- 4 months ago
- #tracesofchina
- #tea
- #chineseculture
- #bubbletea
About 500 years ago, tea was introduced to Europe, regarded as a rare Oriental medicine and luxury — hailed as “green gold.” The second episode of Traces of China II explores how an ancient leaf from the East quietly changed the world.
The journey takes you to Tregothnan Estate, Britain’s oldest tea garden, to experience the art of hand-picking tea. At Cambridge, historian Alan Macfarlane reveals that without Chinese tea, there might have been no Industrial Revolution — nor a British Empire.
The episode also uncovers the story of Robert Fortune and the Wardian case, which transformed global trade, and traces tea’s evolution — from London’s luxurious afternoon teas to the worldwide craze for bubble tea — all returning to the pure, authentic essence of Chinese tea. #Tracesofchina #tea #chineseculture #bubbletea
The journey takes you to Tregothnan Estate, Britain’s oldest tea garden, to experience the art of hand-picking tea. At Cambridge, historian Alan Macfarlane reveals that without Chinese tea, there might have been no Industrial Revolution — nor a British Empire.
The episode also uncovers the story of Robert Fortune and the Wardian case, which transformed global trade, and traces tea’s evolution — from London’s luxurious afternoon teas to the worldwide craze for bubble tea — all returning to the pure, authentic essence of Chinese tea. #Tracesofchina #tea #chineseculture #bubbletea
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00:00One way of thinking about tea is to imagine a world without tea.
00:21Millions of people in moments of stress or worry or celebration
00:29reached for a cup of tea.
00:31Many people's lives would be emptied out without drinking tea.
00:38Tea originated in China more than 5,000 years ago.
00:43Once drunk for its medicinal properties, tea is now the world's favourite beverage.
00:48More tea is drunk than any other liquid than water on this planet.
00:54So it's special and there's a huge amount of reverence for it.
00:58There are many temples and holy places which are devoted to tea.
01:03It's a worshipful object.
01:08The city of Cambridge in the UK is a centre of learning and cultural exchange,
01:13a place where knowledge has been passed down for centuries.
01:17Today students are welcomed to a special class,
01:21exploring the artistry and heritage of the ancient Chinese tea ceremony.
01:27Wow, this looks beautiful.
01:30Good afternoon everyone and welcome you here for the first tea tasting session of the spring.
01:36Today we will demonstrate the selection of green tea which we preserved from last year.
01:44So they are very light hint of spring grass, very beautiful.
01:51While Chinese tea technically comes from the same plant,
01:54several distinct types have evolved over centuries.
01:58White, green, black, oolong and the rarest yellow.
02:04Each with their own variations.
02:07Actually if you look at the tea here, there are a lot of varieties.
02:12They came from different areas of China.
02:14So we can see a map of tea of China.
02:17Because China is a very big country and we have a coastal area,
02:20we have a mountainous area.
02:22So different area, we have different kind of tea plants.
02:26Tea was further shaped by religion, trade and the craftsmanship of tea masters.
02:32Buddhist monks sought the purity in green tea.
02:36Emperors prized delicate white teas
02:39and merchants relied on black teas for long-distance trade.
02:44This Puerh tea from Yunnan province has been skillfully preserved inside citrus peel.
02:51Flower tea is hand-tied with edible flowers, unfurling into a floral bloom in hot water.
03:01So now I'm going to brew another very famous tea, rock tea from Wuyi Mountain.
03:07The tea plants grow in the crevices of the rocks.
03:12Rock tea is a type of roasted oolong, known for its rich mineral taste and complex flavours.
03:18So you can see that the tea leaves are much longer and bigger.
03:23Would you like to try? Smell it.
03:26Oh lovely, it's almost chocolatey in a way.
03:29Yeah.
03:31And you've got a different teapot there. Is there something special about that teapot?
03:35For brew Chinese tea, actually it's not only about tea, but also the teaware is also very important.
03:41So different tea, we normally use different kind of teaware to brew it.
03:45Clay teapots like this absorb flavours over time, creating a seasoned vessel that enhances each brew.
03:53Others like porcelain or glass preserve the tea's taste, making them ideal for delicate teas or switching between varieties.
