Britain Started Selling Opium in China to Pay for Its Tea Habit

Lu Yu's Classic of Tea, written in China around 760 CE during the Tang dynasty, is the first surviving systematic treatise on the plant — a three-volume work covering everything from the species Camellia sinensis to the proper water (mountain stream best, river second, well last) to the order in which utensils should sit on a tray. Lu Yu was a former Buddhist novice who lived as a hermit and disliked, in particular, the contemporary fashion of adding orange peel, ginger, or onion to the brew.

Tea reached the English court in 1662, with the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, who married Charles II. Her dowry included the city of Bombay and a chest of tea, and she made the drink fashionable among the aristocracy. It was wildly expensive — around twenty shillings a pound through the 1700s — and didn't reach a mass market until the late eighteenth century. By 1773 the Tea Act, designed to prop up the East India Company by giving it a near-monopoly on American sales, triggered the Boston Tea Party.

The geopolitical consequence was much larger. Britain bought tea from China and had nothing the Chinese particularly wanted to buy in return; the resulting silver outflow was politically intolerable. London's solution, beginning in the 1820s, was to sell opium grown in India through Chinese smugglers in defiance of imperial Chinese law. When the Daoguang Emperor's commissioner Lin Zexu confiscated and destroyed about 1,200 tons of British opium in Canton in 1839, the Royal Navy's response was the First Opium War. The settlement at Nanjing in 1842 ceded Hong Kong to Britain and forced Chinese tea production into European-controlled supply chains, which is why your Earl Grey is, in the long view, a colonial-trade artifact.