It’s Tea Time: Pirates, Polyphenols, and a Proper Cuppa

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This is the brand new tea plantation.

And it's quite exciting because the backdrop couldn't be any more English.

We see we've got literally a quintessential English village right behind it.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

A tea plantation in England.

I know, shocking.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.

But Nikki and I actually got a chance to visit Britain's one and only commercial tea plantation last month.

It's in Cornwall, a beautiful peninsula that's the southwesternmost corner of England.

And we went there in order to understand the story of two countries, Britain and China, and their shared obsession with a camellia bush.

This episode will tell a swashbuckling tale.

I use that word literally, there are even pirates involved.

how the British stole tea from China and transformed the world's economy at the same time.

And while Cynthia and I roll up our sleeves to harvest some tea, we get into the difference between green and black tea and the science behind tea's health benefits.

But first, we have to get one important thing out of the way: your mint tea is not tea.

Neither is your chamomile, or in fact, any of your sleepy time, tension tamer, revive, herbal, whatever.

That's not tea either.

It's an infusion.

So, tea has become a name that we used for anything steeped in hot water.

By that definition, chicken soup would be chicken tea.

So to be very precise, tea is a drink made from the plant Camellia sinensis steeped in hot water.

So with that important point cleared up, let's get to the pirates.

So we're in Cornwall in southwest England, but tea, as you might have guessed, does not originate in Cornwall.

There are many sort of myths of the origin, but what we believe is that there's a biodiversity hotspot in southern China and the Himalayas, and that tea developed there many millions of years ago.

That voice, that's Sarah Rose.

She's the author of our new favorite tea book, For All the Tea in China, How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History.

Sarah told us that the Chinese have a number of origin myths.

China is where tea first really developed and where it's still incredibly popular today.

The Buddhist myth says that the Buddha was meditating and he kept getting drowsy and he felt that he was sort of neglecting his meditative practice and was so annoyed when he fell asleep that he ripped out his eyelashes because his eyes had betrayed him and he threw them away and in the spot where the Buddha's eyelashes landed, tea sprung forward.

All the better to help keep him awake for his next meditation session.

According to probably the most popular origin story, a few thousand years ago, the mythical Emperor Shenong was boiling his drinking water.

A shiny leaf from a wild tea bush dropped into the hot water, and he found the resulting brew to be refreshing and stimulating.

This myth may be the most popular, but like the Buddha eyelash story, it's not very likely to be true.

We picked fresh tea leaves in corn oil and put them in boiling water, and they don't really taste of anything.

Turns out tea has to be processed a little to turn into what we think of as tea.

And honestly, the whole discovery of wild tea and the development of a process to turn those tea leaves into, well, tea, probably happened thousands of years before this origin story.

We have no idea how long we've been drinking tea.

But China basically owned tea and tea production for millennia.

They cultivated the best tasting tea plants, they developed the best methods to process the leaves into different kinds of tea.

They obsessed over tea brewing and tea serving rituals.

Tea first arrived in Europe in the early 1600s through Portuguese missionaries, but tea first came to England in the dowry of a Portuguese princess named Catherine de Braganza when she married an English king in 1662.

And the British nobility quickly copied her tea drinking habit.

She's credited with introducing the custom of drinking tea to court.

At first, tea was super expensive and rare.

Then, as Britain industrialized, it got a little cheaper, mainly because Parliament banned importing Chinese fabrics in order to protect the new industrial fabric trade in England.

And so, merchants trading with China filled their boats with tea instead of silk.

But it was also very useful in that it is a stimulant, so it keeps you up, and it also is a way of conveying calories, of moving milk and sugar into the human body.

It's hard to overstate just how big a deal caffeine and sugar are in 1700s Europe and, in particular, in industrializing England.

If you drink tea, you can be super perky during the day.

You can get extra calories.

And by boiling water to brew your tea, you also fortuitously protect yourself from lots of diseases and parasites.

And tea wins in England over coffee because, as Nikki Nikki said, the price was right.

Because of its different trade routes, coffee's prices were expensive one day, cheaper another.

Tea was the best deal, and tea came from China.

Part of the reason the price of tea was so stable is because one company had a monopoly on all trade with China, the British East India Company.