04:01So tea in Asian China, over 2000 years ago, it was considered as a remedy, like a medicine.
04:09Chinese medicine theory is all based on the theory of we are part of nature and we are as a whole, as a unit.
04:19How important is tea to the people of China?
04:23Tea creates opportunity for us to gather together, to share not only tea, but also share different kind of beautiful teaware.
04:32And also you share your personal taste. You present your personal taste with your friends.
04:38They want to calm down in a very busy day, so they can have a reflection about their life, about today.
04:44It's like meditation. So don't talk about the future, don't talk about the past, but we enjoy the moment. We enjoy tea.
04:51It's running right through like a thread, through Chinese civilisation, like a colour, like a dye that has dyed China with a different colour.
05:09Everything is infused with tea.
05:12Professor Alan McFarlane, here at Cambridge University, has written extensively on the subject.
05:18Well, tea is in my blood because I was born in Assam, one of the great tea producing areas in Shillong.
05:26And my father was a manager of a tea estate for 25 years. And so I was brought up among tea bushes.
05:34I used to tell my students to drink tea before their exams. It reduces cancers. It reduces strokes, heart attacks. It's good for the teeth. It's very good for the eyes.
05:47It increases your memory and your concentration by 20 to 30 percent.
05:52Do you think it was China's intention for tea to spread all around the world?
05:56My book is called Green Gold, The Empire of Tea. And I have this conceit that it's not that we that spread tea, that tea is using us to spread itself, which is what plants do.
06:09They attract animals, who then spread it around. And tea attracted human beings.
06:15So the Chinese were great traders and they traded all sorts of other things like silks and porcelain and other things along the Silk Road.
06:24And the great advantage of tea as a trade good, obviously, is that it has high value for weight.
06:31In other words, you can carry a lot of tea on the back of a camel or in a ship and you get a lot of money for it and it's very scarce.
06:42Although tea passed through several European countries before reaching Britain, most favoured the growing trend of coffee drinking.
06:50And none embraced tea quite as wholeheartedly as the British, turning it into a sought after luxury enjoyed by the super rich in its pure green form, just as it had been in China.
07:02Could you paint a picture for me of what Britain was like at that time when tea first started to arrive?
07:08It was the most affluent country in general wealth of anywhere in the world.
07:14Because of its wealth, it ate really good food and it also drank very well.
07:19The English took the view that water was very dangerous, which it was, so you should never drink water.
07:26So what else could you drink? Will you drink beer?
07:33As a safer alternative to contaminated water, tea gradually replaced beer as the everyday drink.
07:39Unlike the male-dominated ale houses and coffee houses, tea found favour in the domestic setting.
07:47Tea became the property of women. It was the women who made the tea, served the tea.
07:54By the 1700s, tea was no longer just the luxury, but becoming a daily ritual for all classes.
08:01The rise of black tea, oxidised for long journeys, saw the introduction of milk and sugar to soften its bold flavours, shaping Britain's tea culture.
08:14Ships were built to trade more quickly, and prices became more competitive.
08:20By the 1800s, demand for tea was so high that sailing ships, known as clippers, would race from China to England.
08:28The Cutty Sark was one of the fastest vessels of this era, and now stands in London as the world's last remaining clipper ship.
08:38Why was it so important to be first on the tea delivery?
08:41Yeah, I mean, it's a strange thing, because obviously tea being a dry product, it was a bit of a fallacy, really.
08:47But for aspirant Victorians, I think there was a real fashion growing that they wanted the very first.
08:54So if you could get back to London first, you could command the highest prices.
08:58So in this time, there were great races between clipper ships, where cash award was given to the first ship to arrive back in London.
09:04And this garnered a lot of press attention, so there was a great deal of excitement building around these beautiful tea clippers, which were pinnacle of Victorian design.
09:14But also, crucially, the cargo that they were carrying, this exotic, beautiful tea.
09:19But if you think that just one cargo was worth six million pounds in today's money, I think that paints a picture that it was pretty big business and a huge part of British life.
09:29And what was the journey the tea would then take?
09:32A voyage would tend to last about a year, really, because it would take roughly 120 days to get out and around about the same to get back.
