Chinese Tea Culture Influence on the British Preference of Tea - Paper Example

For centuries, tea has been a significant beverage in peoples lives both in the United Kingdom and other world economic leaders. Despite the differences, the two regions socially and economically share history in tea consumption. The history of tea in China dates back to their god of farming Holly Farmer who was acknowledged between the years 206B.C.-A.D.220. The history of tea in the United Kingdom is not as long dated as that of China since the first instance that tea was recorded in British literature was in 1559 in travel literature. Later in 1669, tea drinking culture began to be adopted in Britain (Hayot 11) this essay assess the different ways in which the Chinese tea culture influenced the British preference of tea. This assessment will be based on structural strain theory to find out if the Chinese relation were the basis of the British preferences of tea.

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I will approach this question by looking at the Opium War and Industrial Revolution as their historical relationship and see how it affect the popularity of tea in England and Britain, and the manner in which they experienced it. Famous scholars in sociology, cultural studies, communication and nutrition fields, have different answers that seem to draw tension between them.

Said Edward argue that scholars curiosity propagated Orientalism in Britain. After learning to trade the Chinese, the British scholars adopted the culture and advanced it to industrialization (Crossman 1). However, they continued to draw difference orientalist curiosity with the positive correlation of Orientalism as an accomplice to the civilization of the British community as an aftermath of the merchants era (Hayot 11).

With the advancements in technology, the British opened up new shipping routes promoting the development of trade between the East and West. While a huge number of products from West Europe were imported to America, the large number of spices, silk, porcelain, rhubarb, and tea were imported to Europe from the East (China). It encouraged the contact between England and China with tea as the subject.

Their relation is inversely proportional as the British preference for tea. After the consumption of sugar had begun being widely adopted in England and other United Kingdom colonies, they began having a negative balance of trade. This sparked the trade of opium which would even out the balances of trade. Eventually, European corporations began giving their employees tea breaks at 11:00 AM. The Chinese norm of serving tea in the social gathering was widely adopted in England.

The industrial revolution also defined the cutlery preference of the British people. The British relied on Indians for ceramic culturally such as ketals. Ketals were used in the United Kingdom for serving tea along with snacks which were passed around during teatime on side plates. While Britain was expanding their capitalistic approach to Asia, as well as over the globe, tea was a central product in the pre-industrial revolution (Hayot 11). Albeit many attempts being made throughout the British Empire at cultivating tea, extensive tea cultivation was restricted to China. The widespread tea farming was favored by Asian climatic and soil unique to that region. As established techniques used to process tea was a restraint to the Chinese inner-provinces. This limited the accessibility of the technology by the British as well as other westerners.

In Victorian England, tea was an instrument that stipulated the social status. It was a luxury, a preserve of the elite in the community (Fromer 65). Tea consumption could neither be done excessively nor minimally, did it have an exotic feeling to it as well as a domestic touch. This made it possible for the people to relate to the tea drinking culture which eventually would grow to become a necessity. It was a shared cultural symbol within England. It struck a population within a thin line that defined social status, precise differences between people, and was also flexible enough to make subtle differences pronounced enough for observation.

Tea was neither masculine nor feminine. This was more evident in the evening after dinner when the men remained behind taking their hard drinks and men moving into the drawing rooms where they drank tea (Suhbater 34). Later on, when men were done smoking cigars and drinking port, they retired to the drawing room where they joined the women in drinking tea. Tea tables often exemplified gender roles in the English community.

In Britain and its colonies, black tea eventually became the established favorite beverage over green tea by the nineteenth century, although in the United States green tea consumption remained higher than black tea consumption throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (View 1). As the demand for the Asian commodities increased in the British Empire during the era of the Canton trade system (1757-1842), especially after the thirteen American colonies gained their independence, black tea production in China expanded to meet the demand, thereby leading to its rise in the proportion of total Chinese tea exports.

Tea has been a fixture of the Chinese diet and widely circulated in China ever since the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). According to historian Wu Chengming, by the mid-Qing period (1644-1912), tea was the fourth most valuable of the seven major commodities that together accounted for 80 percent of all domestic trade within the Chinese empire (Fuchs 25). From the seventeenth century, tea also assumed prominence in the Sino-European trade. China remained the primary exporter of tea to continental Europe and the British Empire until the last quarter of the nineteenth century when British had developed plantations of the plant in India and elsewhere (Sigley 348). The prevalence of tea in Sino-Anglo commerce was especially evident from the eighteenth century when tea-drinking became a prominent feature of British society, and the China trade became a lucrative source of the East India Company's revenues in Asia.

