The History of Tea in England and Europe: Dutch Ships, London Coffee Houses and the British Cup

Portuguese traders and missionaries met tea in China and Japan in the 1500s. Holland imported and drank tea in the early 1600s, decades before England.

The secret sea route

As Peter Keen tells it, the Portuguese were the very first Europeans to bring tea back from China, having found the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope, which they kept secret. The Dutch uncovered it and dominated the shipping for a century.

The Dutch also ran the smuggling. By Keen’s account, Dutch ships supplied 75% of all the tea drunk in England and in the 13 American colonies, then the largest tea drinkers per head. His earlier story puts the first recorded Dutch cargo of tea in 1606, from Japan, and notes that in 1684 the Dutch set up tea farms in Java using Japanese seed.

The voyage itself was immense. Before the Suez Canal, the run from Canton to the Port of London was about 20,000 km (12,400 miles), around the Cape of Good Hope. That is one reason Europe came to prefer black tea, which kept far better on the way than green; see The history of black tea.

France came early too

The French also took to tea before the English. For a century, Keen writes, tea was as much a part of French upper-class society as British, and its devotees included Louis XIV, Napoleon, Marcel Proust and Madame de Sévigné, the first person on record to mention adding milk and sugar to tea. In every one of these countries, tea began the same way: as a luxury, drunk with ceremony by the very rich. Only in Britain did it become the national drink.

Garraway’s coffee house

In London, a coffee-house owner named Garraway advertised it as an exotic medicine. Health was not what made tea popular, though. As a 2014 story on our blog argued, the real turning point was sugar: as sugar prices fell between 1650 and 1750, sweet tea came within reach of ordinary people, and working families came to rely on it. Read How tea really became popular across the world.

The numbers show how fast the habit grew. Peter Keen gives British sugar consumption as 4 pounds a head in 1700, 18 in 1800 and 90 in 1900.

A Portuguese queen and an English court

Tea became fashionable after the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza married King Charles II in 1662 and brought her tea-drinking habit to court. Her dowry reportedly included tea, and, in a twist that matters to us, the port of Bombay, now Mumbai. That gift, together with Charles II’s support for the East India Company, helped lay the ground for Britain’s tea trade with the East and, eventually, India’s tea gardens.

Tea was still rare. According to the story Adeline Teoh retells, when Catherine landed in England after a rough voyage and asked for a cup of tea, none could be found, and she was given ale instead.

Monopoly, taxes and smugglers

The East India Company held a monopoly on tea imports, and in 1679 it held the first tea auction, in London, then the biggest tea market in the world.

Tea was heavily taxed, so smuggling boomed until the tax was cut sharply in 1784. Keen puts the scale of that cut at a single step from 119% to 12.5%, and tells of the Hawkhurst gang, smugglers who lost a two-ton shipment of tea to customs officers in 1747.

The great tea quarrel

Not everyone approved. In 1756 the merchant Jonas Hanway called tea “pernicious to health, obstructing industry and impoverishing the nation”; Samuel Johnson, a devoted tea drinker, answered with a satire, and the public quarrel made more people curious about tea.

A box of tea for Britannia

Tea alone brought the East India Company about £30 million of revenue a year in the early 1800s, Romita Ray writes. In 1777 the Company commissioned the artist Spiridione Roma to paint a ceiling for East India House, its London headquarters. In The East Offering its Riches to Britannia (1778, now in the British Library), Chinese tea and porcelain spill across the canvas, and a small box of tea rests at the feet of Father Thames.

Boston and Edenton

In 1773, colonial settlers protesting the Tea Act and the East India Company’s monopoly dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor: the Boston Tea Party, a spark of the American Revolution.

Ray adds the detail. The chests held £10,000 worth of Bohea, Congou, Singlo, Souchong and Hyson teas. The next morning a fifteen-year-old, John Robinson, found a lacquered wooden tea box washed ashore and took it home; it is now at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum. Only one other chest seems to have survived, saved by Hopestill Foster, and it is in the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C.

Peter Keen reads the protest as a trade war too: in his view, the Company was trying to unload millions of pounds of tea at least three years old on the colonies, and to undercut the smugglers, the most successful of whom was John Hancock. A year later, in 1774, Penelope Barker gathered the women of Edenton, North Carolina, for the Edenton Tea Party, one of the first protests organized by women, who signed their names to it.

Silver, opium and war

Britain paid China for tea in silver, the only currency the Chinese government would accept, and raised that silver by selling opium into China, a trade our blog has called “feeding an addiction to fund an addiction.” The Opium Wars followed, and Britain set out to grow tea in lands it controlled. The First Opium War began in 1839 and lasted three years, and a second war followed in 1856. India’s side of that story is told in The history of tea in India.

The clipper races

Fresh tea fetched the best prices, so the first ship home from China could command a premium of at least 10% for its cargo. In the Great Tea Race of 1866, three clippers, Taeping, Ariel and Serica, left China on the same tide and reached London 99 days later, after nearly 16,000 miles; Taeping docked some twenty minutes ahead of Ariel, and the prize was shared. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the steamships that used it, ended the races.

Afternoon tea and the Corner House

Afternoon tea is credited to Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, in the 1840s, as a way to bridge the long gap before dinner; how it differs from the working family’s evening meal is explained in High tea vs afternoon tea.

Tea was never only aristocratic. The Lyons Corner Houses, which our 2016 post called more central to English life than Starbucks has been in the US, “were built on the working class traditions of tea, not the aristocratic ones.”

The blender’s trade

The tea that reached Europe was of mixed quality, and a new trade grew up to deal with it: the tea blender, whose job was to taste everything available and make a pleasing mix. Tasters came to drive the buying at auction, and brands such as Twinings built their names on their blenders’ skill. Not every blender was honest; some bulked their tea with other leaves and even sheep dung, a practice that faded only when tea grew cheaper.

Strong, malty blends for the breakfast table followed, built on Assam: see English Breakfast tea and The history of English Breakfast tea. Peter Keen sums up the British Isles in three lines: “The Scots shaped its production. The English sold it. The Irish drank it.”

Tea at war

In 1942, with Britain close to defeat, the government bought every available pound of tea from every country in the world except Japan. One estimate puts Britain’s largest government purchases that year, by weight, as “bullets, TEA, artillery shells, bombs, and explosives.”

Tea was rationed at two ounces a week, enough for about three cups a day, and the Royal Air Force once dropped tea in one-ounce bags over the occupied Netherlands, marked “The Netherlands will rise again. Chins up.”

Peter Keen describes the Irish taste as “the very heaviest of teas,” softened with plenty of milk and cream, and the kettle on the hob that brews all day as the identity of Irish tea, as much as high tea is of English tea. The base was Assam; Darjeeling was dismissed as too light.

When neutrality in the Second World War cut its supplies from India and Ceylon by 75%, Ireland began buying direct from growers in Kenya and then Rwanda. Read Keen’s full story, Irish tea, history and elevenish, and our own guides, The history of Irish tea and Irish breakfast tea.