Category: History

For you little gardener and lover of trees…

July 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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 role of botanical gardens in the spread of tea in different colonial possessions, starting with India but also among others in French Indochina or in the Dutch East Indies.

First, what is a botanical garden? It is a “garden” (sometimes a big one) focused on the collection, cultivation and sometimes display of different plants and trees.

Orangery in Schloss Sanssouci by Els Diederen at li.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

The first ones were made to cultivate medical herbs and with Renaissance and the first discoveries, they changed their focus and began to focus on the display and preservation of newly found plants and trees with orangeries becoming the new hype for those with enough means to build and maintain them.

This culminated with the development of botany as a modern science and of economic botany, ie the commercial exploitation of plants by people (I know that people always did it but not in a systematic way) and with the increase in the number of lands colonized and their intended use to produce everything and anything, the botanical gardens were born.

These places were used for the transplantation and pruning of trees and plants before an eventual use in their new country.

This led to the Calcutta Botanic Garden being founded in 1786 after the British East India Company had approved Colonel Robert Kyd’s plans to build a garden for identifying new plants of commercial values and finding new sources of food to prevent famine.

With the final control of the whole Indian subcontinent, several Botanical Gardens were built with the centre and “commanding” point of this network being the oldest one, the Calcutta one.

Kings Lake – Banyan Avenue – Indian Botanic Garden by Biswarup Ganguly [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Fortune’s tea seeds were sent to this garden before being sent to Darjeeling through the local Botanical Gardens. The different Superintendents in the Calcutta Garden were very supportive of the introduction of tea in India and in Darjeeling, believing that the area was the most suited to the development of this plant. And who am I to say they were wrong (check my first paragraph to see why)?

The other colonial powers also used Botanical Gardens or things quite similar.

For example, France had one in Pondichéry (India) and another one in Cao Bang (in the North of Vietnam near the Chinese border), both being useful in the spread of tea from Java to the Réunion for the first one and through Indochina for the second one.

The Netherlands had specialised Proefstation or Experimental Stations notably in Indonesia with one being specialised in tea. The job of these gardens was first and foremost to select the mother-plants, to create more plants through cloning or seeding and finally to check the health of these new plants. Later on, this Proefstation also became a renowned research station on tea, its problems, how to improve its productivity… with several reports being written and kept secret or rather inaccessible to strangers.

Proefstation for tea in West Java by Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This is a first glimpse at what I found out to be a little know part of how tea spread in so many different countries. However as quite often these small (when compared to the tea gardens and plantations) areas played a vital role in ensuring the widespread of our beloved drink.

And to finish, here is another quote found only a few sentences away from the one I used for the title

“Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

Doesn’t it sound like a tribute to the work of these Botanical Gardens?

Prince of Persia

May 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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 another mega-hit (but a Disney one) with Aladdin.

I knew from reading here and there some blogs and for having bought some tea from there that Persia (as usual with tea, I will stick to the old name of the country but for those wishing more precise things, you can replace the name with Iran) was a tea producer but I never really give a thought about its history.

This changed when I read a world history book that presented the major powers of the time around the death of the French King Louis XIV (1715). Among the chapters and the powers was a presentation of the situation in Persia and the story of an ambassador being sent to France to try to settle a military and trading agreement. What interested me foremost was that among the interesting things noted by some memoirists was that Mohammed Rheza Beg drank all day long chocolate, coffee and tea. Yes, you read it right. He was drinking tea all day long.

I was so intrigued by this that I decided to make some research on tea and Persia and I found interesting little things, not enough to have a clear picture of things but enough to “paint” some views of it.

At first, Persia was associated with coffee. But at first is somewhere in the 15th century when coffee became available from Yemen and Ethiopia and then in the 16th century exported to the Middle-East including Persia.

This is when I noted something was wrong as I read somewhere else that the tea culture was introduced in Persia at the end of the 15th century and that because it was closer to the homeland, it replaced coffee.

I don’t really get this idea of tea production places being closer to the coffee ones but perhaps this is the influence of the Silk Road that went through Persia?

This would necessitate further research but one hypothesis I can make is that Chinese traders could have brought some with them (perhaps to create a market or as a drink or as gift as Chinese didn’t trade); another is that it could have been brought though Tibet.

If anyone has any information, I would be glad to hear from you as this is the part I find the more puzzling in this story.

By whatever road it really came to Persia, tea must have really picked up in Persia as in 1697, Dutch ships were used to bring tea from Formosa. And knowing the VOC, it must have meant they thought it could be lucrative.

Let’s make a back to the future trip and move to the end of the 19th century with Prince Mohammed Miza, a diplomat, who had first directly imported tea from India, managed to steal tea production secrets and samples from the British in India bringing them back to his own town of Lahijan.

How did he do it? He worked for them to learn the ropes of the trade, convincing them thanks to him being fluent in French that he was French (which in my opinion, just shows that English people don’t know what a French truly is).

This man was so important that today his mausoleum is part of the Iran’s National Tea Museum.

And, the final result of the trip of this ambassador? It is another interesting story to tell as some people at that time (and some others now) thought that it was just an elaborate scheme to make some money. However, it seems that this public servant tried through a long trip to head back to Persia but lost all the gifts he had received and hearing about a palace revolution killed himself on the way back.

