Tea War by Andrew B. Liu

And this is how A Thirst for Empire reads:

This book is a study of a global commodity that foregrounds intimate yet public settings, individuals, institutions, and recurrent practices. It investigates key episodes that illuminate the underlying ideologies and cultural norms and political and economic thinking that shaped the behaviors of a transational business.

A Thirst for Empire by Erika Rappaport

I personally find A Thirst for Empire to be easier to read, but I’ve also read it a few times, so I am probably more familiar with the text (vs reading Tea War for the first time).

Anyway, my focus for the book was to track the changes in the tea industry in China and India, and that worked out pretty well. In the 19th century, tea making in both countries was very manual, but as tea in India got cheaper (due to things like technology improvement but also penal contracts that created indentured labour), it started to overtake the Chinese supply of tea. This deterioration of tea trade was first noticed in 1870 (according to a commissioner reflecting in 1891) and prompted some soul searching on the Chinese side. First, they thought that taxes were the issue, and then they moved on to other issues. In January 1896, an official named Chen Chi submitted a memorial to the imperial court to address the matter of tea. The memorial consisted of two parts:

• Part 1: three major problems – the rise of South Asian tea, scattered character of undercapitalised Chinese merchants, and the tug of war between tea peasants and inland factories
• Part 2: four solutions – tea-rolling machinery, motorised boats for transport, a guild warehouse, and a reduction on transport taxes. 

I ended up with 9 pages of notes, but one more thing I wanted to share were some traditions related to tea-picking in Wuyi. From my notes:

The first day of tea plucking is called Kaishan, where the pluckers climb the mountain to harvest the leaves, and on the opening day, they must climb in silence to avoid to god of illness and have a rich bountiful breakfast. In addition, breakfast is eaten standing up, the workers must walk straight to the garden, and stay silent and without turning their head (if they turn back, legend says they will have an eye disease. Also turning your head means you’re not fully committed and the mountain god will be angry). After an hour of work, the baotou returns and gives the workers some cigarettes and all the taboos are lifted. There’s also a custom that “forbade the workers from eating their lunch anywhere else but near the factory at the top of the mountains, where the baotou could monitor them” If you’re thinking this sounds exploitative, you’re not the only one because to Lin Fuquan, “these customs appeared as nothing more than cynical tactics for asserting control over the pluckers.”

This caught my eye because I haven’t thought of superstition as a tool for controlling workers. I didn’t mention it much in my very, very brief summary of the book, but at the start, it’s clear that Chinese labour practices were also somewhat exploitative. They didn’t go to the length of penal contracts, but looking at how they measured and paid for work (such as randomly selecting when to weight the leaves to determine contracts and the superstitions to modify their behaviour), Chinese merchants also had no scruples trying to get the most work for the least amount of money.

It does seem that the most exploitative process ends up with the cheapest tea (hence the rise of India tea, although I would argue that a campaign for Empire Tea also helped to shift demand towards them), so I would argue that regardless of who is producing the tea, one of the things we can take from this book is to be wary of tea that is too cheap. If farmers and/or farm workers are to be paid fairly, then we must expect the cost of tea to increase.

Overall, if you’re looking at the supply side of tea during the modern period, this is definitely a book to read because it deals with two major producers. If you want to look at tea consumption, though, you may have to look somewhere else.

If you liked this, read…

A Thirst for Empire by Erika Rappaport – Tea War focuses on the supply side of things, and I think A Thirst for Empire focuses on the demand side of things. It’s a pretty thick book, but fascinating and I would definitely recommend it.

A Social History of Tea by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson – A Thirst for Empire focuses on Britain, so if you want to know more about tea consumption in America, A Social History of Tea is for you. This book looks at both the UK and America, so if you just want a brief introduction to the history of tea in both countries, this would be a good book to read.

An Illustrated Modern Reader of The Classic of Tea by Wu Juenong – If you want a more general look at the history of tea in China, Wu Juenong’s reader is a good start.