It was the first stockholding organization that basically controlled all the trade with the Oriental Empire, the Eastern and Oriental Empire.

And it worked like a government in its own way.

It could mint money, it had its own court system, and it had its own armies.

So

it was an arm of the British government, but it was a privately held company.

And that one company provided all of this economic boost for England and the empire.

And that economic boost was substantial.

A tenth of the British government's revenue from taxes came from tea alone.

Britain was buying a fifth of China's entire tea production because by the mid-1700s, tea had become the most popular drink in Britain, more so even than beer.

So China was totally self-sufficient.

And for a long time, England was trading with China by just buying things with silver.

And this became a balance of payment problem.

Silver went into China and nothing, there was no other trade coming out.

So the Treasury of England is being dumped into China and it's staying there.

And this becomes a massive problem for Britain and the East India Company.

And so they come up with this idea, which is they do have something that the Chinese would like, and they start dumping opium into China, and then they create a nation of opium addicts.

Turns out, opium poppies grow really well along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

They still do, obviously.

And in the 1700s, that area was all part of the East India Company's gigantic domain.

And so there's now this kind of drug trade.

On one side, caffeine is coming out.

On the other side, opium is is going in, and that sustains itself for 100 years.

So Britain at this point is pretty happy with the setup.

And here's another piece of this story.

As the Brits are becoming a nation of tea drinkers, they're also becoming a nation of gardeners.

There's a kind of plant mania in Britain.

Britain is this very rapidly industrializing country.

People are being moved off of their farms and into the cities, and they obsess about plants.

But this is more than just getting in touch with nature.

Brits are obsessing about exotic plants in particular.

And so plants become extremely valuable.

There are noblemen who are willing to bet their entire family fortune on one orchid.

Some of these are plants that you see alongside roads today.

They don't strike us as particularly exciting.

But at the time, they were being brought back from the Far East or South America, and they'd never been seen before.

These big houses and gardens in the UK were all about having the best, the oldest, the first introductions, and the botanical gardens, if you like, were great showing off devices on a huge scale.

And that's just the history of the estate we visited in Cornwall called Tregothnan.

And they were all competing like mad.

Of course, they're all very friendly and very, you know, gentlemanly towards each other, but secretly, they're all furtively collecting and growing as much as they can to beat their neighbours.

Jonathan Jones is the managing director of trading at Tregothnan.

So Tregothnan is home to the Boscoan family since 1334, so almost 700 years old.

So, lots of countries don't really have a state, so it's a very British thing.

The Boscowans are British aristocrats.

They're the Earls of Falmouth.

And in the 1700s, they, like all their noble friends, were mad for plants.

They created the largest private botanical garden in Cornwall, and they sponsored expeditions to stock it with all sorts of exotic treasures.

So, this place, Trigoston, actually grew the first outdoor camellias in the late, well, probably 1790s, we're not exactly sure, but they were the first outdoor camellias in the UK, with that much we do know.

And they're still growing, like 200 years on, they're still looking good.

These are flowering ornamental camellias.

They're not camellia sinensis or tea bushes.

But the point is, the Baskowan family ancestors at Tregothnen were in the thick of the camellia planting exotic flower displaying competition.

So that's the scene.

The East India Company is keeping Britain in tea by selling opium to China.

And meanwhile, all these caffeinated British aristocrats have developed a serious botany habit.

The past is truly a foreign country.

The British aristocrats are pretty happy with this setup, but the Chinese, not so much.

It takes the Chinese 100 years to get truly pissed, but finally they do.

The Chinese emperor gets mad because he doesn't want a nation of drug addicts.

So he fights back.

They have a war.

And China may have been self-sufficient as far as being able to feed itself, but it didn't have armies, it didn't have modern navies, and it gets gets roundly humiliated by England.

So Britain wins its dirty drug war, and as part of the peace treaty, it gets five new trading ports along the coast.

Five more ports is five more points of entry, footholds from which Brits can sneak into China and steal its secrets.

Because the East India Company, I mean, they might have won the opium wars, but drug dealing is such a headache and they keep having to fight over it, which costs money.

The East India Company has an idea.

England totally controls India, and folks from the company had seen wild tea growing there in the Himalayas.

It doesn't taste great because it was never selected and bred the way it had been in China for thousands of years.

And the locals chewed it.