Florilegium on Japanese tea

March 25, 2015 / / 2 Comments

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 as I am lacking access to proper sources*, either Japanese (language problems) or American ones (although I looked for long series of foreign trade statistics, I couldn’t find the detailed ones that I needed).

Why American sources? Because it seems that the USA were the main export markets for Japanese teas.

However, let’s not hurry and let’s get back to the beginning.

With the arrival of the Dutch and the VOC (Dutch East India Company) on the Japanese shores in 1609 came the first exports of Japanese teas to Europe (some post-roasted ones from Ureshino).

Things went slowly until Commodore Perry opened trade with Japan with his ships in 1854.

This event was the trigger for many things in Japan, including the move at great speed towards modernisation and the restoration of the imperial power under Emperor Meiji.

But what impact did these events had on tea exports? The first and obvious one was the opening of trade with foreigners (which is always easier to do when you are not in an isolationist mood).

This led to 181 tons of tea being exported in 1859 with 1868 and the Meiji restoration leading to more exports and active support to create national (ie Japanese) companies that would be able to deal with the whole sale chain but also with a peculiar focus on the USA for the tea exports (probably because Great Britain had already access to all the black tea it needed).

This emphasis can be seen in different things.

For example, in 1874, some samples of black tea from 12 different Prefectures were sent to Italy (why Italy?) and in 1875 other sales samples of tea were sent to the USA and other countries (China, India, Europe, America) .

Protection and encouragement were given to traders with for example, the Yokohama Kocha Shokai (a company focusing on black tea in Yokohama) being founded in 1881 or the Japanese government taking steps when branch offices of Mitsui Bussan and Okuragumi were established in London to commission them for the export of black tea and other products manufactured by the governmental factories.

The first port opened to foreigners for trade was Yokohama, followed by Kobe much later in 1868. Each port had its own hinterland (a German word meaning here the area from which products are delivered to a port for shipping elsewhere) with Uji of Yamashiro and Asamiya of Goshu going through Kobe while teas from Kawane, Honyam or Sakura from Shiuka going through Yokohama.

A “funny” thing I found out is that at first, Japanese were somehow alien to Westerners preferences, customs, money or languages and so they used Chinese experts to introduce tea-making techniques (including the artificial colouring of tea leaves with dangerous products).

Another “strange” (at least for us nowadays) thing was that Japanese teas were categorized by method of production as Basket-Fired, Sun-Dried or Pan-Fired (and not by place of production) leading to some problems during transportation as fired teas could sometimes mold.

Problem with fired teas was during the transport where it could mould in the ships but a man named Kahei Otani found a solution in 1861 by buying only well-dried Pan-fired teas and storing around 40 kg of it in large porcelain jars (leading to what was called porcelain teas)

In 1875, in an attempt to diversify their production output, more Chinese experts were hired to begin working on black teas (remember the name of these society founded in 1881. However, it was never popular in the USA and ended up representing only a small percent of their imports.

Why do I keep on talking about the USA? It is because for a long time, they were the primary customers for the Japanese tea exports with these last one becoming an important part of the American tea imports.

In 1860, 10% of tea imported to the US came from Japan becoming 25% in 1870 and 47% in 1880.

Let’s not be carried away too quickly as in 1890, only 1.3 pounds of tea were consumed per capita in the USA (a little more than today), which with a population of 62,979,766 should make the American tea consumption around 37,140 tons for that year.

But what about the production? Did it rise? Decrease?

The figures I could find out are not really complete but will give us an overview.

Year

Production (in Kan)

Production (in tons)

Exports (in Kan)

Exports (in tons)

Local consumption (in tons)

1880

5,040,000

18,900

1890

5,760,000

21,600

1895

8,240,000

30,900

1905

6,970,000

26,138

1910

7,695,444

28,858

4,880,000

18,300

10,558

1935

12,500,000

46,875

2,960,000

11,100

35,775

Tea production, exportation and consumption in Japan between 1880 and 1935

The production did rise and quite a lot while at same time, the exports were decreasing and the local price for tea (in real price, which allows us to compare the 1880 and the 1930 prices) was divided by 2 in just 50 years (the basic law of supply and demand). Because of the wage rise in Japan at that time, this led to an increased mechanisation in the Japanese tea fields and in the whole tea making, leading to whole new processes.

* For this post, my main sources were:

– Foreign Trade Policy in the Early Meiji Era by Yasuzo Horie in Kyoto University Economic Review, Volume XXII, Number 2, October 1952 published by the Faculty of Economics, Kyoto University

– Technical Progress in the Tea Manufacturing Industry in Japan by Masahiko Sintani in Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics, 32(1), 1991-06

– Japanese Tea Exports in the late 1800s by Bruce Richardson in The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo, Benjamin Press, 2011

Go West

January 28, 2015 / / 2 Comments

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 I should get back to tea? I think it is safer if we all agree to take the second option.

