Tealand - British Tea Documentary

"Tealand is a documentary on tea houses in Britain. From quaint tea houses in Dorset to Mr Scruffs Tea Bar in Manchester, including an interview and music from the man himself."

Teas Hope - Tea Shop

Ten Things That Make Us British: Tea

A short snippet from the History Channel UK.

Eco-Cha - Responsibly Sourced Artisan Tea. Direct from family-run farms in Taiwan.

Free Classic Tea eBooks I

In addition to writing about tea at this site, I contribute frequently to The English Tea Store Blog. One of my favorite topics there is old books about tea. Now that every bit of text in the known universe is being (or soon will be) digitized, it means that quite a few of these dusty old tomes are readily available in free electronic editions. Here are links to some of the reviews I've written about them and here's part two of the list.

Tsiology; A Discourse on Tea
By A Tea Dealer link

Tea, Its Mystery and History
by Samuel Phillips Day link

A Journey to the Tea Countries of China
By Robert Fortune link

Tea and Coffee
By William Andrus Alcott link

Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea in Two Cantos
By Nehum Tate link

The Natural History of the Tea-Tree
By John Coakley Lettsom link

The Tea Cyclopaedia link

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On the Virtues of Thee or Tea (1690)

From The Virtues of Coffee, Chocolette, and Thee or Tea, Experimentally Known in This Our Climate. See the full version here.
Tea of the People - barrel aging teas like fine wine

Weighing Tea on a Ceylon Tea Estate

from Ceylon in 1893: Describing the Progress of the Island Since 1803, Its Present Agricultural and Commercial Enterprises - link

Adagio Teas - Best Tea Online

Japanese Tea Pickers of Yesteryear

From Japan: Historical and Descriptive, by Charles Henry Eden (1877)

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Video - Indian Tea Production 90 Years Ago

Here's an interesting historical look at the production of tea in India in the Twenties.

Adagio Teas - Best Tea Online

19th Century Tea Patents

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

19th Century Tea Patents
By William I. Lengeman III

I’ve been writing about tea gadgets at this fine site for a while now, and not so long ago I began writing a regular monthly feature on the topic – with a side of offbeat tea-related news tossed in for good measure. Yes, I do run across enough tea gadgets in a month’s time to allow me to write a regular column. That’s a lot of gadgets.

Which is nothing new, really. As I wrote in an earlier article, one of the first tea-related patents in the United States was for a device with a rather fancy name but that was essentially just a teapot. But as I skimmed through the patent office files for tea stuff patented prior to 1900, it became apparent that the problem of what to do with tea leaves was one of the main issues inventors of the day...

more

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In Search of the First Tea Bag Patent

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

In Search of the First Tea Bag Patent
By William I. Lengeman III

There is a commonly accepted tale for the origin of the tea bag, one that I’ve written about at this site and elsewhere. I’ve also seen it mentioned countless other times in many other places. I’ll kick off this article by giving a very brief version of the story. Sometime around 1904 or 1907 or perhaps even 1908, depending on who’s telling the tale, a tea merchant named Thomas Sullivan got the idea to give out samples of his wares in silk bags. Some of his customers got the notion to dip these bags in hot water and thus the humble tea bag was born – for better or worse.

The more I thought about it and dug around a bit, trying to find out more about Sullivan and his “invention,” the more it occurred to me that this seemed like...

more

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A Brief History of the Tea Chest

A Brief History of the Tea Chest
By William I. Lengeman III

What do you get for the person who has everything? According to one theory you could always get them something to put it in. Although if they truly have everything, that would presumably include a sufficient amount of storage containers – but I digress.

All of which is a somewhat roundabout way to emphasize the importance of packaging and to work our way around to the subject of the tea chest. It’s a topic that...

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The Past and Present State of the Tea Trade of England

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

The Past and Present State
of the Tea Trade of England
By William I. Lengeman III

When setting out to pen a book on tea, writers of previous centuries didn’t really concern themselves much with coming up with a snappy title. I’ve written about a number of such tomes in the past here and the subject of this article is hardly no exception. Then again, perhaps a title like The Past and Present State of The Tea Trade of England, and of the Continents of Europe and America: and a Comparison Between the Consumption, Price of, and Revenue Derived From, Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Wine, Tobacco, Spirits was considered to be rather snappy back in the day.

In any event, the book was written in 1832, by one Robert Montgomery Martin, who apparently wrote a number of other books on commerce, history and whatnot. If you guessed that this one is not a real...

more

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Book Review - The Empire of Tea

Here's a book review from the archives.

