Category: History

France, its colonies and tea

August 28, 2012 / / 16 Comments

I know it is probably quite strange to publish something about a country that is going to get under the ever cautious eyes of Mr @thedevotea himself and that @lahikmajoe wrote about.

What is even worst is knowing that in 2009, with a mere 0,21 kg per year and per capita, France ranked 88 in terms of tea consumption per capita and per year (along really known tea drinkers countries like Azerbaijan, Belize and Moldiva) (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consumption_per_capita and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations).

But we are talking about the country of Theodor, Palais des Thés, Mariage Frères, Kusmi Tea, Dammann Frères and so many others I forgot to name (and no this is not a ranking), so there must be something to it.

I did some research and found online a book published in 1912, L’agriculture pratique des pays chauds, a compilation of newspapers from the Bulletin du Jardin Colonial et des jardins d’essai des colonies françaises (Bulletin from the Colonial Garden and the French Tropical Botanical Gardens).

I think the best way to sum up this article is to say that some of the French colonies had potential but lacked both the cheap labour needed to harvest tea and the skilled one needed to prepare it.

The main producing area was Indochina but I will come back to it later.

In Senegal, there was no tea but a kind of ersatz, the Lippia adoensis, but the production was rather low.

Mayotte and Madagascar produced some tea (not much) but mostly in private gardens or through experiments with plants comings from Java or Ceylon.

The production in the second of these islands is said to have been of excellent quality but I don’t know how they judged it.

La Réunion must have shown great promises since tea production was introduced at least 4 times (1816, 1841, 1858 and 1894) from Java or Ceylon, mostly because the interest seems to have vanished because of the same reasons that seem to have plagued the French tea industry.

However, the quality was there since in 1867, tea from La Réunion earned the gold medal at the Paris Universal Exposition (the writer wrote the London one but it must be a mistake).

Now we are getting to Indochina, the tea jewel of the French Empire.

The local people produced a tea but it was badly prepared (at least for the European standards) and as such was not really interesting for the colonial power or the rich local people (who drank Chinese tea)

It seems that the missionaries were among the first to introduce tea production (mostly because no one ever thought of competing against the Chinese teas) in Assam from where it went in the whole country.

The different plantations belonged to French owners and the production was directly sold through them.

But all this for what?

Here is the tea consumption in France during these years.

As you will see it is not really that bright with a really low consumption per inhabitant and a stable price (rather typical of the period).

 

I would have liked to publish here some of the pictures that first inspired me but I asked for the authorization and didn’t receive it.

So I can only put the link here and hope you will click on it.

http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/sdx/ulysse/index

After clicking on it, just write “thé” in the “Plein texte” box and then hit enter.

My kingdom for a horse! Or rather an island for a tea!

June 12, 2012 / / 7 Comments

Obviously, Richard III had no clue about tea otherwise he would never had asked for a horse.

In my case, I asked for tea but since I am no king, I only offered an island, the island of Sylt.

For those of you that are not German or Danish, I know I need to explain a little some things and I hope that the Germans and Danish that read the next few lines will accept my apologies for stating obvious or known things.

However, in either cases I won’t bother you with a tourist guide to Sylt.

 

Sylt is a Frisian island north of Germany and only a couple of kilometres (if these are kilometres) away from Denmark.

Its size shrink every year but they seemed to have been able to stop the process by bringing in sand, which according to what I heard was a highly controversial move.

It is the German equivalent to Saint-Tropez (without the ships or I missed them) because a lot of wealthy and famous people have houses there.

My trip was not tea oriented but the guide spoke about several tea places (one to drink and 3-4 to buy good tea) and I managed to find them and much more.

See the pictures below for the much more (a huge buy and drink tea shop/salon) but don’t ask me anything about this place since I was there on a Saturday at 14h00 and exceptionally they had decided to close earlier.

The previous lines were just an appetizer for one of our fellow Teatreaders to one day go to Sylt and make us a full report.

As I said the trip was not tea oriented but I had high expectations.

Why?

Because in Germany, the Frisian Islands are known to be the place where people drink tea.

They even have their own tea ceremony, with cream and rock candies (for anyone going there, don’t forget to put the spoon in the cup but only after you drink the third one).