They didn't have a culture of processing tea like in China.

But the fact that tea plants grew there gave the top dogs at the East India Company the idea to start a tea industry in India.

They want to be able to make it themselves and keep all of that money for themselves.

And if they can have it in India, which they fully control, then there is no middleman.

From the moment you plant it to the moment it comes to the British table, every step in that chain is British-controlled and there's British profit.

And it's far better for the British Empire, they believe, to lock out China from this trade.

There's only a couple minor problems with this brilliant plan.

The East India Company has no tea plants other than the crappy wild ones.

And, again, minor detail, no British person knows how to grow and process tea.

So they needed an intellectual property thief.

They sent a spy.

His name was Robert Fortune.

Robert Fortune was a Scottish botanist, and he had experience in China.

He'd already been sent there once on a plant hunting expedition.

Out of all the plant hunters of the day, he knew China the best, so he was the perfect thief for the East India Company.

In theory.

But Robert was Scottish, and the other not insignificant challenge is that actually no foreigners were allowed into China, except for inside the walls of these five trading ports.

And tea doesn't really grow in those ports.

No white people are allowed beyond the treaty ports.

For Robert Fortune to go exploring, he needs to not be a white person.

And so he shaves his head, he sews a cue into it, a ponytail down the back, which is how people sort of would signify that they are Chinese.

and wore Chinese clothing.

And I know it sounds absurd that some six-foot-tall white guy could pass as Chinese, but the idea was that China was so big and really so diverse and also so closed from the world that they wouldn't know what they were looking at since nobody was having trade with the West.

Nobody knew that Westerners had long noses and round eyes.

And also China at that moment is ruled by the Manchurian court and the Manchurians are foreigners.

So there's this idea that foreignness is something internal and as long as he was wearing the signifiers that made him Chinese, he could be Chinese.

There isn't even a one national language at this moment.

There are many different languages.

So it's possible he just didn't speak the local dialect.

And it's not just the hairstyle and the clothes.

Robert even learns how to use chopsticks.

Quite a struggle, according to his diaries.

But Robert, even dressed as a native and acting like a native as skillfully as he can, he can't do this on his own.

He hires guides.

He hires people to speak for him, people to carry for him, people to do all his negotiating with the culture.

And they are people from the coast who do have experience with Westerners.

And they go in together as a team to hunt plants in the wilds of China.

And he's specifically looking for two things.

He wants the very best green tea plants and the very best black tea plants.

And he needs to get tea makers and recipes from both.

So yeah, this is not an easy mission.

In fact, Robert spends the next 10 years of his life undercover in China.

Sarah never quite figured out what his wife thought about all this.

Still, it wasn't like Robert was having a ton of fun.

There are lots of obstacles and challenges.

He fights pirates.

And in fact, this is the thing that sort of got me into the book in the first place.

I was like, wait a minute.

He dresses and drag and he fights pirates?

That's the greatest story ever.

China is a bit of a lawless place, and there's a lot of money to be made.

And so the pirates rule the coasts.

And in order to travel in China, you have to sort of travel up the coast.

And he gets beset by pirates, fights them off.

When he is in the interior, there are bandits and there are prostitutes, and it's an adventure tale in order to find the best tea regions of China.

My favorite part of the story is where he sleeps on top of coffins by mistake.

Or maybe the part when his entire first shipment of plants dies.

But really, you have to read Sarah's book for all the tea in China for the whole adventure.

I bought it for a friend as soon as I finished it.

But the main thing is that Robert Fortune succeeded and he made a fortune.

He stole tea from China, and he even stole tea makers for their expertise.

He stole everything, the entire process from seed to kappa.

It's one of the biggest intellectual property thefts in history.

And now, over a million people in India are employed in tea, and that's where, for a long time, most of the world's tea came from.

In fact, Indian tea becomes even more famous than Chinese tea.

So among the things that Robert Fortune did was he was the first person to bring tea to Darjeeling, and Darjeeling is the champagne of tea.

It is the very finest tea you will ever ever get, and that is what I have in my house.

Robert's story explains how tea ended up in India, but how on earth did it end up in Cornwall?

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse.

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And you can do that with pure leaf iced tea, real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

With a pure leaf iced tea in hand, you'll be left feeling refreshed and revitalized with a new motivation to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a pure leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break, time for a pure leaf.

