Tuesday January 23, 2007 | 6 comments
Tang brick tea was the first currency exchanged throughout these regions and even in Tang times was scored for convenience of breaking into smaller sections and “making change.” These bricks were practically indestructible. According to historian Peter Hopkirk’s Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, a British explorer of the 1860s saw quantities of tea bricks “believed by the natives to be a great age” which were dug from the ruins of a Tang-era garrison town in Central Asia. “This tea, despite its age, is in great demand among local people, particularly as supplies from China have (recently) dried up.” While exploring this region in 1873 Sir Aurel Stein also noted “black bricks of tea, old and musty, exposed for sale in the bazaar” which had been dug up near Yarkand. Thus tea imported during the Tang occupation was being sold and drunk a thousand years later!
Although harmony began to return after 960 as China was gradually reunited, the new Song dynasty did not regain Central Asia. The herds of war-horses which China desperately needed now lay outside the Empire’s borders, and the Song established the policy of “controlling the border regions with tea” to obtain them. The Song laid out new plantations on a vast scale and enforced the strictest control of the tea trade throughout the border regions. A Tea and Horse Commission was granted a monopoly on all the tea produced in Sichuan, which it would exchange for ten thousand to twenty thousand horses each year. (The average horse went for fifty jin, or pounds, of tea while exceptional horses brought 120.) Sichuan had supplied Tang emperors with legendary Tribute Teas from Mt. Mengding and elsewhere, but Song poets never mention Sichuan tea, now a low-quality product produced strictly for export.
The powerful Tea and Horse Commission was to operate for almost five hundred years in western China and defying its monopoly meant death. Even the son-in-law of the first Ming emperor was compelled to commit suicide for smuggling border tea. The Commission itself, grown too corrupt to reform, was finally abolished outright in 1424. Its enduring contribution is the invention, sometime in the early Ming era, of hongcha or black tea, which the Commission developed for its barbarian customers. The birthplace first of loose leaf tea and later of black tea also was probably Sichuan. Only over the centuries to come would these tea-manufacturing discoveries be transplanted to China’s coastal provinces and provide non-Asian 10 fan from Europe with their first experience of tea.
Have a strong desire to retrace these steps with like minded people like you sometime in this life and then get absorbed into Chinese teas after spending a life time in Darjeeling Tea with people like Rajah Banerjee et. al.
I wish you to write more and more on the times of yore.
Dear Rajiv Locham–
A question for you and all our fellow Darjeeling devotees: Does anybody know the origin and type of the China tea cultivar(s–??) imported to India and propagated in Darjeeling from the 1850′s onward?
In wine, we have developed the science of ampelography, as I believe it used to be called–a way of tracing a wine varietal’s DNA, so to speak, and thus tracking it to its origin. The “parentage” of California famous Zinfandel, for example, has finally been traced to the Primitivo grape of south Italy. Wouldn’t it be interesting, not to mention instructive, to know just which China tea plant produced the plants that provide our Darjeeling? Has anybody tried to find out, I wonder. –jnp
Hi JNP, from the back of my memory, according to Charles L. Sullivan, the author of “Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine”, Zinfandel originated from a part of Hungary that is now Croatia. Primitivo is the same variety, but Italy was not its place of birth. When it came to America, it was first documented as Black St. Peters, and then later known as Zinfindal before becoming Zinfandel. I’m a zin fan myself….gotta love a wine that stains your teeth black!
(sorry, this has got nothing to do with your Darjeeling inquiry, of which I’m curious too)
Dear Mr. Pratt,
You are unearthing a question which lies deep in the layers of history, because when
seeds were brought from china everything was mixed up. Nobody knows the existance of those records of progeny which Mr. Robert Fortune would have kept as a matter of routine 150 years ago.
However, your question has stirred something deep inside my soul – we must find those
roots. That applause still rings in my ears which i got on the comment that I am brining
your tea back after 150 years. And darjeeling tea was an instant sucess at the Hangzhou show in september 2005.
Let us find the roots – I am sending copies to a few great personalities on
darjeeling – with the hope that they will help us in our quest.
On Darjeeling plantation one finds a broadbank of cultivars, which originate from China and Assam stock both. Himalayan Journal gives some accounts of the tea seeds which were initially brought from China and put up at the Government Horticultural Farm at Saharanpur before being distributed to Dehradoon, Mussorie, Almora and Kangra, where nurseries were established. After initial failures there and opening up of Darjeeling hills from 1828 onwards more and more tea stocks were brought and experimentally planted here and there.I will rummage thru my library and try to find those records and share with TChing.
Dear Norwood,
I seem to have reached the right person, Prof. Xinru Liu of College of New Jersey, who is the right link between India and China, as her subject is teaching Chinese Civilization, Indian History, and the Silk Road.
Let us hope for the best. She can be contacted at liux@tcnj.edu
Hope we will be able to find answers to the missing link.