Since I am always eager to understand things that are non-logical at first sight, I asked people in a tea store why were the Frisian Islands so famous in Germany for their tea.

 The answer is that one day, a ship came to England with tea but it had to go through a storm and the tea ended all mixed up since everything was broken but the teas were still dry.

When the ship arrived, the English didn’t want it since it didn’t suit their peculiar drinking habits.

So here they were with a ship full of tea but no one eager to buy it.

This is when a “nice” Frisian merchant (I don’t know why but merchants are always nice fellows in these stories) who was there said that he would buy it and the ship was sent to the Frisian Islands. It seems that people there liked it so much, they rationalised the all thing (after all, you cannot make your favourite drink rely on the weather, such an unreliable thing) and perfected it to make the now famous (at least in Germany) Frisian Blend

A nice story, no?

However the truth might be a little different.

Frisian are not far from the Netherlands (Frisian is also a region in the Netherlands) and since they speak more or less a close language (at least at that time) and were good sailors, they were quite often recruited by the Dutch East India Company to sail on their ships.

Since every sailor was doing a little bit of trade for himself, it is no wonder that tea came to the Frisian Islands, probably first as a drug but helped by the Church it quickly grew in popularity and managed to become the number one drink before beer.

This upset Prussia, which had become the owner of East Frisian (as this part of the country is known) in 1744 and in 1778, they tried to ban it but failed and two years later, they had to lift the law.

You will ask why were they so upset?

To understand it, you have to remember that at that time, Frederick II was King of Prussia and trying to “modernise” Prussia, which for that time meant that the economical theory they applied was mercantilism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism) or in other a bit too simplistic words “don’t let my gold go in the other countries and force them to bring their in mine .”

The Frisian love of tea meant a “huge” trade deficit with the Netherlands and good old gold coins going there instead of staying in Prussia.

This was not the last time that mainland Germany had to do something for the Frisian Islands and their love of tea as during World War II, they were allowed a bigger amount of tea per day than the rest of the country.

Is this more logical than the nice tale I told you a few lines above? Yes but since I could not find any peculiar reason behind the famous Frisian blend, I think both explanations go together rather well. Mine for the reason behind tea in the Frisian Islands and the other for the blend.

If you ever find a better explanation for it, just let me know and I might send you a pack of Frisian Mischung.

 

Of competitive intelligence, letters and tea

November 9, 2011 / / 4 Comments

We live really interesting times.

Thanks to the Internet I can chat with people from all over the world about tea or any other topic I might be interested in.

I can also find a lot of surprises while looking for other things (which is probably my favourite part of the Internet) and I can also have access to a whole set of data and figures on tea trade, tea consumption, tea whatever you might think of.

Now, you are probably wondering if I have lost my mind somewhere over the rainbow or if the Mad Hatter took it to make one of his special teas.

The answer is none of the above.

When I read a book on trade or spying in the old times, I am always amazed by how they informed themselves about prices, products, competitors…

The whole process might surprise a few people that think that we (those of the modern era) invented everything but let’s look more closely at a modern concept: competitive intelligence.

What is it?

According to Wikipedia, “a broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.”

Now, let’s go for a few lines in the mind of one of the tea merchants from earlier and see if this definition would fit.

Let’s say you belong to a big company, perhaps the East India Company and you want to know if you can still sell tea, how, to whom and at what price (you know that you want to sell tea, don’t you?).

Surprise, you just defined your intelligence needs about your customers, competitions, needs that will allow you or more likely the board of directors to decide what is the best sales strategy for tea.

The next step is to decide who are the people able to answer your questions.

First, accountants to let you know how much it costs, where you make a profit, how much tea you sale each year and other mundane things.

But then, comes the tricky questions regarding competitors, foreign markets.

What do you do?

Today, you would probably look all over the Internet for raw data, chat with people for qualitative information, give a few phone calls, look at the press… But apart from the press, none of these tools were available during the time of the East India Company.

So the only option would be to take your most beautiful feather and write letters (or make others write them after all you are the boss here) to selected consuls and gentlemen to ask them to collect data on the local/national market (depending if there is a thing like a centralised state or if it is more a balkanised one).