Darjeeling in India is a long way from southwest England, but in 1999, Jonathan Jones decided to plant England's first tea garden at Trogothnon.

On a very small scale, we put it into the kitchen garden.

And this wasn't just a crazy idea, although it was a little bit of a crazy idea.

But Jonathan's a botanist by training too, and he had noticed some similarities between Tregothnon's gardens and Darjeeling.

So we have a magnolia tree which flowers here in February, sometimes in January.

It comes from Darjeeling and yet it does better here than it does in Darjeeling.

There are a few other examples like this.

Jonathan calls them indicator species.

And he wondered if they can grow these other plants so well at Tregothnon, why not tea?

It still sounds a little crazy, but the climate in Cornwall and particularly at Tregothnon is actually really similar to that of Darjeeling.

You know, in Cornwall we get this very languid spring-like winter they call it so it's not quite winter not quite spring.

That is what tea loves.

We have 1100 millimeters of rain a year.

It's usually warmer here in the winter than it is in Darjeeling which surprises most people because Darjeeling's in India.

And Jonathan pointed out tea is not actually a tropical plant.

It grows in the mountains.

It just doesn't like a hard frost.

And Cornwall is warmed by the Gulf Stream and it doesn't usually have hard winters.

But that doesn't mean that growing tea in Cornwall was easy.

Things like shade, I didn't believe we needed it in the UK because we're quite far north.

But in fact, shade trees are really important and our best tea grows where it gets about two-thirds of the day's sunlight.

I never would have thought that England had too much sun.

I really thought that we had that one covered.

Literally.

One great thing about England is that it doesn't have the same pests and diseases that the tea plant faces in China and India, but it turns out it had some new ones.

And we had attacks from deer.

They do, do, they love it.

There's a very old, closed herd of fallow deer here.

They're 300-year-old herd or more now.

And they would get a taste for tea, and then it's very hard to stop them.

But pheasants, too, I've never heard of this elsewhere, but the pheasants at Tregothnen would come in and pluck the young two leaves into bud.

The very bit that we want is what they'd like to get as well.

So we had to put in scaring things to prevent them stealing all our tea.

Still, Jonathan persisted.

And in 2005, we had enough tea to actually sell the first packet of tea.

Bella Percy Hughes is the director of marketing at Tregothnan, and she took us on a tour of the estate.

First stop, the very first tea bushes Jonathan ever planted.

Think it's the door to the secret garden.

Really, this door looked exactly how you'd picture a secret garden door all covered in ivy and lichen and set into an archway carved in a stone wall.

Yeah, so this is the kitchen garden behind the secret garden door.

This is one of the oldest remaining parts of the estate, too.

So the door dates back to the Plantagenet era.

Which makes it 700 years old, pretty much.

So this was where the first tea was planted, and they chose this area obviously because of the protection offered by the walls.

They've had some full starts, but this is now very established and very happy here.

Tregothnen has 150 acres of tea on the entire estate, which, by the the way, the estate itself is huge.

It's nearly 26,000 acres, about 40 square miles, nearly half the size of the city of Boston, just one estate.

And the tea plantations are dotted about all over the estate, wherever the soil and the shade and the drainage are just right.

We kept hopping in and out of Bella's car to visit them.

and various other highlights of the estate.

We saw all sorts of unusual plants.

We saw banana trees and a pine tree that was thought to be extinct.

We also saw a typical English hunting blind and a bowling lawn.

So this is the world's largest maze made from camellia.

It's the gardener's pride and joy.

He absolutely loves making it look this perfect.

I think there's a tea bush in the middle

if you can find it.

I was afraid we were going to lose Nikki to the maze.

I love mazes nearly as much as I love tea, but onwards.

So we're looking now over the top of this tea plantation in the Himalayan Valley, which is named because there are plants here that are very reminiscent of the Himalayas, and it's a rolling hillside

looking at the Chinese pagoda, so you kind of feel like you could be anywhere but England right now.

This particular plantation was weird because it really did look like Darjeeling.

Admittedly, it's been 20 years since I was in Darjeeling, but still, this patch of hillside is actually being used in films as a stand-in for India.

We walked over to the tea bushes.

