Tea

Assembled from 80 blocks · 3 evidence · 70 related

1. Story
2. Tea is the processed leaf of Camellia sinensis, drunk in China for at least two millennia and traded outward from south-west China first overland and later by sea. Phytolith and biomolecular analysis of plant remains from the Han Yangling mausoleum near Xi'an gives a physical date of roughly the second century BCE for tea as a consumed commodity. From the seventeenth century it became the single largest item by value in European trade with China, and by the nineteenth century it was the commodity around which British fiscal policy, the opium trade and the annexation of Assam tea land all turned. It is a manufactured good as much as an agricultural one: the same leaf becomes green, oolong or black tea according to processing, a fact European buyers did not understand until the middle of the nineteenth century.
3. Knowledge
4. Tea
5. Camellia sinensis
6. Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao)
7. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
8. Silver
9. London
10. Connections
11. Camellia sinensis
12. Silver
13. London
14. Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao)
15. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
16. English (later British) East India Company
17. Tea culture
18. Tea buried in the Han Yangling mausoleum
19. Tea-for-horse exchange between China and Tibet
20. Tea first shipped to Europe by sea
21. Qing trade confined to Canton
22. Boston Tea Party
23. Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
24. Robert Bruce shown tea growing in Assam
25. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
26. First Assam tea auctioned in London
27. The Opium Wars
28. Treaty of Nanking
29. Tea
30. Darjeeling
31. Yunnan
32. Assam
33. Growing conditions for tea (altitude, rainfall, drainage)
34. Tea buried in the Han Yangling mausoleum
35. Robert Bruce shown tea growing in Assam
36. First tea planted at Darjeeling
37. Robert Fortune removes tea plants and tea makers from China
38. Tea
39. The Columbian Exchange
40. Manila
41. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
42. Opium
43. Qing trade confined to Canton
44. Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
45. The Opium Wars
46. Treaty of Nanking
47. Potosí
48. Silver ore is registered at the Cerro Rico of Potosí
49. Manila is founded as the eastern terminus
50. Mercury amalgamation and the mita transform Potosí
51. Tea
52. Afternoon tea
53. Tea first shipped to Europe by sea
54. Boston Tea Party
55. Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
56. First Assam tea auctioned in London
57. London Marathon
58. New York City
59. White City Stadium
60. The 1908 Olympic marathon fixes 26 miles 385 yards
61. The first London Marathon
62. The Great Exhibition
63. Google DeepMind
64. Tea
65. Yunnan
66. Tea-for-horse exchange between China and Tibet
67. Tea
68. Cohong (Gonghang)
69. Silver
70. Opium
71. Shanghai
72. Qing trade confined to Canton
73. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
74. Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
75. The Opium Wars
76. Treaty of Nanking
77. Evidence
78. Phytolith and biomolecular analysis identifies tea in the Han Yangling mausoleum (c. 2nd century BCE) and at Gurgyam, Ngari, western Tibet (c. 2nd–3rd century CE), evidencing early tea consumption and overland movement.
79. The Company's Canton trade, its tea purchases and cargo accounting, and its administrative decision-making are documented in a single surviving institutional archive.
80. Between 1757 and 1842 all Western maritime trade with China was confined to Canton and conducted through the Cohong, with tea the dominant export and silver the dominant means of payment.