In March, 1904, the Southwark Borough Council at the request of Sir William Collins gave permission for an inquiry to be made into the constituents of tea in order to ascertain what injurious ingredients were present, and if it were possible to obtain the characteristic effects without subjecting tea-drinkers to any of the deleterious symptoms. The subject will be seen to be of importance and I propose to include a brief history of the use of the Tea plant, together with a general review of the experience gained by those best competent to judge of the effects since its introduction of what has now come to be considered a necessity of life. In addition there are set forth the results of examination of different samples of tea and the general conclusions to which I have arrived.
What we call tea, is called by the Chinese tcha, tha, or te, and by the Russians tchai. The original English word was tee, at least this is the name used by Samuel Pepys one of the earliest to allude to the herb in this country. Tee was afterwards altered to tay, as will be seen from Pope’s lines in the “Rape of the Lock.”
Soft yielding minds to water glide away
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tay.
Or again,
Hear thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tay.
Some of the modern editions of Pope have altered the spelling at the expense of the rhyme.
The tea-plant, Thea Sinensis, botanically speaking a close ally of the Camellia is in its natural state a tree which attains to 20 or 30 feet in height. Under cultivation it remains a shrub from three to six feet high. It grows in all tropical and sub-tropical countries, and roughly it takes the labour of one man a day to produce a pound of tea. The leaves—the only part of the plant used in commerce—vary from two to six inches long, are evergreen, lanceolate and serrated throughout nearly the whole margin; the leaves are stalked and arranged alternately on axis, the flowers somewhat resemble apple blossoms but are smaller.
The shrubs are planted in rows three or four feet apart and look like a field of currant or gooseberry bushes; at the end of the third year the bushes become large enough to allow of the first picking and in the eighth year the plant is cut down, when new shoots spring up from the old roots. In Ceylon and parts of India the first picking is in March and there may be as many as 25 pickings in the season until October; in China the first picking is in April, and in Japan late in April or early May. The early pickings make the finest quality of tea, and the very late leaves are not usually exported at all, but are used by the peasants locally. In preparation for commerce the leaves are subjected to various processes of drying, rolling and roasting, into which it would not be necessary at any length to enter; the essential point to remember is that black tea differs from green in that after a short preliminary rolling and roasting, the leaves are exposed to the air in a soft moist state, when they undergo fermentation with the result it is said that a portion of the tannic acid is converted to sugar. Robert Fortune,[1] an authority on the cultivation of the tea plant thought that the differences of manufacture “fully account for the difference in colour, as well as for the effect produced on some constitutions by green tea, such as nervous irritability, sleeplessness, &c.”
When we come to look into the early origin of the practice of tea-drinking we find that the subject is shrouded in the mists of antiquity. There are many legendary stories of the discovery and use of tea by the Chinese, but the only authentic and well-attested accounts were given by two Mahommedans who travelled in India and China in the ninth century. The original manuscript was found in the Comte de Seignelay’s library by Eusebius Renaudot and published in 1733. There is plain internal evidence that the manuscript was written about 1173, for there are observations upon the extent and circumference of the walls and towers of Damascus and other cities in subjection to the Sultan Nuroddin, who is spoken of as living at that time. This prince died in 1173 which fixes the date of the narrative before that time. The account speaks of the Arab merchants having been present in China in the years 851 and 867 respectively. On page 25 occurs the following important passage “The Emperor also reserves to himself the revenues which arise from the salt mines and from a certain Herb which they drink with hot water, and of which great quantities are sold in all the cities, to the amount of great sums. They call it sah and it is a shrub more bushy than the pomegranate tree and of a more taking smell, but it has a kind of bitterness with it. Their way is to boil water, which they pour upon this leaf, and this drink cures all sorts of diseases; whatever sums are lodged in the treasury arise from the Poll-tax, and the duties upon salt, and upon this leaf.”[2]
Tea was therefore much in vogue in China in the 9th century. From China the knowledge was carried to Japan, and there the cultivation was established at the beginning of the 13th century; from that time until the 19th century China and Japan have been the only two tea producing countries. As with all innovations Europe and particularly England was very slow to take to the practice, for tea is hardly mentioned by any of the writers prior to the 16th century.