On looking at tea
The Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard painted a table still-life of a set of tea things on a tray, probably around 1781. The painting, called Tea Set, is now in The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles....
View ArticleBritain’s Oldest Tea (and First Modern Commodity)
Last week we released a news story about our discovery of Britain’s oldest tea leaves alongside colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London. They had been a gift from the Scottish trader and...
View ArticleLondon, Paris, Macau: Getting to Know Tea
One of my first forays into the early history of tea in Britain was to prepare an edited version of one of Thomas Garway’s famous (well, in tea history terms ‘famous’) broadsides advertising his retail...
View ArticleElizabeth Pepys’s Potticary Tea
Samuel Pepys was an enthusiast for novelties. In the first few years of Restoration, he was surprised to see the return of full wigs, ‘painted’ women wearing cosmetics, and the theatre — and happily...
View ArticleI Pray God send us a Prosperous Voyage
The great transoceanic trading voyages associated with the East India trade between Britain and China are – in many respects – a gift for storytelling. They have a small cast of named protagonists –...
View ArticleJonathan Swift’s cup of tea, Downton Abbey style
How to make a good cup if tea? This is the advice, given to a footman, of the satirist and poet Jonathan Swift: When you are to get Water on for Tea after Dinner (which in many Families is Part of your...
View ArticleEnfield or Uppsala? The First Tea-Tree in Europe
In chapter five of Empire of Tea, I wrote about the ways in which tea was understood and instrumented within British scientific culture during the eighteenth century: botanically, medically, and...
View ArticleNotes towards the Cultural History of Bohea
Tea first became known in Britain in the mid seventeenth century. For the next five decades or so, British knowledge about tea was scanty. All tea was simply ‘tea’. When Pepys first drank it in...
View ArticleMicro-brew
It has been a troubling month for tea aficionados. First, David Tennant – in his role as DI Hardy in the acclaimed ITV Drama ‘Broadchurch’ – was shown preparing himself a cup of tea via a method...
View Article‘Milk in First’: a miffy question.
The question of when to add milk to tea is a delicate one in British tea customs. Do you add the ‘milk in first’, pouring the tea on top of it, or do you pour the tea in first and add it later. There’s...
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