Black Tea: Origin & Production

it’s all about economy

Not only was red tea production a more simplified process that needed much less fuel and labour compared to oolong, but it could use leaves that are either younger or older than oolongs, allowing for more harvests each year. It was a logical solution in response to the needs for quantity and lower costs for export. Soon the process was spread to areas that were not key or famous tea production regions (6), but close enough to the route to the export port that was Guangzhou (Canton). Some county chronicles documented that tea merchants from Guangdong and Jiangxi went to their territories to persuade the making of red teas starting from 1830’s. I believe that they had done it much earlier in other locations.

In 1784, the young British prime minister William Pitt introduced the historic Commutation Act, reducing tea tax from 119% to 12.5% to fight tea smuggling, amongst other purposes. He was successful. Not only did tea become affordable by the mass, but the government was actually earning more tax. Tea import by the West, mainly to England, increased from 18.9 million pounds a year in the 1780‘s to 26.7 million pounds in the 1790’s, and not stopping (7). Without the presence of the quicker turn-around red teas and extended production bases, it was impossible to satisfy such demand. By mid 1850’s, almost all provinces south of Yangtze River became red tea producers.

Came Robert Fortune and the East India company

This production process was later to be picked up by the British in the newly setup plantations in Assam in their Indian colony with imported skill labour from China. The Dutch did that as well in Indonesia, even a bit earlier. From the start, the British planned on scale; tea gardens became plantations; scattered and localized production huts in Fujian became centralized factories in Assam; very soon manual processing were replaced by machines — all in line with the spirit of the reigning Industrial Revolution of those days. Since 1888, black tea export from India had started to take over that of China and replaced it by the turn of the century.

An etching by J.L. Williams after Thomas Brown’s in 1850 depicting tea production in Assam. Clearly all key stages of production were conducted by Chinese. The truthfulness of the depiction is in doubt (8), but the Chinese presence in founding tea production in Assam is clear. Source: Wellcome Library, London

As Europe continued to colonize other parts of the world, exploitable labour resource in the conquered land together with the scalable India model made it financially viable to set up huge tea plantations. Nepal, Bengal (now Bangladesh), Ceylon (now Sri-Lanka), Indonesia, Kenya, and Nyasaland (now Malawi) joined in at different points of history to export tea to satisfy the ever-expanding quantity need. These countries continue to be black tea exporters today. Recently, even United States and Australia have set up productions for mass market quality. Only a minority have picked up the tea habit themselves. For example, over 97% of the tea made in Sri Lanka is exported. Seems weird, but maybe they are paid so poorly that they can’t even afford the factory price. (more about the social economy of tea production)

Though one stream of development in China had followed the industrialization route, another continued to specialize in artisan skill mastery. Each locality boasts to be different from the other, finer in taste style, workmanship, horticulture, and process uniqueness. This became the category of Gongfu Hung Cha (translation: red tea which making demands hard-work and mastery). The British had liked the prestige of the name so much that they still keep the name for some of their labels, although not necessarily reflecting the quality of the content — Congou, which is a romanization of the Amoy dialect for Gongfu.

Only the finer Gongfus will be the focus of this category in this site, which I think is totally different from factory products, although some better “orthodox” productions from various origins will also be described.

Production

As mentioned, black tea was invented as a way to shortened production time and fuel cost in place of oolong production. The original process was divided in these steps:

1. withering
2. curling (and kneading)
3. piling up and cover for fermentation (normally 2 to 3 hours, 7 to 8 hours in Xiao Zhong varieties)
4. twisting (only in certain varieties)
5. baking

Compare this with the oolong process. Oxidation was sped up through breaking of the leaf cells early on, and by piling the leaves in a one step fermentation process.

The English further hastened it by introducing heat and mechanized the whole process. Later on in the 1930’s they even began to cut and tear the leaves before briefly curling them (CTC) to shorten the whole process, dramatically compromising quality for cost.

The lowered price strategy was successful in training the mass to alter palatial sensitivity and get accustomed to the CTC taste. The process was later to be adapted for tea processing for other tea categories. Traditional automated productions involving the whole tealeaves, particularly those in India, are labelled as “orthodox” teas to differentiate from these torn leaves labelled as “broken’ grades.

footnotes

6. This is an original theory by myself and the related subsequent writings will also be posted in this site.

7. Roy Moxham, Tea — Addiction, Exploitation and Empire. 2003 Carroll & Graf Publishers

8. Roy Moxham revealed in his book (9), amongst other things, horrid atrocities and misfortunes done onto the waves of Chinese tea makers that were exported, smuggled or deceived to go to Assam to staff the new plantations. The journey alone had killed a good quarter of the victims, the living conditions in cramped mud sheds within the damp tea fields gradually took much of the rest, during when the craft was transferred to the new tea production territories.

9. This colour image was one amongst the visionary photographic surveys of the Russian Empire made between 1909 – 1915 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), having the support of Tsar Nicholas II. The precious negatives, where each image is composed of 3 negatives ingeniously made through the red, green and blue filters, are now recomposed digitally and shared through the efforts of Library of Congress, USA.