09:42And then you'd also spend a bit of time in China securing that cargo.
09:49With so much effort being poured into Britain's growing obsession with tea, we could ask, was it really just about a drink?
09:56Or could the resilient tea plants have been quietly shaping the course of history?
10:02The most important effect is that it made the British Industrial Revolution possible.
10:08Because until tea arrived, there was no possibility that large cities could grow to a size where you could begin to get industrial growth.
10:21Because what always happened was that as the city expanded, the water was polluted and you got waterborne diseases.
10:30And so suddenly, the population of London, Manchester, Birmingham and so on in the 18th century could go on growing.
10:41Helping cities to grow by providing safer drinking water wasn't the only thing that tea was bringing to the table.
10:47You find that from that time onwards, the factories and the mines are incredibly difficult places to work in.
10:56You're working with dangerous machinery or deep in the ground.
11:00They were sustained by tea.
11:02The tea break and the tea trolley were the only ways that people could concentrate for hours on end doing this repetitive and boring work.
11:09So we would not have had an industrial revolution, nor would we have had the British Empire.
11:18Because the pillar of the British Empire was trade.
11:21And the pillar of that trade was the East India Company trading to India.
11:25And the East India Company was centrally around the trade of tea from China.
11:32So without the tea trade, the East India Company would have been nothing like what it was.
11:38And our empire in India, and hence elsewhere, would have been just a shadow of what it was.
11:44The Industrial Revolution was transforming Britain.
11:53Cities were booming, factories were rising, and workers needed fuel to keep up the pace.
11:59But relations with China were being tested.
12:02The opium wars mark a dark moment in the history of Britain and China's trading relationship.
12:10What began as a thriving exchange of tea and goods soon spiralled into conflict.
12:17The Chinese wanted only payment in silver.
12:20And this was something that the British government had decided was not sustainable.
12:24So they had to find another way of recouping the silver.
12:27The option they selected was to grow opium in India and then smuggle that opium into China.
12:34And they were then paid in silver.
12:37So they recouped this silver with this nefarious method.
12:40At this time, opium was forbidden in China.
12:44And various efforts were made to stop the growing trend.
12:48These attempts angered the British authorities, who retaliated with force, ultimately triggering the conflict.
12:54So before the opium war, only Canton had been open to foreign trade.
13:00After the opium war, other ports had been forced to open.
13:04And then also there was a very interesting twist where a Scottish botanist by the name of Robert Fortune,
13:11he was actually instrumental in what we call, you know, agricultural espionage.
13:16The British felt if they could get the tea plants and the closely guarded secrets of how to process the tea out of China,
13:25they could grow and produce it themselves.
13:28He went into China disguised, spoke the language, blended with the locals.
13:33He stole about 20,000 saplings of tea, which were then cultivated in the northeastern part of India,
13:39in a small town called Darjeeling.
13:42It was here that Britain's grand quest to import tea from China took an ironic twist,
13:48when they discovered India's indigenous Assam tea plants had been thriving all along,
13:54right under their noses.
13:56So Darjeeling was where Chinese tea bushes slowly flourished,
13:59and Assam is where Assam tea bushes were found to be indigenously grown.
14:06Fortune and his accomplices recruited Chinese tea farmers to share their cultivation practices,
14:12recreating the plant's ideal conditions, true to their Chinese heritage.
14:18And established the industry that we now know today in India and Africa,
14:23and broke free of being reliant just on trading with the Chinese.
14:26Jonathan Jones is a horticulturalist, an expert in botanical innovation,
14:36working at one of Britain's most celebrated estates,
14:40which, as fate would have it, happens to be home to an historical treasure,
14:45with direct links to Robert Fortune himself.
14:48So what's this, Jonathan?
14:49This is a travelling greenhouse, a Wardian case named after Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward.
14:54Oh, wow.
14:55This is a complete and exact replica of the oldest surviving wand
15:00that was found here at Tregothnan in one of the garden sheds.
15:03And it was used by Robert Fortune, and what's good about it is you can lift it up
15:08and pop the tea bushes inside, and the water that you've added inside stays inside
15:14because it runs down and stays in there like a bottle garden concept.
