History of Tea Trade

(This blog is based on some information that Tomoe personally took from Robert Hellyer’s book, “Green with Milk & Sugar”, 2021, and added her personal comments.  It includes information taken from sources other than the book.)

Tea is truly international.

Tea originated in China, and it was brought to Japan by monks who had studied there.
And Japan developed into the unique tea types such as matcha, sencha, gyokuro as well as tea culture represented by the chanoyu (tea ceremony).

In Europe, Chinese tea was introduced to France, Germany, and the UK via the Netherlands, which prospered in overseas trade.
Do you know that green tea was the first tea consumed in Europe?
And the US, a British colony at that time, took over the British custom of tea drinking.
Chinese green tea, oolong tea, and black tea were enjoyed.

This book is about the history of tea in the U.S. and Japan, including the author’s personal family history.
It is a very interesting book with many facts that I learned for the first time.

1st, there was a time when American people consumed more green tea than black tea.
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, is known to have been a green tea lover.
American people boiled green tea leaves for 10-15 minutes, then added sugar and milk!
Interestingly, Japanese tea was especially popular with Midwesterners (Illinois, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan), and from about 1805 to the 1910s, Japanese tea was one of major teas in the US, and accounted for 44% in 1880 of all tea imported to the United States.
There was a time when Japanese tea was more consumed than Indian/Sri Lankan black tea or Chinese tea.

2nd, the exported tea was different from the tea that Japanese people used to drink.
It was a special tea for export.

In 1853, a female merchant Kei Oura in Nagasaki, sent tea samples grown in Kyushu to the UK, the US and Arabia via a Dutchman.
The British merchant, William Alt,  later placed a big tea order, tea from Kyushu was exported to the United States via him for the first time.
According to the featured page of Kei Oura on the Nagasaki City Tourism website, the tea exported from Nagasaki was kamairicha tea.

At the end of the Edo period, the US Commodore Perry visited Japan, and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce were signed with the following countries, in addition to the US.
1858 – the US, Netherland, the UK, France, Russia
1860 – Portugal
1861 – Germany
1864 – Switzerland
1866 – Belgium, Italy, Denmark
1868 – Sweden-Norway, Spain
1869 – Austria-Hungary.
And along with raw silk, tea began to be exported abroad.
Tea is exported to the US via non-Japanese merchants.

This tea was “Chinese-style Japanese green tea”.
It was different from Japanese kamairicha tea (with curled leaves) or sencha (with thick, slightly curved leaves) develped in Kyoto.
Japanese tea was reprocessed under the guidance of Chinese artisans with extensive green tea export experience before being exported to the United States.
Hideki Kuwabara, Chairperson of Nihoncha Award Executive Committee, wrote an article titled ‘The US and Japanese Tea’ in Ujicha mail magazine, and according to his research issued on August 2018,
1. The tea was further dried by heating in a pan or basket to prevent deterioration during transportation.
2. The tea leaves were stretched and made long and thin, like a wire to reduced volume for easy transportation.
3. The tea leaves are well rolled to produce a strong and bitter taste to meet the American way of green tea brewing.
Eventually, the current form of sencha tea leaves was created.
This unique reprocess was continued until the late 1890s.

The 3rd is the change in tea consumption by the relationship between countries.
In the early 1830s, the East India Company initiated tea plantations in the Assam region of India, and tea from India and Sri Lanka began to be exported.
Tea consumption changes as tea was produced in large quantities on large plantations in India and Sri Lanka.
In 1866, the UK imported 96% of its tea from China.
But by 1896, 88% of its tea came from India and Sri Lanka.
The UK merchants began to sell tea from the British colonies to other countries, and the US was also a targeted market.
American people began to consume more black tea from India, Sri Lanka around 1920.
With the beginning of World War II in 1941, the tea trade between Japan and the U.S. came to a halt.
In 1943, the Japanese government ordered to produce more wheat, potatoes, and other food crops, and tea fields were converted to the fields that produce foods.
After the war ended in 1945, tea production and export were resumed, but American people continued enjoying black tea and ice (black) tea has become the national beverage.

Do you think that sencha is produced the most because Japanese people love sencha?
History shows that it was the Americans’ favorite tea, which is why production increased!
The statistics shows one time Japan exported about 90% of tea produced.
Most of them were shipped to the US.
Japanese people started drinking sencha instead of bancha because Japanese tea did not sell as well abroad as it used to!

The 4th is quality improvement through export.
Exported tea was initially made by hand-picking and hand-rolling.

According to Hideki Kuwabara’s column in the February 2020 issue of the Uji-cha newsletter, “America and Japanese Tea”, the hand-rolling method was not standardized across the country, and tea from all over the country had different shapes, colors, and flavors.  Therefore those teas were needed to be reprocessed to be made a big lot.

As the export volume increased, poorly dried and colored teas began to be exported by the emphasis on profit.  In 1883, the U.S. enacted An Act to Prevent the Importation of Adulterated and Spurious Teas and demanded that the quality of imported tea be improved.  Japan established tea associations in various regions, and the Uji sencha production method developed in the Edo period was improved upon to create a unified production method that spread throughout the country.  In the late 1890s, mechanization of tea production began to progress, and stable Japanese tea of similar quality to today’s Japanese tea was started exporting.

It was also around this time when Americans began to enjoy Japanese tea in the same way that Japanese do.  Exports helped to improve the quality of Japanese tea.

Finally, the author, Robert Hellyer, is an associate professor at Wake Forest University whose great-great-grandfather was a nephew of William Ault, the first Japanese tea exporter to the US.

Frederick Hellyer, an Englishman, came to Japan to help William Ault with his business and took over his Nagasaki tea trade.  Frederick foresaw the potential of the tea business in the US market and moved to Chicago and become an American citizen.  He later established offices in Chicago, Kobe, and Yokohama and devoted himself to exporting Japanese tea to the US market.

If Frederick had not had the opportunity to encounter Japanese tea, he and his family including the author would have led very different lives.

Japanese tea is once again beginning to gain popularity overseas with the matcha and Japanese food boom together its health benefits.  Japan is also developing new tea cultivars with less astringency to meet the taste preferences of overseas customers.

When you fill Japanese tea in your cup, what do you taste and feel?
Perhaps your taste and preference will evolve Japanese tea and push it to the next level.