The gardeners cut the tops of the plants, so they hit about mid-torso because this makes for easier plucking.

The leaves were all bright and shiny.

I'm about to pluck.

Is there a technique?

Just pop it off.

Okay.

Everyone heard that?

I heard it.

There you go.

Before we did too much damage, Bella introduced us to the different parts of a tea bush's anatomy.

So, this very green, bright green,

top two leaves in a bud is what we're looking at here.

And you can see the little bud has got tiny little white hairs on it.

And

to make a white tea, you need that bit, which is why white tea is so prized and precious and expensive, because that's the bit that you use when you make a white tea.

So normally the other leaves, so further down the plant, we'd be using for black and green teas, it's only this top part that's used for the most precious teas.

Yes, it's true.

Green and black and white tea all come from the very same bush.

White tea is just the bud.

But what's the difference between green and black if they both come from the leaves just under that bud?

The difference between green tea and black tea is a little bit like the difference between a boiled potato and a roasted potato.

I cannot really think of tea as being like potatoes, either boiled or roasted.

But Sarah's point is that in green tea and black tea, the actual leaves are the same.

The difference comes in what you do to them post-harvest.

Jonathan told us that there are five main stages in processing tea.

You pluck, wither, roll, oxidize, and dry.

Pluck, wither, roll, oxidize, and dry.

And that is simply taking the leaves off, pluck, and then withering is a matter of letting them wilt, so they go floppy.

And then the next step, the oxidation, that's what really makes a difference from one variety to another.

This oxidation process basically means that you bruise the leaves, usually by rolling, and all the juices from the broken leaf cells come into contact with each other and the air and the leaves turn brown.

Oxidation doesn't just change the color of the leaves.

All those chemicals in the leaves are interacting with each other and the environment and that transforms the flavors in your final cup of tea too.

If you want white tea you stop the process immediately and dry it.

You probably would be really gentle with them.

You wouldn't roll them very much at all or

you may not even roll at all.

If you want a slightly green tea or you know even yellow tea you would oxidize a bit more.

If you want an oolong again a bit more.

But if you want a black tea you're looking for the leaf to literally turn from a green leaf to a black leaf.

This is a lot like an apple core.

If you leave a you know a half-eaten apple out it goes brown or eventually black.

Not quite black but dark brown.

Same with tea.

It's literally just turning colour during the oxidation phase.

And then when you're happy that you've got the grade of tea you want be it green or oolong or black or whatever you stop it by drying it.

And drying is simply to store it.

If you want to drink it, then go ahead and put water on it again.

But otherwise the whole point of drying is to take the water out, it stops the oxidation process and you end up with a stable product that you can store for, well, could be years, many years.

And that's it.

There are hundreds and hundreds of variations on that, but that is fundamentally at the heart of it.

We've had listeners ask if tea is fermented.

This step in the process is sometimes called fermentation, but it's not.

It's oxidation.

Other than a particular tea called Pu'er, Pu'er is actually fermented for many months.

The other thing that listeners often ask us about is health.

Is tea good for us?

Is green tea better than black tea?

Tea has a long reputation as a medicinal plant, but the hype these days, it's intense.

Well, if I tell you the number of health benefit fits that have been associated with tea, you won't believe me because it seems like a panacea.

It's heart disease, it's cancer, it's diabetes, it's Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's, it's dental caries, it's metabolic syndrome, it's osteoporosis.

Really, that's just unbelievable.

Jeffrey Blumberg is a professor of nutrition, science, and policy at Tufts University.

He chaired a number of symposia on TN health.

And honestly, it does seem hard to imagine that tea could possibly do all those things.

But it's really important to appreciate two things.

The strength of the evidence for each of these different outcomes is different.

The evidence for tea's health benefits is strongest when it comes to your heart.

And what we find, particularly in people with poor vascular responses, drinking tea improves those vascular responses.

And we've even seen, there have been clinical studies where they look at people who have had a heart attack, and then they look at who are the tea drinkers and the non-tea drinkers.

And they find that the tea drinkers are less likely to have a second heart attack.

Here's why this seems to work.

The chemicals in tea, they're called flavonoids, they help your body increase the production of nitric oxide and they prevent that same nitric oxide from breaking down.

Nitric oxide is crucial.