You would probably ask the same questions to several people so as to be able to double or triple check their answers (you never know).

Now, gathering and analysis are likely to be done (it was not done as quickly or easily as I might make it sound but still) and this is when distribution of the collected and analysed data would be useful.

If you were in the Middle Ages, you would probably write it down in some obscure language but now in the 19th century, you are civilized, so you probably print it since His Majesty ordered the East India Company to do so.

And guess what? Years later, the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek made a copy of it and put it on the Internet, so enjoy the Papers relating to the trade with India and China including information and prices of tea, in foreign countries.

To help you to read through it, I gathered every tea related information I could find in this book and put it under Google Docs (file here)

Just to show you how serious these people (you know them, they are you) were with tea and competitive intelligence, I must tell you that each file has something like 18 tabs filled with data.

Tea and Opium

May 18, 2011 / / 5 Comments

For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose

 

To summarize it in a few words, this books is the story of how Robert Fortune stole the secrets of tea for the British East India Company to bring them from China to India in the middle of the 19th century.

Yes, this is right: tea was right in the middle of a James Bond novel, perhaps not the modern James Bond but at least a Victorian one.

But this is not what is really interesting in this book (or at least not for this blog). What I found truly fascinating are the reasons behind him stealing the secrets of tea.

Let’s sum up thFlag of the British East India Companyings: the introduction of tea in India and in the Darjeeling Estates is the result of an immune system, the immune system of one of the first megacorporation known to the world: the East India Company or British East India Company.

But in order to understand this, two little steps back in time are needed:

First, how was the trade balance between European powers and China? To be honest, it was not good: demand for Chinese products (tea, silk and porcelain among others) was high while China had no need for European products and wanted silver. For the mercantilist economists that ruled in Europe during that era, this resulted in a impoverishment (as the prosperity of a State depended on the amount of precious metal it owned) and this was not a viable solution on the long run. For the United Kingdom, it was even worst as it no longer used silver standard but gold one and it had to buy silver from other European countries, losing a bit of money each time.

This is why the East India Company, which held a monopoly over trade with the Far East (via a royal charter) decided to sell a high value commodity: opium (produced in the Bengal area, that more or less belonged to the British East India Company since Clive’s victory at the battle of Plassey in 1757).

Ship of the British East India Company

The high prices and increasing demand (from an estimate of 15 tons in 1730 to 900 tons in the 1820s) made sure that the trade balance was improving (Great Britain even fought two wars against China to keep this business running).

 

Then why did the East India Company needed to steal the secrets of tea? There are several answers to this question: first of all, they were slowly losing their trade monopoly (first with India and then with China) and were unable to cope with the new competitors (including other countries); they also needed more money to deal with wars and expansion on the Indian borders (which the Company paid for); last but not least, they were afraid that China might legalise the cultivation of opium and/or steal it from India (the Bengali opium was of higher quality than the Chinese one).

In order to solve all these problems, the British East India Company decided to produce their own tea in Darjeeling, a place that seemed well suited for these products. The first intents used tea found in Assam and tea smuggled of Canton but it was not a success and quality was low.

Now, you get the overall picture. The British East India Company had to deal with a big problem as they needed more money but had to give a lot of it to their suppliers.

This is the reason behind their first move: replacing money by another product, one that they could produce rather easily and that was highly addictive (making it even more profitable): opium.

The next evolution came from the increased competition (with the end of the trade monopoly) and the fears that China might become a competitor for the Indian opium. The only solution the British East India Company found was to keep on producing opium for the Chinese while at the same time, they tried to launch their own production of tea to take away that market from China.

The end result was an increase of the profits as once the quality had increased and the industrial processes were known, the Indian production could be sold on the London market while being promoted as safer as the Chinese one (as the Chinese used some dangerous chemical products to make their green leaves greener as Westerners always wanted the greenest ones).

 

In modern times, we would use words such as trade war, industrial espionage, marketing,…

Without judging its ethics or its success, it seems that the British East India Company was rather modern when it comes to business survival and evolution and that it was indeed the first megacorporation (in a true cyberpunk way) in history.