Go West is just the physical movement of the tea going from China to Russia, which will be our topic today. As my last post, I wrote this article after reading a book by Martha Avery titled The Tea Road, China and Russia meet across the steppe, a book which gave me a lot of information on this peculiar road (historical, economical,…).
The first recorded Russian experience with tea happened during the first recorded Russian embassy to the Khotogoit in 1638, the Khan made them try a “strong and bitter, green and fragrant” drink and then gave them some to bring back home, hoping to start a profitable business and to earn firearms to deal with the Manchu and the Chinese.

However, some Russian habits like a likeness to drink tea in glasses suggest that they might have had access to tea via the Persians, who drank tea like this and not the Chinese who drink tea in cups. And the first recorded trade agreements with people from this southern tea trade road were recorded during the reign of Ivan IV (1538-1584).

054 - Russian tea glass

An example of a Russian tea glass

“Podstakannik mit Gold” by Jürg Vollmer / Maiakinfo – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons –

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Podstakannik_mit_Gold.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Podstakannik_mit_Gold.JPG

It seems that, in spite of the early reserved reactions, a taste for tea had developed by the end of the 17th century.

Following the first treaties between the two great powers, a border was defined and several fortresses were built on the Russian side; one of them being Kyakhta (funded in 1728), which became a major trade city for the Tea Road thanks to its status as the Russian one and only open trade city.

The Russian tea road

The Tea Road, source: CCTV News

The tea trade grew steadily until it reached its highest level in the 1850s with for example in 1851, over 9 million pounds of leaf tea and over 4.5 million pound of brick tea going through this town.
The rise in fast oceanic trade (and textile from Great Britain and cotton goods from India) led to a fall in these figures but the “lower quality” brick tea made for non-European Russians continued for a while to flow through Kyakhta.

A view on Kyakhta

A view on Kyakhta

http://www.vintage-views.com/RussianPictures/images/0124k5-plate2.jpg

Another sector that kept on following the inland road was the best teas or family teas, produced in the Southern China Fujian plantations, with families owning since generations these “gardens” and their name being used as a sign of quality. This was so important that until the 20th century, any good Kyakhta tea merchant had to know a list of these plantations and be able to recognise them.

And since the Russian drinkers of these higher teas needed less roasted teas, which suited overland transport (and not oceanic ones), Kyakhta was also used as a major trade gate for these teas.
I guess you will all agree with me that the typical image of the Russian tea is one of a roasted tea with a camp fire smell and taste to it, which was only a small part of the business (and probably not the most lucrative one).

Funny isn’t it?

Another proof can be found in a book titled Report on the Russian Caravan Trade with China by Harry Parkes where he looks at the trade going in and out of Russia with an eye for tea.

What does he say about it? “The superiority of the tea consumed in Russia to the generality of that imported in the United Kingdom may be accounted by the circumstance of its being a more costly kind, unsuited on account of its expensiveness to our markets, where, if imported, it is only used to mix with or flavour other teas.”

It seems that at that time (1854), Russians were known to drink high quality teas (and also lower ones as we saw above), whereas England was a country where people drank low quality teas or where people were unwilling to pay for a good quality tea.

I think this had something to do with the way, tea was being imported in both countries. The early maritime shipments produced a low price tea which seems to have been heavily roasted and was not always of the highest quality available, whereas the non brick teas imported through the Russian merchants were from specific and well-known plantations, with a lighter taste and a population willing to pay for it (Russian Europeans in Moscow and Saint Petersburg).
However in the end, the rise of the British East India Company, the opium solution (see here for more detail), the increased speed of the clippers, the Suez Canal, steam combustion, the appearance of tea plantations in Darjeeling and Assam made the Tea Road decline evermore and before the end of the 19th century, it was no longer an attractive place to trade tea through (and Kyakhta had also to face competition in the 1860s after the opening of the whole Russian-Chinese border to trade).
Such is history; some routes, countries and places flourish when those from before struggle and in the end vanish.

Now my eyes are turned from the South to the North

December 26, 2014 / / 6 Comments

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 the steppe influenced both of them (at least where I am in the book right now).

However, what I found really interesting was the chapter on Da Sheng Kui or “Great Prosperous Chief” an unknown (to me) Chinese conglomerate that came to dominate the trade with Mongolia and the tea trade with it and this post is written thanks to elements from the book as I couldn’t find elsewhere information on this company.
So I would first like to thank the author Martha Avery for her work on this unknown (to me) topic.

Why focus on this company? I will give you some figures taken from the book to explain my choice. 9 Chinese firms were dealing with Mongolia but the largest was Da Sheng Kui.
It was active in business from 1700 to 1929 and at its height, it employed 7,000 people and had a turnover of 10,000,000 silver dollars (19th century currency unit).

After the Quing took the power, China recovered from the difficult economical conditions of the late Ming period (mostly caused by the Little Ice Age and several natural catastrophes, which in China produce quite often a change of dynasty).
An increase in general welfare, population and less taxation created the right conditions for the merchants to flourish, even if the Quing limited the contact with outsiders and wary of the power of wealthy merchants limited their trading licences to better control them.

