CHINESE TEA CULTURE

Chinese tea spread to the rest of the world in three ways: spiritually, carried by Buddhist monks to neighboring lands like Japan and Taiwan; commercially, carried by trade to Russia, Arabia, and Europe; and finally by theft — uprooted from China in the oldest and grandest case of industrial espionage in history. Spiritually, tea flowed first to its neighbors. To Japan, it traveled through the monks — the Song dynasty's whipped tea became Matcha and, combined with Lu Yu's Cha Dao, grew into the Japanese tea ceremony, Chanoyu (茶の湯). In 1855, the traveling monk-scholar Lin Feng Chi brought 36 Wuyi tea plants and the Oolong tea-making tradition home from the Mother Tree Temple in the Wuyi Mountains — giving rise to the famous Dong Ding Oolong tea. Commercially, tea flowed along many trade roads. The oldest was the ancient Tea Horse Road (茶马古道, Chá Mǎ Gǔ Dào), with roots dating back to the Han dynasty over 2,000 years ago. Compressed tea cakes were carried across Sichuan, Yunnan, and Tibet and traded for prized war horses from Tibet. Another route, rarely told, begins in the Wuyi Mountains' famous Nine-bend River (九曲溪, Jiuqu Xi), also known as the Stream of the Nine Windings, in Fujian, China. In 1727, the Treaty of Kyakhta between the Qing and Russian empires transformed it into a major tea waterway. Called the Thousand Li Tea Route (千里茶路), it stretched more than 1,500 miles, carrying Wuyi Rock Tea to Russia and Europe. For nearly three hundred years, from the 1600s to the 1800s, tea was traded through the port of Canton, now Guangzhou, China, and it dominated all of China's exports to Europe via the Dutch and British East India Companies. And finally, tea spread to the rest of the world by theft. Until the mid-1800s, China was the only country on earth that knew how to make tea — a trade secret the West spent nearly three hundred years failing to crack. So in the 1840s, the British East India Company engaged Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to infiltrate China's forbidden tea regions to collect tea plants, tea seeds, and tea masters and processing knowledge — transplanting tea plants, seeds, and tea-making know-how from the finest tea regions, including the famous Wuyi Mountains, to the British government tea plantations in Darjeeling and Assam in India. Unearth the most audacious tea heist in history and evolving Chinese tea culture in the documentary, TEA: The Drink That Changed The World, at teadocumentary.com/watch. Also stream free on YouTube and Tubi. For ad-free viewing, stream the TEA documentary on Amazon.