15:18Most of the world's countries that now grow tea got the tea bushes through one of these travelling greenhouses.
15:22So where did they find it?
15:25I was cleaning out a shed, and one of the garden guys said to me,
15:30have you seen this old rabbit hutch? It was under a pile of netting.
15:33And when I got to it, I couldn't believe my eyes, because I'd read all about these things.
15:37I could not believe that this was a surviving Wardian case.
15:41And yeah, this is amazing. It's a living piece of history.
15:49China still accounts for up to 40% of the world's tea production, followed by India, Kenya and Sri Lanka.
15:56With tea's reach extending across these tropical regions, its global conquest was well underway.
16:04But few could have imagined that this special plant would one day set seed in the most unlikely of landscapes.
16:11Welcome to the UK's oldest tea plantation.
16:14Wow, this is stunning.
16:24Tregothman in Cornish meaning the house at the head of the valley.
16:29And we benefit from warm Atlantic weather and lots of rain.
16:34So we have a true microclimate here, which allows us to grow not just one kind of tea, but lots of Chinese teas.
16:43We've got tea bushes from the east coast of China all the way out to Yunnan.
16:47How much tea is here?
16:49Oh, almost two acres. This was a trial site.
16:53And the first of this kind of tea on this river.
16:56Although it's south facing, people think, oh, tea needs hot, dry conditions.
16:59It actually hates that. It wants to be in shade. It likes warm, wet conditions.
17:04But when you get them up to this high, they shelter each other.
17:08This is what we call the plucking table. These bushes are at least 10 years old now.
17:12Tea needs a really specific set of conditions.
17:15And the trick is, if you find baby tea bushes growing underneath, you know they're really happy.
17:20Tregothnan produces around 10 to 15 tonnes of tea per year, grown, harvested and processed directly on the estate.
17:36And there's five steps. This is step one. This is plucking and we're taking the top two leaves and the bud.
17:42Just the little tips.
17:43Just the little tips. There's loads to choose from.
17:45Lovely season started. And then we can put these out here to wither.
17:51Okay.
17:52Wither our tea leaves.
17:53Withering them. And that's step two.
17:55The leaves are softening, wilting literally, and they go quite rubbery.
17:59And then you can pick them up and roll them, which is step three.
18:02That's doing this gently.
18:04Just a little handful.
18:05Yeah. The main thing is to bruise them and then oxidation begins.
18:08And you start to get the tea flavour or the smell.
18:11Smells kind of sweet, doesn't it?
18:13Gorgeous.
18:14Yeah.
18:15It's the first of this year and it just takes you straight into that beautiful summery.
18:20Oh, it's gorgeous.
18:21Ready for the cup out.
18:22Yeah.
18:23The natural juices or chemicals within the leaf react with each other.
18:26A bit like when you cut an apple and it goes from green to brown.
18:29Same is happening with this.
18:31And in China, they stop the oxidation at different stages to get different kinds of tea.
18:36So if you want green tea, you would let it go a little away.
18:39If you want white tea, you wouldn't do this at all.
18:41You'd literally pick and dry.
18:43Finally, black tea, which is what most people want.
18:46Maximum oxidation and then you get a really strong black tea.
18:50Look at that.
18:51So what's the next step?
18:52What do we do with this now?
18:53Well, it depends how patient you are, Amelia.
18:55You can either put hot water on that and drink a very fresh green tea, which would have very light flavour.
19:00Or you can leave that overnight.
19:02And by lunchtime tomorrow, you'll have storable or drinkable tea.
19:16Hello.
19:17Hello.
19:18Good to see you.
19:19Come along in and taste some tea.
19:21Now, this is blended with Darjeeling.
19:25And here we have it.
19:27Tea cultivated for centuries in China, now grown in the UK, and even blended with Indian varieties.
19:34Who would have thought so much cultural exchange could have been found in a simple cup of tea?
19:40Lighter?
19:41Yes.
19:42It's softer.
19:43Darjeeling tea is lighter.
19:46So we call that afternoon tea because that is what you would traditionally drink in the afternoon.
19:51To finish with, we'll go on to what we call the single estate.