The history of Da sheng Kui is closely linked to the Quing dynasty and to their conquest of Mongolia.
His founder Wang Xiangqing sold his services to Manchu forces guarding a passage in the Great Wall before going with them in Mongolia to supply them with local and Chinese products (mostly tobacco, food, tea, livestock…) and at the same time, making useful contacts with the Mongolian tribes.

When they had taken control of most of their nomad neighbours, the Manchu established new trading rules abolishing the previous horse markets and issuing licences for lü meng shang or “travelling Mongolia companies”.
These companies could not have fixed places of residence in Mongolia, could only follow a predetermined route, could not pay for goods with silver (the metal more sought after by the Chinese) and could not stay in Mongolia for more than one year.

However, Wang Xiangqing first followed its “tradition” by providing the military and administrative base close to the Western parts of Mongolia (as some tribes still fought up to the mid-1750s) with the logistical network to bring them supply.

What really gave Da sheng Kui its competitive edge came in line a little bit later as under Jiaqing reign (1796-1820), the company was one of the two issued a long piao or Dragon Ticket, a ticket that was not only a licence to commerce but also one to become a kind of bank.
This was a very effective syphoning tool as the Mongolian nobility that wanted to buy good either for themselves or to sell to their “banners” (the area under their rule) would ask for a loan to the agent of Da Sheng Kui making their “banners” accountable for these loans that were paid back mostly in livestock.
When combining high pricing (for selling), low pricing (for buying), high interests and monopoly, it is no wonder that the company made huge profits.

This banking office was really important in their trading process as it gave them the money to caery their other businesses.
And the loaning office became even more important as after 1789, the Mongolian princes had to make regular visits to Beijing to pay tribute and attend at the Manchu court. Without the money to travel or unwilling to keep so much silver on them (as the travel, “proper face” and tribute expenses were quite high), they had to request the bank to loan them an amount of money determined according to the number of adult males in their “banners”. The bank personnel travelled with the princes and paid for everything.

But let’s get back to tea, somewhere in the 18th century with enough resources and in order to maximise profits, the company developed many specialised subsidiaries specialising in selling and buying different products from the whole China.
For tea, the company was San Yu Chuan or Three Jade Rivers, which mainly sourced its tea from selected locations in Hubei and Hunan.
In the early years of the 20th century, it bought between 6 and 8,000 cases per year for Mongolia (something between 380,000 and 510,000 kilos), with more being bought to be sold to the Russians.
San Yu Chuan mixed the origins and supply sources to adapt to the demand both in terms of quantity (just in case one area could not produce enough tea) and quality (through improvements in terms of process).

Without the right to settle, Da Sheng Kui had to use caravans to go and distribute its products to its customers and back to China with a maximum of 15 caravans on the road at one time, each of these including 14 smaller ones (nearly 3,000 camels).
The cases containing tea were filled with bricks of different size and the number in one case was the name of the product sold to the Mongolians (which preferred certain products of certain origins to others).

This successful company disappeared in 1929 for an unknown reason but probably because of the political turmoil in China.

What I find interesting in this history is how the political, financial and trade systems were combined together to create a monopolistic system that supplied tea (among other things) and took away all the resources from an area.
Tea as an instrument of power? Who would have thought that?

I find however that the amount of information on this company and on the others is not really big. Perhaps in Chinese? Do you know anything about these trade companies? About this trading-political system?

Without the answer to these questions, I will stop and resume my reading of this interesting book and see if I can find more information on this tea road between East and West.

Rise and fall and …

August 22, 2014 / / 5 Comments

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 my previous article on this topic, I did some research but I had troubles with some raw numbers or general statements that don’t say if they are related to quantity or value. In the end however I managed to find some raw data and information through all the colonial period and early independent one and this is what I will try to present here.

In 1885; sugar, coffee and tobacco represented 72% of the total value of the different exportations from the Dutch East Indies but tea was growing up fast as in 1928, 17% of the tea produced in the world came from these islands and in 1929, tea was the fifth export (in value) before tobacco and coffee.

However, what is unusual is that at that time the main market was not the “motherland” (a common thing for all colonial power) but London with the British houses ruling the tea market in Batavia. (1) Was it pragmatism from the Dutch with acknowledgement of where and who was the market or just a manifestation of the British supremacy over this trade?

From hints I gathered, it would say that the second option is probably the most realistic one since the main problems faced by the Dutch prior and during World War I was the irregular quality of the tea being harvested, which was a problem for their sales to America and Australia, where the Dutch had launched from 1913 on a marketing campaign to sell their products. (2)

This shows that they tried to get around and find new markets.

Assam teas were introduced in 1878 and quickly became the only ones used, probably because these plants were more efficient and also because the London market was the one targeted at that time.

