The first topic I can remember being told to write on, as an English schoolboy at the age of six, was "How to Make a Cup of Tea." I'm sure my conformity to the details of the ritual -- adherence to such iron rules as "Milk first, tea afterwards," and "Don't forget to warm the pot" -- was graded higher than my spelling or grammar.
Penguin are in the habit of re-issuing outstanding works alongside not-so-outstanding ones under their paperback imprint, but this entertaining book is undoubtedly in the former category. On the surface it's a history of tea, and from a distinctly English perspective.
But underneath it's a book written by someone with a genuine feel for words -- how they sound, and the patterns they make when they jostle together.
It's an indication of the kind of book the author set out to write that there's no index, no notes, no list of sources, and no pictures. This is something it has in common with almost all classic texts, but for a basically historical work, it's surprising indeed.
The reason for this approach is clear from the first couple of pages -- Jason Goodwin is out to entertain. His long set-piece on the mid-19th century scene at Whampoa, the port downriver of Canton (Guangzhou), is a masterpiece. And he's found the key to vividness of style -- keep it personal. So he begins with his two grandmothers, women who probably never met but who both maintained a ceremony of afternoon tea to the end of their days.
This is technically a travel book rather than a work of history; travels through China and India in search of tea. The author goes to Calcutta, Darjeeling, the southern hills in India, the UK's Greenwich where the Cutty Sark, last of the great tea clippers, is preserved, and to the Bohea hills of Fujian Province where, perhaps, it all began.
He is quick to point out that Indian tea, however beloved of the British, has little of the marvelous variety of the Chinese original. Whereas in China many farmers grow a field or two, and the flavor varies from valley to valley, in India it is produced commercially on vast plantations and conforms to a fixed standard. India is now the world's largest tea producer, and tea was for many years the country's most valuable export. In China, by contrast, tea today forms a mere 1 percent of exports.
This disparity is a mark of the success of the scheming long ago of the perfidious British. They made off to India with Chinese tea plants, hoping to reap the profits of both grower and importer, only to discover that it was the local Assam variety that in fact flourished best in Himalayan conditions. And for all the exquisite variety of the Chinese original, it was the stronger Indian variety that the rest of the world in the event became addicted to.
There are three chapters on China's Fujian Province. The author visits Amoy (Xiamen) -- where his parents worked from 1945-49, before moving south to Hong Kong with the arrival of the communists -- and Fuzhou, from where he travels up to the Wuyi mountains, home of the famous Wuyi Oolong tea.
He doesn't visit Taiwan, but there are some appreciative references to Taiwan tea, long popular with the Americans and the Japanese, he asserts, not surprisingly given Taiwan's history. Taiwan's "Orange Pekoe Leaf Size" was invented especially for the American market, Goodwin writes, describing it as an oolong fermented longer than usual to take on some of the characteristics of black tea.
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