It allows your blood vessels to expand and contract more easily to keep your blood flowing and your blood pressure steady.

So there's good evidence and a proven mechanism for how tea benefits your heart.

That data is strong.

But what about cancer?

That's another one you hear about tea being good for.

The data that suggests that tea has a chemo-preventive or cancer-preventing effect is really strong if you're a rat.

It's easy to make sure rats don't smoke.

It's harder to tease this all out with humans.

In general, it's really hard to do studies in humans that show what does or doesn't prevent cancer.

And all these cancer studies are observational, meaning scientists just watch people over decades.

So it's hard to figure out exactly what causes or prevents diseases.

Jeff does think that tea might help prevent some cancers more than others.

The ones that we see it has a greater effect on are oral and digestive cancers, so cancers of the mouth, cancers of the small intestine and of the colon, colorectal cancers.

In other observational studies, scientists have shown that tea drinking is associated with less depression and even a reduced risk for some forms of dementia.

Those effects are modest?

Okay, modest, I get that.

But still, on balance, I'm feeling pretty good about my tea consumption habit at this point in the conversation.

But am I drinking enough?

Dose is really, really important.

When we compare people who drink one or two cups of tea to those non-tea drinkers, there is a reduction in risk.

But when we look at those who drink three to four, or five or more cups a day, the risk continues to go down as the dose goes up.

In general, you can always have too much of a good thing.

So in theory, you could probably drink too much tea.

But Jeff thinks that would be hard to do.

We just don't drink that much liquid in a day.

Exactly how much of the beneficial chemicals you're getting varies too.

Iced tea is usually weaker.

Bottled iced tea has almost none of the good stuff left because it was dilute to start off with, and then the light breaks all the good chemicals down.

But so, here's a question: Is green tea the best?

That's what most of the studies I read seem to suggest.

There's much more, oh, green tea is amazing, than you ever hear about black tea.

It's mostly because more research has been done on green tea because the original data came out of Asia, where we saw these apparent benefits.

So, green and black tea might come from the same bush, but the differences in processing actually do create different chemicals in the end product.

However, when we look, particularly in observational studies and even in clinical trials, we see very similar effects of green tea and black tea.

How could that be?

This is clever.

Jeff told us that it seems as though microbes in your gut actually break the molecules in black tea down and turn them into the same molecules that are in green tea.

So I don't want to say that if you drink black tea, it turns to green tea in your your colon, but something akin to that happens.

This all sounds pretty awesome, but of course there's still a lot more research to be done on tea, what the chemicals are, how they work, how they interact with our gut microbes, what the benefits are.

But Jeff, he's a fan.

Yes, we should do more research.

I believe strongly that we need to do that to better define and substantiate these benefits.

But I'm perfectly comfortable telling you today that the evidence that we have says tea is a healthy beverage.

But again, as a nutritionist, I have to tell you, you're not going to drink tea and have an otherwise completely terrible diet and expect it to do miracles.

In short, drink more tea.

Happy to.

But maybe lay off the biscuits.

By which Nikki means cookies.

Drinking lots of tea is actually something that we Brits excel at.

As well as cookie consumption.

Roughly, we drink four and a half cups a day, you know, per head.

And the reason we can drink that much tea?

Robert Fortune's epic tea heist.

Stealing tea from China meant far more than than just, okay, the East India Company can now control the tea trade and cut China out.

It was absolutely world-changing.

First of all, he remade the economies of England and India and the East India Company.

That the minute you could have tea somewhere other than China, you are redrawing the maps of the world and the trade systems.

All of a sudden, you can grow tea everywhere.

India, yes, but also lots of other British colonies.

Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka, Kenya, Burma.

And that means a lot more tea is for sale, which means it's cheaper.

And so now, after 1842, when Robert brings tea to India, all levels of British society can share this national obsession.

And it doesn't just take off in Britain.

Tea now becomes the most popular drink in the entire world.

And then there's all these geopolitical ramifications, such as propping up the East India Company and the British occupation of India for another hundred years.

This theft changed the course of the British Empire for the next century.

And at that point, the British Empire was like a quarter of the world.

And like we said, Robert's heist made Darjeeling a major center, if not the major center, of tea production.

But here's a question I was wondering about as we toured Dragothnon.