19:56This is pure Tregothan tea.
19:58Not blended, so it tastes different from batch to batch.
20:02Ooh.
20:06Ooh, that's really nice.
20:07Yeah, it's different, isn't it?
20:08It has a very distinctive flavour.
20:10Now, this is the ones we sell to China.
20:11Right.
20:12They love it.
20:13Now, the Chinese look at tea in much the way we look at very fine wine.
20:17It's all about where it's grown, what the climate's been like.
20:21Tells you a whole story.
20:22Yes, and this is exactly the same with the tea.
20:24Yeah, really fresh.
20:25Absolutely.
20:26Could definitely drink that without milk.
20:27Oh, yes.
20:28Do you like this one with milk?
20:29No.
20:30No.
20:31No.
20:32Absolutely not.
20:34As the tea plant continues its march across continents, taking root in new lands, it wasn't just the British developing a passion for it.
20:45Through trade routes along the Silk Road and expanding commercial networks, regions like the Middle East, India and Russia were also shaping their own tea traditions.
20:55You know, some would add ginger, some would add cardamom, some would add cinnamon.
20:59The addition of ingredients like milk, sugar, fruits and spices became an essential part of the evolving tea rituals, shaping the cultural traditions that continue to influence how it's enjoyed around the world today.
21:14Many people may not realize, but every single day, seven billion cups of tea are drunk around the world.
21:25So that's almost every single human on the planet having a cup of tea every single day.
21:31That's how ubiquitous and global and international it is.
21:37Tea is so good because you can enjoy it at the absolute pinnacle of an experience in the best hotels.
21:43Also, you can have a builder's brew in a mug.
21:47But the British have elevated it to a decadent ritual.
21:51Afternoon tea is now a vital part of London's tourism sector, with a growing market worth more than £800 million.
21:59So what is afternoon tea? What do you get in the experience?
22:03Tea in our culinary world has probably become one of the most prominent traditions.
22:09And in a way you can wonder why, because in theory you just had lunch and you're about to have dinner.
22:17Yet we're having this rather extravagant three-course sandwiches, scones, followed by pastry meal.
22:23So what's the necessity of all of this?
22:26I mean, if you look around the room right now, Amelia, and you see what's surrounding us, it's literally just happy faces.
22:32They're all here to really appreciate the time together.
22:38I think because it is so unnecessary, it became such a wonderful occasion to celebrate and link this sort of meal,
22:47which isn't lunch and isn't dinner and is in the middle of the afternoon, with the celebration.
22:51And I think that's exactly what over centuries and centuries marked it as such a special moment to celebrate.
23:04Five thousand years since its original conception, tea continues to find new ways to stay relevant, reinvent itself,
23:11and remain an integral part of people's lives and hearts.
23:16From traditional loose-leaf brews to modern wellness infusions, the story of tea is far from over.
23:23Just when it seemed like tea innovations had reached a limit, along came a phenomenon known as bubble tea.
23:29Emerging in Taiwan in the 1980s, it's defined by its signature ingredient, tapioca, sweet, chewy pearls made from cassava starch,
23:41which was once a key energy source for Taiwan's indigenous hunters.
23:45The sweet, multi-sensory creation of bubble tea has grown in popularity across Asia, the United States, and now Europe.
23:53Bubbleology is the UK's largest bubble tea brand, with dozens of locations around the country.
24:02It now has three franchises in central London, including this one in Bloomsbury, London's historic literary quarter.
24:09Kristin McCoy Ward's bubble tea story began as a student in Southern California.
24:15She then moved to the UK and opened her own business, and now travels the world,
24:19tracking bubble tea's continuing global rise.
24:24So how similar is this to regular tea?
24:27Very similar, actually. So majority of bubble tea has tea in it.
24:31And back there on the counter, you can see they're doing Assam black tea and jasmine green tea.
24:36Those are the two main bases that are used in bubble tea generally, and most of those teas are coming from China as well.
24:41But sometimes you'll see things like oolong, or maybe a smoky oolong, or maybe they'll just do like a jasmine, or they will just do a green tea, or they'll do a combination of the two.
