THE HISTORY OF TEA IN THE UK
Tea only made its way to England in large quantities in the first years of the 17th century. Dutch and Portuguese traders were shipping tea from China and a few other Asian countries to Europe regularly by 1610.
Tea was being sold more widely in England by 1657, in London’s existing coffee houses, but it was called Tcha, China Drink, Tay or Tee, and was generally sold as a remedy to cure all ills; from fatigue and lack of virility to overall poor health and diseases of all kinds, and it was expensive. Tea was sold in the mid-1600s for as much as £10 per pound (£22 per kilogram), which is around £2,000 in today’s money. Needless to say, the average Brit didn’t have a £4,000 a year habit at the time. Commoners and servants would be lucky to earn £50 per year back then, so tea was exclusively for the very well off and they would lock it away in tea caddies.
Nonetheless, it was available on almost every street in London by 1659. When Queen Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II, introduced the custom of taking tea to the royal court in 1662 it became more than just addictive, it became fashionable. By the mid-18th century, Canton was exporting nearly 7 million tons of tea to Europe each year; nearly half of it on British owned ships.
Of course, the Crown didn’t take long to see the growing popularity of this new luxury good as a source of income. By the 18th century tea imports were being taxed at as much as 119%. The heavy taxation of course lead to smuggling on a massive scale, but also the sale of lower quality, sometimes dangerously adulterated tea. Used tea leaves were often dried and mixed in with new leaves, and plants like liquorice, sloe and willow were used to ‘bulk up’ the much more expensive tea leaves. This smuggling was largely eliminated after 1784, when the tax on tea was brought down to 12.5%, but adulteration remained a large problem until it was made illegal in 1875.
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