Sure, the climate in Cornwall is just like the climate in Darjeeling.

But why bother?

Tea grows perfectly well in Darjeeling already.

So, you know, the Brits took essentially what is the Chinese national drink.

We made it our national drink over a period of 400 years, but we never actually grew it here, even though Winston Churchill wanted us to.

So in the late 1930s, he said,

you know, you better get some tea bushes and get busy planting tea.

Just think for a minute, Britain runs on tea, and the German submarines were sinking all the merchant ships, bringing it to England.

There is literally no way the British could have continued to fight without tea.

But then they checked it out.

It would take six years to cultivate.

They had no tea bushes to start with.

It was all just not going to happen.

So instead, they actually stockpiled tea all over the UK, which I love that story.

So So back when Jonathan planted his first tea bushes in 1999, it wasn't that he thought that he needed to help his country stockpile tea against any potential future war, but his employers did have another rather pressing reason.

After the Second World War, the British government really ramped up taxes on all these huge inherited aristocratic estates.

These estates were really laboring under 98% tax rates for a long time.

They were really hit hard.

Running costs of these historic houses are enormous.

People have no idea how many millions it costs to just keep them going.

Straight out of the gate, it's hard to feel much sympathy here.

Oh, boo-hoo, people who have inherited shitloads of money are being taxed a completely appropriate amount and will have to open up their ancestral estate to the public, etc.

Tiny violins.

Frankly, we tourists are happy these centuries-old estates and castles often have to open up to the public.

We love to visit them and we pay for the experience.

But Tregothnon has a slight problem.

It's really hard to get to, as we discovered, and so it would be hard for tourist money to keep it afloat.

That's why growing tea became more and more of an interesting opportunity.

Tregothanon tea tastes really good, but it also costs a lot.

Not all of it.

Tregothanon sells plenty of blends, and those are also delicious and much more affordable.

Right, so which ones would you like to try?

I'd suggest about five so you can get a good sort of range.

Bella poured us cups of their strong English breakfast blended with tea leaves from India and a delicious earl gray with genuine bergamot oil from Italy.

We also tried a green tea custom blend with lemon balm and other herbs for Liberty's department store in London, which I loved.

I would totally go to their tea room just for that tea.

Trigothanen even has a special Manuka earl grey blend because they grow New Zealand Manuka trees on the estate too.

And a smoked tea commemorating 400 years since the Great Fire of London.

But they're single estate loose leaf tea, so just the leaves they grow on the estate, no other leaves blended in.

It costs $47 for just 11 grams.

That's enough for about 12 cups.

You put a lot of work into tea, way more than people realize.

Tea is unbelievably cheap for what it is.

Even the most expensive teas are great value.

And there's more work in this than in wine, really, but you don't see this on sale for the cost of wine, do you?

Very rarely, anyway.

When we tried to harvest tea at Trigothnen, it took us about 15 minutes to pluck enough tea for just a couple of cups.

Granted, we aren't experts, and I was holding a microphone, so okay, it was a little awkward, but it wasn't easy.

A really good tea picker can pick 30,000 tea shoots a day, but after a bunch more work processing, that translates into just two pounds of finished tea.

Then it's done by hand, and it's a very slow, painstaking, labor-intensive, and expensive process.

So it doesn't play well in the West, where wages are high.

But Jonathan's not looking to sell mass-market tea, so he doesn't mind.

At Treguthnen, they only harvest 10 tons annually compared to 3 million tons globally.

But that's okay.

And

our tea is selling at like a pound a gram for the really expensive single estate stuff, sometimes more actually.

But you break that down, that's still only two pounds per cup.

Three dollars for a cup of tea?

Well, but I pay about six cents for my tea bags, which make a perfectly solid cup of what we Brits would call Builder's Brew.

It makes me strong.

I do probably pay a little more for my Chinese black and oolong teas or my Japanese green tea, but nothing close to three bucks a cup.

But there is a market out there for Tregothnan tea.

It's a luxury product.

And selling luxury Britishness has no limit.

We might have a limit to leaves, but we can sell a lot of experience.

Bella and Jonathan have even managed to sell tea to China.

The irony.

We get a lot of people contact us, especially from the Far East.