24:52You know, nine times out of ten, a bubble tea drink is definitely going to have tea in it.
24:55So you can really define yourself by your bubble tea preferences.
24:58Exactly, and I think that's one of the things that makes it so popular, is the fact that you are what you say your favourite drink is.
25:04Like, there's some people who walk into a bubble tea shop, and they're very adventurous, and they want to try everything on the menu.
25:09But there's some people who go in and they like, I'm just a brown sugar tapioca pearl person.
25:13Or like, I just like taro. Or I'm just a classic milk tea fan, right?
25:17So that bubble tea kind of defines people, but it also allows people to be a little adventurous with who they are.
25:23The bubble tea market is expected to double in size in the UK and Europe within 10 years, and will be worth an estimated $2 billion globally by 2035.
25:36And here's the interesting thing. If you look at who makes up the majority of the global market, it's Asia Pacific, Southeast Asia, China, all of those areas.
25:45So they are not only leading it in terms of money, but also in terms of trends.
25:50So on my recent trip to China, I saw a lot of trends that didn't really exist before.
25:56And it wasn't until I came back a few months later, I'm starting to see tiny, tiny bits coming through.
26:02A lot of it is going back to the tea basics, actually.
26:04I think sometimes we go so far away from the actual tea itself, we get too many flavours, it becomes too sweet.
26:11So I think a lot of the stuff that we're seeing in China right now, for example, is base-flavoured, very strong, high-quality tea with a little bit of milk and maybe a little bit of sugar, and that's it.
26:22So it's the tea flavour that's shining through. And that is super important.
26:27If you were going to write a book about bubble tea, what would the ending be?
26:30Oh, dear. I don't know, actually, because I feel like there wouldn't really be an ending at this point.
26:36I don't really see an end to bubble tea. All I keep seeing it is just going on and on and on.
26:41So I think it would be a very, very long book, unfortunately, that doesn't have an end.
26:45It'll just keep going.
26:46It'll just keep going, exactly.
26:50Tea seems to be something that's been reimagined and reinvented so many times over the generations.
26:57Where do you think it's going in the future?
27:00I think we are now in the right track because, you know, nowadays we emphasise everything to be natural, organic and to be earthy.
27:11Inviting people for tea gathering become more and more popular.
27:15Tea has a very special character, it's the harmony.
27:19So just several dry leaves and with hot water, wait a little bit of time and you have an aromatic liquid to share with your friends.
27:29You think about the peace, you think about the harmony.
27:34They say today that there are more teas in China than there are wines in Western Europe.
27:38And that just shows the sort of mind-blowing diversity and endless flair that tea has.
27:44When I go to China, I'm always amazed at the interest they have in what we've done to their national drinks.
27:52So I find chains of English-style tea rooms appearing across China.
27:57I have to do tastings and talks about English tea style.
28:01It sounds strange, but I have to actually consciously think, what is the English tea style?
28:05It's just what we do.
28:08That's the thing about tea.
28:09It's got tradition and trend.
28:11It's got evolution and revolution.
28:13You know, it's got culture and craft.
28:15It's got history, geography, biology.
28:17So, you know, what's not to love?
28:22If you had magically taken away tea over the last thousand years, both in China and the West,
28:30we would be living in a totally different world.
28:36It's very important to have tea as a type of language to build up the bridge just between the two cultures.
28:44The real story is tea as a thread to knit us together.
28:50There is no distance between you and me.
29:00There is no distance between you and me.
29:01You could walk every time wherein the character in China is up to habit.
29:02There is no distance between you and me.
29:03There is no distance between you and me.
29:05The element of the沒關係- às Chernobyl.
29:06There is no distance between you and me.
29:07It's not easy.
29:08It's crazy.
29:09It's crazy.
29:11You could even imagine that your heart must correspond to me.
29:12fundamental Garrilco and Realize- 할 Quandolet around Babelours.
29:13When you come to sleep with enough support for this,
29:14When you go to sleep with the joy of the night,
29:15Where youötous Karen- MAYBE alive or slid- barbecue,
29:19and you too might look like dishes to help the past few years.
29:21participants.
29:23You can avoid logros of your trip.
29:24How about you唯 후?
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