However, things only heated up in 1900 when European companies (including British ones) began investing in bigger and better lands, resulting in a quick growth between 1919 and 1931 and a good reputation of some teas like those of Permantag Siantar (3)

The production changed from year to year and in 1921, there was a huge crisis (without any indications of what might have happened) that made the production dropped as showed in the table below (and don’t blame me for the wrong figures, I just copied them).

in kilos 1919 1920 1921
 Java 42,500,000 47,000,000 28,000,000
 Sumatra 4,000,000 5,000,000 4,000,000
 Total 46,500,000 52,000,000 32,000,000

Tea production in the Dutch East Indies (1919-1921) (2)

But where did they go?

in kilos 1919 1920 1921
Netherlands 25,136,000 16,865,000 11,203,000
United Kingdom 12,356,000 11,718,000 6,638,000
Australia 7,262,000 8,753,000 9,786,000
USA 2,278,000 3,475,000 2,537,000
Canada 634,000 796,000 38,000
Europa 722,000 36,000 17,000
 Singapore 466,000 452,000 60,000
China 1,117,000 35,000 0
Others 275,000 452,000 472,000
 Total 50,246,000 42,582,000 30,751,000

Tea exportations from Java, 1919-1921 (2)

in kilos 1919 1920 1921
Netherlands 1,729,870 1,165,779 1,450,892
United Kingdom 1,790,072 2,663,784 2,389,733
Australia 15,000 0 600
USA 64,000 118,344 0
 Singapore 549,320 34,582 119,065
 Java 89,591 12, 630 35,167
Others 2,652 25,468 2,336
 Total 4,249,505 5,130,587 4,197,793

Tea exportations from Sumatra, 1919-1921 (2)

in kilos 1919 1920 1921
Netherlands 26,865,870 18,030,779 12,653,892
United Kingdom 14,146,072 14,381,784 9,027,733
Australia 7,277,000 8,753,000 9,786,600
USA 2,342,000 3,593,344 2,537,000
Canada 634,000 796,000 38,000
Europa 722,000 36,000 17,000
 Singapore 1,015,320 486,582 179,065
China 1,117,000 35,000 0
Java 89,591 122,630 35,167
Others 277,652 477,468 474,336
Total 54,486,505 46,712,587 34,748,793

Tea exportations from the Dutch East Indies, 1919-1921 based on (2)

I hope I got it right as the French word was not exportations but rather exploitations, which could have something to do with the ownership but this hypothesis seems rather strange and out of place, so I kept the exportations idea.

Apart from obvious mistakes in the Sumatra figures (the figures simply don’t add) and a difference with the total produced (that could be explained for Sumatra by rounding things down), these tables are interesting and show for example that the first exportation country for tea was not the United Kingdom but the Netherlands.

The only explanation is that these figures are just the ports of destination and not the countries of final consumption (even if both can be the same), which would be consistent with the British houses ruling the market and with the usual obligation in the colonies to go through a limited set of ports, mostly located in the motherland, where products would be transformed or simply shipped to another country.

The production by the natives was stopped by this 1921 crisis as a lot of factories either stopped buying from them or paid such a low price that only the big plantations were able to keep on growing tea. (2)

What is rather interesting is that in these years, the Dutch tried to move ahead as for them, even if the United Kingdom was the best client, it was still below the pre-war level and this could mean that diversification was the way to go.

This lead to several initiatives like making rules on the tea sales regarding quality and general conditions (rules made by the Handels vereeniging (Trading Organisation) and enforced by the Vereeniging voor de thee cultuur in Nederlandsche-Indie (Organisation for the culture of tea in the Dutch East Indies), the Thee Export Bureau (Tea Export Bureau) in Batavia and the Chamber of Commerce for the Dutch East Indies in London) while making huge advertising efforts thanks to the financial support of the Vereeniging van Thee-Importeurs (Association of Tea Importers).

There were also intents to sell to new countries like Canada or other English speaking countries using the networks of the British companies already active in Indonesia. (4)

These efforts produced an increase in the exportations and therefore in the production in the following decade with the main buyer being the United Kingdom and then (but well behind) the Netherlands, Australia and Egypt.

in kilos  Java  Sumatra Total
1930 61,419,000 10,159,000 71,578,000
1931 65,922,000 12,060,000 77,982,000
1932 64,188,000 13,293,000 77,481,000

Dutch East Indies tea exportations in 1930-1932 (5)

Tea, the second export in value before World War II, suffered like all the other exportation crops first from the Japanese invasion as the number of plantations dropped (from 138 to 97) and then from the Indonesian War of Independence.

By 1948 (one year before the end of this war), only 25% of the pre-World War II plantations were still cultivated and the 1947 tea production was of 1,500 tons (1/40 of what it was before WWII). However in 1949, the situation was already improving. (6)

I don’t have any further sources or articles on what happened after but my guess (feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong or if you have more information) is that the tea plantations suffered from the different fights in the country as well as the development pattern focusing on industry and oil until tea became trendy and again …

  1. Robequain Charles, Le développement économique des Indes Néerlandaises. Le rôle des capitaux hollandais et étrangers in Annales de Géoographie 1934 t.43 n°241

  2. de Wildeman Emile, A propos du Théier in Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale, 2e année bulletin n°16, décembre 1922

  3. Robequain Charles Problèmes de colonisation dans les Indes néerlandaises in Annales de Géographie 1941 T50 n°281

  4. de Wildeman Emile, A propos du Théier in Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale, 4e année bulletin n°29, janvier 1924

  5. Albenque A. Le commerce des Indes Néerlandaises depuis 1931 dans Annales de Géographie t.43 n°242, 1934

  6. Evolution de l’économie indonésienne in Etudes et conjoncture – Economie mondiale 5e année n°2, 1950

An unexpected journey

June 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

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, the 8th producer of tea in the world with a production just over 140,000 tons.
But this didn’t give me a hint about the situation prior to World War II and its evolution since that time.
I turned out to good old Internet and a good legal resource to find old scientific journals in French and in other languages Persee and after some researches, I found a lot of old French articles from the 20s-30s but with a few from the 80s-90s dealing with this topic (at least in part).
I found quite a lot of information and that these people had already faced a problem I had: that most books or articles on this topic were written in Dutch. (1) If anyone has access to any info and can pass it to me, it would really help.