Just so fascinated with the whole concept of the fact that we've obviously taken China's national drink, we made it our own national drink, and now we're actually growing it and selling it back to them.

Their main market, though, is still the UK.

And Jonathan is planning to educate people like you, Nikki, to show that there is a lot more than Builder's Brew out there.

Most people in the UK, although we're supposedly a nation of tea drinkers, we don't have a clue about tea.

We know more about coffee now than tea.

That's the amazing opportunity because

if you go back 30 years, coffee was black or white.

Now, what happened?

You know, the Americans have done a brilliant job at repackaging the whole thing, making it an experience.

It's no longer about the coffee, it's about the out-of-home experience and all of that.

And tea hasn't been through that yet.

But when Mr.

Schultz at Starbucks says his number one opportunity is tea, you've got to listen.

And I think he's right.

I am ready and willing to be re-educated.

And I will be honest, that Tricothanan single-estate tea is pretty delicious, as well as expensive.

But there's one thing I still find totally bizarre.

Nikki, you and your fellow Brits, you're all tea drinkers, but you only drink black tea.

What is up with that?

Jonathan, frankly, finds it frustrating.

Our early days, we said, oh, we'll just do green tea.

We won't worry about black tea and we certainly won't do tea bags because six to eight percent of the UK supposedly drinks green tea.

Well we still haven't found them.

I'm looking.

I promise you I'm looking really hard.

I cannot find this six percent that drinks green tea.

I have to confess I do not know a single Brit that drinks green tea.

Please don't all write in.

The thing is, it turns out there's a historical reason for this.

We have Mr.

Robert Fortune to thank again.

He goes to a green tea factory in China.

Remember, this is almost 200 years ago.

And he discovers something alarming about the tea there.

It is being dyed green.

It is being dyed green with poison.

Chinese tea growers have heard from dealers in the treaty ports that English people like their green tea to be really green.

So they used Russian blue, which is a form of cyanide, and a whole variety of other chemicals to dye it.

And they are not good for the human body, but they do make things bright and green.

And so he comes to a green tea factory and he sees that the workers' hands are dyed green at the fingertips.

And he realizes that the green tea has been doctored.

And he exposes this for the world at one of the great exhibitions in London.

And this changes English tea preferences forever, at least until today.

After that, it was very hard to get people to drink green tea because green tea was poisoned.

So, yeah, it cemented a preference for black tea in England.

Sorry, Jonathan.

And with that, it was time for Cynthia and me to have another cup and maybe a biscuit or two.

And for Jonathan to head out to tend to an old rose bush.

Of course, gardening is another thing Robert Fortune transformed.

My mom grew bleeding hearts and a Forsythia bush in my childhood home.

Robert brought both those plants to Europe from China.

He found

the kumquat, which he named after himself.

And he found lots of other garden plants.

There was a dahlia, there are some rhododendrons, but a lot of the things that we see now, a lot of our garden plants now that we identify as sort of beautiful perennials and annuals, are things that came back via Robert Fortune.

And that old rose bush that Jonathan was heading out to prune, it's from Ningpo in China.

And it was collected by a chap called Robert Fortune, and it's called Fortune's Double Yellow.

And there's this, it's purely romantic.

I'm probably completely wrong, but I like to think that this rose collected by Robert Fortune when he was collecting all those tea bushes somehow passed through his hands and found its way back to Tregothan and now it grows on the house.

And enormous thanks to Bella Percy Hughes and Jonathan Jones for showing us round England's one and only commercial tea plantation.

We have links and photos of the secret garden and the camellia maze and more online at gastropod.com which you definitely need to see.

Thanks also to Jeffrey Blumberg of Tufts and to Sarah Rose.

Her book for all the tea in China is a really great read.

We definitely recommend it.

Thanks also to our fantastic volunteer Ari Lebowitz who helped us with our tea and health research and much more besides.

And we're back in two weeks with the tale of big chicken.

Now, where was that kappa?

And the best way to do it is just have a spoonful so that when because then you can really slurp it, and actually, that's what you're supposed to do because you get the most air through the tea, and that's obviously what

wakes up your taste buds.

Will you demonstrate slurping for us?

Yes, I will.

So, here we are, slurping the tea.

So, um, your turn.

All right.

I'm a much messier slurp with me.

Something I never knew about us.

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