The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant That Took Over the World
by Alan MacFarlane & Iris MacFarlane

You know you've read too many books on tea history when you find yourself getting weary of that quaint little myth about tea's origin. You know the one - the Chinese emperor who just happened to be boiling water...outside. A few tea leaves just happen to blow off of a conveniently located tree and land in the water. The emperor drinks it and voila, thousands of years later everyone's got their drawers in a pinch about how good this stuff is for you.

For a work of tea history that treads relatively little of this oh so familiar ground you might want to turn to Iris and Alan MacFarlane's, The Empire of Tea.

Iris MacFarlane opens the book with Memoirs of a Mesahib, a chapter in which she relates her time spent on a British tea plantation in the Assam region of India, one of the world's most productive tea growing areas. MacFarlane offers up a fascinating reminiscence from someone who gradually woke up to the sobering truth of what British colonial policies had wrought, in this case, specifically with regard to tea production.

Son Alan MacFarlane, a Cambridge professor, takes over for the rest of the book, presenting an unvarnished and often highly critical look at how the British essentially took over the tea industry from the Chinese by cultivating the plant on an enormous scale in Assam, as well as other regions of India and a few select other countries.

Highly recommended.

The Empire of Tea

Infini-tea Adventures in Tea - Episode One

A brief history of tea, with a humorous bent.

Adagio Teas - Best Tea Online

The History of the Tea-Cup

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

The History of the Tea-Cup,
by Rev. G.R. Wedgwood
By William I. Lengeman III

You might not stop to think about the history of a relatively mundane object such as a tea cup but it has a history nonetheless, a history that was explored in an 1878 volume appropriately titled The History of the Tea-Cup. It’s not completely clear if the author of this book, Rev. G. R. Wedgwood, was a member of the famous Wedgwood family but it seems oddly coincidental that he should write such a volume if he wasn’t.

In any event, the book is...

read the full article here

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The Other Tea Parties

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

The Other Tea Parties
By William I. Lengeman III

Recent political movements aside, there’s no question that the mother of all tea parties was the one that took place in Boston a few centuries ago. That was on December 16, 1773, to be precise. As noted in this article a little while back, it’s an event that recently gained its own spiffy new tourist attraction – the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

Some of us tea lovers may cringe a bit at the notion of so much tea wasted...

read the full article here

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The Romance of Tea, by Yan Phou Lee

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

The Romance of Tea, by Yan Phou Lee
By William I. Lengeman III

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is but there’s something about tea that sometimes inspires its fans to flights of literary and poetic fancy. This is something that’s been going on for quite some time now.

I’ve written about a number of rather epic pieces of English verse about tea dating back as far as the early eighteenth century and I’d wager that Chinese poets were tackling this topic much earlier than that...

read the full article here

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Fannie Farmer on Tea

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

Fannie Farmer on Tea
By William I. Lengeman III

While there are said to be records of Roman cookbooks dating as far back as the first century, the most influential such works to published here in the United States in the pre-Julia Child era were the Joy of Cooking (1930), by Irma Rombauer, and The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, a book that first came out in 1896.

A star pupil at the aforementioned school, Farmer later became the principal there and about six years after publishing her cookbook decided to...

read the full article here

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An Account of the Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea in China

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

An Account of the Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea in China
By William I. Lengeman III

Once upon a time the Chinese tea industry was said to be so jealous of their secrets that when the British sought to grow their own tea they essentially had to resort to corporate espionage. It’s a story that’s been told many times – at book length and otherwise – but for a brief overview of the exploits of one such bold tea pioneer/spy, start here.

With this in mind it’s interesting to run across a book like Samuel Ball’s An Account of the Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea in China. The work was published in...

read the full article here

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The Curious (Court) Case of He-No Tea

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

The Curious (Court) Case of He-No Tea
By William I. Lengeman III

Tea sellers are probably not all that different from merchants seeking to push any other kind of product. There are the good, the bad and the ugly, though in the case of tea, I can safely say that the majority of those I’ve run across appear to fall into the former category.

But not all of them. If you doubt that there are unscrupulous types out there looking to make a buck off of tea...

read the full article here

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Discourses on Tea and More

Here's another article I recently wrote for The English Tea Store blog.

Discourses on Tea and More
By William I. Lengeman III

Tea was still relatively new to England in 1750, when Thomas Short wrote about it. It was not yet the runaway hit it would later become, but tea‘s popularity was already experiencing a marked upswing. With a title like Discourses on Tea, Sugar, Milk, Made-wines, Spirits, Punch, Tobacco: With Plain and Useful Rules for Gouty People, Short’s book is obviously not going to make for gripping beach reading and to be perfectly honest it’s more useful for its historical interest than anything else.

read the full article here

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