Britain's Oldest Cuppa Found

What may be the oldest tea in Britain has been identified in the stores of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London.

Labelled “a sort of tea from China,” the box of dried leaves had remained unnoticed in the museum for more than 300 years.

Historians from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) identified the sample as the oldest physical remnant of Britain’s favorite drink during research for an upcoming book called “Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World.”

“What makes the discovery so fascinating is that it captures the very moment at which tea was about to lay claim to a mass market in Britain,” QMUL researcher Richard Coulton, one of the authors of the book, said in a statement.

According to Coulton and colleagues Markman Ellis and Matthew Mauger, the other authors of the book, the tea was brought to Britain by James Cuninghame, a Scottish surgeon, trader and plant hunter, following one of his two trips to China in the late 17th and early 18th century.

Cuninghame joined an illicit private trading voyage to Amoy in Fujian province in 1697, which was a center for the early-modern tea trade.

“He arrived back in Britain in 1699 and very soon after set out again to China with the famous East India Company. He stayed for three years on the island of Chusan, where he found the tea plant growing wild and witnessed the local manufacturing of leaf tea,” Coulton said.

Today tea is a popular drink that crosses many cultures and traditions, but at that time it was considered an unusual, exotic and fashionable pleasure. Indeed, tea consumption in Britain became widespread only decades after Cuninghame imported the green leaves into the country around 1700.

“In the seventeenth century, the simple act of blending hot water with infused leaves was considered pretty extraordinary. It was priced as a luxury item and the best tea was ten times more expensive than the best coffee,” Coulton said.

It is known that in 1663, tea of the finest quality was sold at up to 60 shillings per pound, compared to the six shilling price for the best coffee.

Coulton and colleagues believe Cuninghame’s tea would have tasted much like an artisanal green tea today.

Read more at Discovery News