I won’t go yet into details about the numbers but tea was important to the Dutch East Indies (as they called Indonesia then), not for local consumption but for exportation, the goal of the first European colonies (there were also settlement colonies but Indonesia was not one of these and the Netherlands were never overwhelmed with a big population).

Parts of Indonesia were first dealt with by the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) until it was nationalised in 1796 by the Batavian Republic (after going bankrupt)
During the Napoleonic Wars, most of the possessions of the former VOC were occupied or controlled by the British before being given back to the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands following the Congress of Vienna and the Anglo-Dutch peace treaty that followed.
What had the VOC achieved? A lot but I didn’t find a lot regarding tea in Indonesia (tea trade is another topic). The only exception was the land ownership, which was quite complex and in a way became more complex thanks to the VOC because of the different treaties it made with the local powers and the differences in what both parties understood from the terms and the concepts used. (2)

Following two wars in the area against local people and the Belgian Revolution in 1830, the Netherlands was in need of money as they were facing bankruptcy. Rhis is when they decided to get the most of their colonies. The new Dutch East Indies governor Johannes Van den Bosch’s priority reflected that new policy with a peculiar focus given to the increase of the resources (and therefore the money) drawn from the territory he was appointed to
To do this, he implemented (among other things) the Cultivation System in which the local peasants had to dedicate 20% of all lands to exportation crops or to work 60 days every year on government owned plantations. (3)
This system that slowly turned Indonesia into a huge plantation with sales going through a whole network of middlemen gave enough cash to the Netherlands but faced opposition because of famines and epidemics created by the priority to export crops, because of independent merchants that preferred free trade and because of the publication of Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company.

The public opinion in the Netherlands forced the government to change its politics with first a “Liberal Period” focusing on free trade, free investments by anyone willing to do it, which saw an increase in the number of big plantations (owned by European and American companies) and in the exportations. (4)
Obviously, this led to a focus on plantations being optimised when it comes to crops thanks to the work of the different specialised or not garden stations that tested, implemented and improved the different cultures, following what could be defined as the British model implemented in India and probably elsewhere in the world. (5) (6)

This policy was followed by an “Ethical Policy” (starting in 1901) with a focus on the local people and the civilisation mission focus in the colonies. However, this new approach had to deal with money problems to fund these investments (in infrastructures, education…).

I just went quickly through some general things regarding agriculture in Indonesia that will allow me to introduce tea production and the reason for the sudden changes during and after World War II.

One question however remains to be solved: when was tea introduced in Indonesia?
I found two answers: 1826 with seeds/trees coming directly from China and with the first batches sent to the Netherlands in 1835 (7) but this would mean that it was there before Robert Fortune stole it from China. The other answer is 1898. (4)

 
(1) Coolhass W. Ph. Outre-Mer néerlandais in Revue d’histoire des colonies t.44 n°156-157, 3e et 4e trimestres 1957
(2) Durand Frédéric, La question foncière aux Indes Néerlandaises, enjeux économiques et luttes politiques (1619-1942) in Archipel Volume 58 1999
(3) Durand Frédéric, Trois siècles dans l’île du teck. Les politiques forestières aux Indes néerlandaises (1602-1942) in Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer t. 80 n°299, 2e trimestre 1993
(4) Evolution de l’économie indonésienne dans Etudes et conjoncture – Economie mondiale 5e année n°2, 1950
(5) Maas J. G. J. A., La culture et la sélection du Palmier Elaeis aux Indes Néerlandaises dans Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale, 4e année bulletin n°34, juin 1924
(6) van Haal C. J. J., La sélection des Caféiers aux Indes Néerlandaises dans Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale, 19e année bulletin n°209, janvier 1939
(7) Robequain Charles Problèmes de colonisation dans les Indes néerlandaises dans Annales de Géographie 1941 t. 50 n°281

We grow old because we stop playing

January 21, 2014 / / 8 Comments

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 trade and merchant houses why else would I be interested in a tea game?).

 

This game is about running a merchant house on the path of success along the road of tea and horses.

It is not an easy game and it seems so complex that after going two or three times through the rules and making everything ready, we did not play it.

 

But first things first. Here is the board with everything ready to play and you will notice the cups full of a Yunnan Imperial Tea ready to be drunk during the game.

Yunnan boardgame

Yunnan board game

Yunnan boargame with rules

Yunnan board game with rules

Now here are my thoughts on this game.

It is a complex game with almost no luck involved (I say almost while you do have a little bit of it in the way you find out who should play when).

