Many people had tried to grow Chinese tea plants outside China from the 1700s, but their attempts had failed largely because it was so difficult to keep plants alive on board ship for any length of time. Tea plants were successfully transported from China to India by a botanist called Robert Fortune in the 1840s and 1850s. Thereafter the tea, sugar and slave trades grew alongside each other. It began to grow in popularity in England from about the 1720s, when it was sweetened with sugar grown in the West Indian slave plantations. The Portuguese had been trading directly with China for over 100 years by this time, and were already familiar with the drink.Īt first only small amounts of tea were imported to England, and for some years it remained a luxury item drunk for its medicinal properties as much as for pleasure. Tea-drinking was first introduced to the court of King Charles II by his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza. History of tea-drinking in England: tea, sugar and the slave trade Tea was grown exclusively in China until the mid-19th century, and increasingly large amounts of it were sold to Britain from the early 18th century as it became a more and more popular drink. It is generally thought that ‘char’ is an Anglicisation of the Indian word for tea, but ‘char’ is in fact quite a close version of the Chinese for tea, tcha. The humble cup of tea was the most popular working-class drink by the mid-19th century.
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