Following the conquest of Bengal during the years 1757-65, the British government was able to extract revenue from trade with India, the levy of taxes and sale of cotton and other goods from India, and the exportation of Indian raw cotton to China began to expand rapidly. Over the course of the next half century, the cotton trade with China became integral to the East India Company's transfer of funds from India to Britain via the Canton market because it was used to help pay for tea import from China to the British Empire. East India Companys exports to Canton provided China with an inexpensive solution to its textile shortage as the price of Indian cotton fell below that of domestic cotton.

By the 1820s, a growing trade imbalance had still developed between British exports into China and the British demand for Chinese goods, mainly tea, via the East India Company. At the heart of the trade, imbalance were Indian cotton, British precious metals, and Chinese tea. During the eighteenth century, the Company purchased tea, silk, and porcelain from China via the sale of Indian cotton and British woolens (Wang 1). As Chinese demand for these goods decreased by the 1830s, British demand for tea continued to grow, thus creating a major disparity in the Sino-Anglo trade. The dependence of British purchase of Chinese tea upon the export of Indian cotton set a precedent for the export of smuggled Indian opium for Chinese tea. This would help to level the balance of trade between the two countries.

While China specialized in the industrial production of tea, the British exported Opium to China. The income generated from the purchase of opium was used by the British to purchase luxuries from China which was tea. The consumption opium in China gained popularity after the introduction by Turkish merchants. In 1796, the Chinise replaced the loyalty of smoking tobacco with more intake of opium. The opium intake in China was heavily relied on as a relive of tension and pain. The importation of opium from Europe was effected essentially to even out the imbalance in trade effected by the importation of luxury goods precisely tea in large scale.

Industrial Revolution in Great Britain affected the British demand for tea, by leading to more importation of tea in Britain and the consequent sale of the tea to the British colonies. In Tea, Gender, and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century England Beth Kowaleski-Wallace asserts the British adopted tea as the best of herbs credited with attributes such as clearing those vapors which the head invade." The widespread adoption of the Chinese tea culture in the European exportation of opium in large amounts to the Chinese which sparked legislative concern.

The Qing Dynasty established restriction of the trading of opium, licensing only a few people to who would produce opium for medicinal purposes. The legislation meant that the Great Britain had no a commodity which they would use trade with the Chinese to level out their balance of trade. This forced the British to trade Opium with Chinese merchants at their docks illegally. This altered the relationship between China and Great Britain. This resulted in two opium wars between the Great Britain and the rest of the as the Qing Dynasty tried to eradicate abuse of opium in 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to1860.

The structural strain theory and the conflict extrapolation of the British tea culture compared to that of the Chinese assert that the British rule helpedto advance their tea culture, preferences and culture. In the late 19th century, Canadian newspapers consistently published advertisements of Indian-grown teas. Having been unable to acquire the technology employed in tea processing, the British lobbied for the Indian tea culture which had some similarities to the British tea culture (Suhbater 34). The Globe and Toronto Star began to publish advertisements for "Ceylon and Assam teas" in the early 1890s. British Colonist, (which was the major British newspaper) published advertisements for the products frequently. Advertisements published at the turn of the century acknowledges the great margin of growth experienced by the organizations. The advertisement was similar in the information disseminated. Star of India, a brand of black tea, was frequently advertised in the British Colonist for medicinal benefits such as relief of "that tired feeling."

One similarity from that can be drawn from the Chinese culture is afternoon tea which was served in between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. It was served with niceties such as some bread and butter, cake, tarts, or biscuits. This cultural development was borrowed from Anna, the 7th Duchess of Bedford (Sigley 348). It also explains the connotation of afternoon tea with the British tea ceremonies. This was the British civilization tribe drawn from the Chinese customs was more practiced in the cities. The farming communities hard a high tea which was served between 5:00-7:00 pm. The Britons also had a custom tea break between 5:00 and 6:00 am which was allowed by the enterprise owners. The consumption patterns today conform to be consistent with the British corporate tea consumption customs a retaliation of the global impact of the interdependent of the people depending in the organizational dependence on the social interrelation. While today the context of tea consumption in China may be similar to tea use in Britain, anciently there were entirely different from those of the Europeans (Sigley 348). The tea consumption had various contexts where the Chinese had a lunch feasts, art shows.

The structural strain theory and the conflict perspective of the implications of the interaction among different establish that this often results in the formation of new cultural goals that then shape our...