You have to select carefully what your merchants (which are more or less the people acting for you) will do: travel (bringing in tea), buy improvements (which will allow you to be more efficient in a specific field).

Then you have to connect your merchants, trading posts… to avoid paying logistical costs when they bring back the tea to the main town but at the main time, you should try to avoid the ever present inspector or neutralise it thanks to your political influence.

 

From what I understood there is not a simple and unique path to victory. It depends on what all the players are doing and this is what I find really interesting in the concept.

 

After going through Internet and looking at different websites, it seems the game is best played with 3-4 players, even if rules for 2 are provided.

This might be what we missed in our game.

 

If you want to look for yoursefl, here is the game page http://www.argentum-verlag.de/yunnan_en.html and then the Board Game Geek one http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/143401/yunnan

All it took was one ship

June 20, 2013 / / 6 Comments

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 some researches on old statistics of tea trade. When I found out that this company was quite successful in spite of several problems (more on that later in this blog post) and in spite of being among the lesser known East India Companies (most people knowing only the British, Dutch and French ones), I knew I had something interesting to look at.

This was confirmed a bit later when I went to the Armada in Rouen (a famous gathering of big sailing ships) and saw the Götheborg, the sailing replica of a 18th-century ship that sank right before getting back into its harbour in Göteborg, fully loaded with goods from China.

034-Götheborg-full

Götheborg in full

034-Götheborg-closer

Götheborg, a closer look

This was an obvious sign of destiny.

What is so peculiar with this company? And why not another small one like the Imperial Ostend Company (yes I know I am the best when it comes to finding obscure and unknown references or names)? First of all because it lasted longer (from 1731 to 1813, even if no ships were sent from 1807 on) and also because it was quite successful.

Successful, I hear all of you saying but we never heard of it. How can a company be successful and leave nothing but a ship in the memories of Western people?

To show how successful it was, I will give you some raw data of the number of ships sent to China (almost all those listed below were heading towards this country), the pounds of tea shipped back (mostly to be smuggled back to Great Britain) and the pounds of tea officially sold by the East India Company in the same country.

To understand these figures, you have to know that in 1784, the Commutation Act was passed in England reducing the taxes on tea from 119% to 12.5% (thanks to Richard Twining of the Twinings Tea Company) and in these times, news were slow to move from one country to another and the ships of 1785 might have been sent without any knowledge of this Act.

Year

Number of ships sent

Pounds of tea shipped

Pounds of tea sold in Great Britain by the EIC

1767

2

3 066 143

4 681 891

1768

2

3 186 220

6 668 717

1769

1

1 494 509

7 984 684

1770

2

3 076 642

7 723 538

1771

no account

3 000 000

5 566 793

1772

2

2 746 800

5 882 953

1773

1

1 489 700

2 571 902

1774

2

4 088 100

5 687 384

1775

2

2 562 500

5 475 498

1776

2

3 049 100

3 763 540

1777

2

2 851 200

4 304 277

1778

2

3 258 000

3 402 271

1779

2

2 626 400

5 457 138

1780

3

4 108 900

5 588 315

1781

2

3 267 300

3 578 499

1782

3

4 265 600

4 166 854

1783

3

4 878 900

3 087 616

1784

none

8 608 473

1785

4

6 212 400

13 165 715

1786

1

1 747 700

13 985 506

Total

40

60 976 114

121 351 564

Average cargo per ship sent

1 524 403

Year

Number of ships sent

Pounds of tea shipped

Pounds of tea sold in Great Britain by the EIC

1787

2

2 890 900

14 045 709

1788

2

2 589 000

13 429 408

1789

none

14 537 967

1790

none

14 682 968

1791

1

1 591 330

15 090 781

1792

1

1 559 730

15 821 101

1793

1

756 130

15 833 660

1794

none

16 642 448

1795

2

2 759 800

17 794 897

1796

none

16 549 563

1797

2

1 406 200

16 319 254

1798

1

1 408 400

18 808 617

1799

1

444 800

19 910 292

1800

2

2 202 400

20 358 827

1801

none

20 022 261

1802

2

1 427 067

21 837 698

1803

none

21 647 922

1804

2

2 352 666

18 501 904

1805

none

21 025 310

1806

none

19 655 973

Total

19

21 388 423

352 516 560

Average cargo per ship sent

1 125 706

Ships sent to China by the SOC with the pounds of tea shipped back compared to the pounds of tea sold in Great Britain by the EIC from 1767 to 1806 (source: Oriental Commerce by William Milburn, 1813)

Now since you all know that Sweden is not the most Western or maritime country in Europe, you will probably ask why did they venture on these high seas and why were they so successful?

I heard you in the back, the answer is not “because they are Vikings”.

Money is the answer as after the Greath Northern War (1700-1721), Sweden, the former Baltic Sea major power, was impoverished and trade was seen as one of the options to help the country recover.

It didn’t go without all kinds of struggle as at first tea and porcelain were seen as “poor goods” to be traded for the traditional and well-known timber and steel. Furthermore, the nascent Swedish textile industry saw the Asian textiles as direct competitors and wanted to avoid it.

Part of the solution came from the closing of the Ostend Company as English and other foreigners who could not trade via foreign companies had to find a new “home” to help them make some profits.

