When was tea first drank

The national average is four cups per person per day, with many people drinking six cups or more. The Irish love of tea is perhaps best illustrated by the stereotypical housekeeper, Mrs Doyle in the popular sitcom Father Ted. Tea is prevalent in most cultures in the Middle East. In Arab culture, tea is a focal point for social gatherings. Both black and green teas are popular and are known locally as sabz chai and Kahwah, respectively. The popular green tea called kahwah is often served after every meal in the Pashtun belt of Balochistan and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which is where the Khyber Pass of the Silk Road is found.

In the transnational Kashmir region, which straddles the border between India and Pakistan, Kashmiri chai or noon chai, a pink, creamy tea with pistachios, almonds, cadamon, and sometimes cinnamon, is consumed primarily at special occasions, weddings, and during the winter months when it is sold in many kiosks.

In central and southern Punjab and the metropolitan Sindh region of Pakistan, tea with milk and sugar sometimes with pistachios, cardamom, etc. It is the most common beverage of households in the region. In the northern Pakistani regions of Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan, a salty, buttered Tibetan style tea is consumed. In Iranian culture, tea is so widely consumed, it is generally the first thing offered to a household guest. Sweet tea is a cultural symbol of the southern US, and is common in that portion of the country.

Switzerland has its own unique blend of iced tea, made with the basic ingredients like black tea, sugar, lemon juice and mint, but a variety of Alp herbs are also added to the concoction. Apart from classic flavours like lemon and peach, exotic flavours like jasmine and lemongrass are also very popular. In India, tea is one of the most popular hot beverages. It is consumed daily in almost all homes, offered to guests, consumed in high amounts in domestic and official surroundings, and is made with the addition of milk with or without spices.

It is also served with biscuits dipped in the tea and eaten before consuming the tea. Are you interested in Flagyl price? At big-pharmacy This substance has the trade name Flagyl, a drug that has established itself as an essential antibiotic. We recommend that you buy Flagyl Online to be a healthy and happy person tomorrow.

One unforeseen consequence of the taxation of tea was the growth of methods to avoid taxation - smuggling and adulteration. By the eighteenth century many Britons wanted to drink tea but could not afford the high prices, and their enthusiasm for the drink was matched by the enthusiasm of criminal gangs to smuggle it in. Their methods could be brutal, but they were supported by the millions of British tea drinkers who would not have otherwise been able to afford their favourite beverage.

What began as a small time illegal trade, selling a few pounds of tea to personal contacts, developed by the late eighteenth century into an astonishing organised crime network, perhaps importing as much as 7 million lbs annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million lbs!

Worse for the drinkers was that taxation also encouraged the adulteration of tea, particularly of smuggled tea which was not quality controlled through customs and excise. Leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried, were added to tea leaves.

Sometimes the resulting colour was not convincing enough, so anything from sheep's dung to poisonous copper carbonate was added to make it look more like tea. By , the government realised that enough was enough, and that heavy taxation was creating more problems than it was worth.

Suddenly legal tea was affordable, and smuggling stopped virtually overnight. As well as the great debate in the eighteenth century about the taxation of tea, there was an equally furious argument about whether tea drinking was good or bad for the health. Leaps forward in medical and scientific research mean that we now know that drinking four cups of tea a day may help maintain your health, but such information was not available to tea drinkers years ago.

Wealthy philanthropists in particular worried that excessive tea drinking among the working classes would lead to weakness and melancholy. Typically, they were not concerned with the continuing popularity of tea among the wealthy classes, for whom 'strength to labour' was of rather less importance!

The debate rumbled on into the nineteenth century, but was really put to an end in the middle of that century, when a new generation of wealthy philanthropists realised the value of tea drinking to the temperance movement. In their enthusiasm to have the working classes go teetotal, tea was regularly offered at temperance meetings as a substitute for alcohol.

Another great impetus to tea drinking resulted from the end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China, in Before that date, China was the country of origin of the vast majority of the tea imported to Britain, but the end of its monopoly stimulated the East India Company to consider growing tea in India.

India had always been the centre of the Company's operations, where it also played a leading role in the government. This led to the increased cultivation of tea in India, beginning in Assam. There were a few false starts, including the destruction by cattle of one of the earliest tea nurseries, but by there was sufficient cultivation of tea of 'marketable quality' for the first auction of Assam tea in Britain.

In the British government took over direct control of India from the East India Company, but the new administration was equally keen to promote the tea industry and cultivation increased and spread to regions beyond Assam. It was a great success, production was expanded, and by British tea imports from India were for the first time greater than those from China.

The end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China also had another result, which was more dramatic though less important in the long term: it ushered in the era of the tea clippers. While the Company had had the monopoly on trade, there was no rush to bring the tea from China to Britain, but after the tea trade became a virtual free for all.

Individual merchants and sea captains with their own ships raced to bring home the tea and make the most money, using fast new clippers which had sleek lines, tall masts and huge sails. In particular there was competition between British and American merchants, leading to the famous clipper races of the s.

The clippers would then be towed up the River Thames by tugs and the race would be won by the first ship to hurl ashore its cargo at the docks. But these races soon came to an end with the opening of the Suez canal, which made the trade routes to China viable for steamships for the first time. It also received early imperial sponsorship and spread rapidly from the court and the monasteries to the other sections of Japanese society.

And can last up to four hours and use as many as 24 utensils. Tea reached Europe from China and Japan in when Dutch traders brought leaves back as a luxury item alongside spices and silks. Created in 16th century under a charter from Elizabeth I to seek exotic riches, the Company had a monopoly on all goods entering Britain from outside Europe.

At the start of the 18th century, England imported , pounds of tea each year; by , that figure grew to over two million.

By the 19th century, the British Empire had helped make tea a daily drink as explorers and entrepreneurs set up tea plantations in India.

In Britain, tea integrated into society at all levels, and was thought to have reduced urban disease and fuel the Industrial Revolution. In Turkey, tea is of such importance, that all brides-to-be must master the art of demilikacay, or tea preparation. The people of Turkey drink more tea than any other beverage, consuming about , tons of tea per year.