Category Archives: History
-
For you little gardener and lover of trees…
Read more
By mere luck, I write this post while drinking a Darjeling tea, probably the most suited one as you will soon read. While going once again through some books and papers I have used for past posts, I became interested in knowing more about the …
-
Prince of Persia
Read more
For a whole generation of video players, Prince of Persia was a major hit with a “complex” story of prince, princess, assassins and a Persian kingdom (and a heart) to conquer. It sounds familiar? You change the name and the settings and you will have …
-
Florilegium on Japanese tea
Read more
Tea and Japan… A lot has been written about it and a lot could still be written on this subject but I decided to focus on a really small topic, the early Japanese tea exports. As it happens quite often, this is merely an introduction …
-
Go West
Read more
No, this has nothing to do with the famous Pet Shop Boys’ song. What? No one else remembers this song? Such a shame. No, this one is not from the Pet Shop Boys but from Talk Talk. Come on guys, know your classics or perhaps …
-
Now my eyes are turned from the South to the North
Read more
I began reading The Tea Road by Martha Avery or how China and Russia meet across the steppe (the original subtitle). As could be expected from it, it is far more than a book on tea and contains a lot on Russian-Chinese relations and how …
-
Rise and fall and …
Read more
After a first glimpse at Indonesian history, mostly on how tea came to it and how the Dutch implemented different agricultural policies (http://teaconomics.teatra.de/2014/06/24/an-unexpected-journey/), it is time to see if Indonesia was such a big tea producing tea country and what happened to it. As for …
-
An unexpected journey
Read more
Indonesia as one the biggest tea producer (in numbers) before World War II? When I read this in one of The Devotea’s posts, I was quite puzzled and I started to dig into this topic. According to Wikipedia and the FAO, Indonesia was in 2011, …
-
We grow old because we stop playing
Read more
Yunnan… Yunnan? Yes I know, you know everything about this region and its teas. But let me surprise you. I am not going to talk to you about this but rather about a game named Yunnan, a game about tea, trade and merchant houses (yes …
-
All it took was one ship
Read more
All it took for me to think about this topic was one ship. If only this was true, it would make a good story but the truth is that I came across the topic of this Swedish East India Company (or SOC in Swedish) through …
-
Bowing to traditions
Read more
Tradition is something that binds people together. Sometimes it makes sense when you look at it from an historical perspective but some other times, it amazes those that look at it. As far as tea is concerned, traditions are part of it since it …