Following a discussion in the Sweden Parliament, the company was formed in 1731 and was given a royal chart for at first 15 years.

What set it aside from the other Indian Companies in the different countries? First of all, secrecy was to be maintained around the shareholders and finance (ie the books were burned at the end of each trip). Why? Because all countries forbade their citizens to trade with Asia without going through their “national” companies, which were not able to satisfy every demand (and the potential profits were also hampered by high taxes).

They could also not trade in any port belonging to any State in Europe, unless they had been authorized by the local authorities to do so.

The other rules were shared by the other companies and as such I will only list them: all departures and arrivals were to be made from Gothenburg, the Swedish State taxed everything, the ships were to be built and outfitted in Sweden and at first the subscribers were only in for one trip (this changed in 1753).

The ships when at sea followed a specific trade routine. Leaving Gothenburg with iron, copper and timber, they headed towards Cadiz in Spain to trade their goods for Spanish (or should I say South American) silver (the company being prohibited to use Swedish coins, remember mercantilism?), which was the basis of the trade with Asia. From there, it sailed mostly to China, bringing back tea (and some other items like porcelain).

What made this company so successful?

My analysis (but after all if you have read up to now, it is because you want to read it or because you thought this was about Vikings selling teas) is that they made it because they had good leaders, they focused on one niche with potential and didn’t try to fight too openly those already on the market.

For the good leaders, one just has to look at its founders: you have some Scots merchants, some former Hanseatic ones and some Swedish ones. Some had experience with the former Ostend Company (and thus with Asian trade), others with European trade and others were well connected but all of them were men of experience that wanted to get more money from trading.

For example, Colin Campbell was a Scot merchant that had a huge debt to pay and that wanted to pay it (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Campbell_%28Swedish_East_India_Company%29).

The focus on the niche is obvious when looking at the value split of the cargo at Gothenburg. Most of the times, 90% of it was tea, a good that could be easily put into a ship in good quantities, had a market with people ready to pay for it (thanks to the high taxes), something that ensured a good return on investment since with less cost per pound (more on that in a few lines) you could sell it under the official price (but still with a good margin) and know that you would be able to sell everything.

The benefits of not fighting openly those already on the market part were twofold. On the one hand, by deciding not to “colonize” or create “factories”, the Swedish East India Company was probably seen as a lesser threat to the big players (see the numerous and costly fights between the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French for the control of the Indian sea and the Asian trade) and on the other hand, it avoided the extra burden of having to build fortifications, keep garrisons, wage wars… Hence the less cost per pound of cargo unloaded.

All this made the SOC, a successful and profitable company until the British government decided to drop the tax level bringing the “official” tea back into the competition and making smuggling not worth the cost.

This was one market evolution too much for the SOC, a company that had put all its eggs in the same basket and wasn’t able/willing to find new waters to swim in them.

Bowing to traditions

March 19, 2013 / / 8 Comments

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.

 031 - Preparations

As far as tea is concerned, traditions are part of it since it began and nothing is more traditional then a tea ceremony.

What is a tea ceremony? For this post, I will define it as a sort of tea ritual, as an unique way of making and drinking tea over and over again until everybody in a certain area knows that the xxx tea ceremony is performed that way (the precise area depending on a lot of factors such as being the motherland of tea or of tea in Europe or a country full of traditions that sounds exotics to us or ..).

Everyone knows about the Chinese tea ceremonies, the Japanese one, the English one (aka “5 o’clock tea”) , the Indian one, the Moroccan one, the Russian one and I am sure I am forgetting a lot of them.

031 - 2 cups

What I want to show you here is a little less known tea ceremony (although several of us Teatraders have talked about it), the East Frisian one.

East Frisian? Yes, a small part of Germany (for the East part) and of the Netherlands (for the West part) that is famous in Germany for being the place where people drink tea and nothing else (I already spoke once about a trip to this area in a previous blog post).

I didn’t go back to this area yet although I am sure that one day I will as I have many things that I didn’t see yet (both tea related and unrelated) but I travelled to Bremen, another “tea town” in Germany (for me Bremen and Hamburg are the southern borders of “tea drinking” Germany) and although I find that they usually make black tea too strong (but I think I know why), I decided to make a short video about the “right” way to perform a East Frisian tea ceremony.

After reading a bit more about it, I did at least one thing wrong: I poured too much tea on my candy sugar since the cup should not be full but the candy sugar should be covered by tea.

But as goes the saying, practice makes perfection.

I am also lucky that I was the one pouring tea into my cup as I didn’t get into any trouble by forgetting to let my spoon in my cup (as long as you don’t do this, it means you want more tea).

 031 - 2 cups once more

Now regarding the strength of black tea that sometimes borders on the bitter side, my explanation is threefold.

First and foremost, Germans are black coffee drinkers and the stronger, the better.

A second but more factual explanation is that in East Frisian, tea is drunk with liquid cream and sugar to sweeten it, which makes it easier to drink. So why bother for the strength of your tea?

My last explanation is that in Germany, tea pots remain heated while they are on your table, which even if the leaves are no longer there, changes the taste of what you are drinking.