Ep. 140-17 | The Tea Secret Gets Out
The China History Podcast
Laszlo Montgomery
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2015
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Processing tea leaves was never an intuitive process. That's one reason it took so long for others to figure out how to do it. But as it was with silk, once you saw how it was done, it wasn't a terribly difficult process to master and even improve upon. In this Part 17 episode, we see how Robert Fortune gathered the tea seeds, plants, tools, and experts and got them to the Indian highlands. There, a British dream team of botanists and horticulturalists take over the job begun by Robert Fortune. Their hard work helped to launch the tea industry in India. We also look at James Taylor's efforts to plant tea in Ceylon and how his business-savvy partner in this venture brought tea to the world. This partner was Thomas J. Lipton, the one who brought us the ubiquitous Lipton Tea. What a character he was!
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Transcript
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| 0:45.2 | restrictions and teas and sees apply 18 plus. Hey everyone how's it going |
| 0:48.3 | Lausl Montgomery here starting to whine things down on this epic history of tea overview part 17 today. |
| 0:55.8 | Oh man China had such a good run 2737 b.C. E E all the way to 1850. 4,557 years. That's a nice stretch by anyone's |
| 1:09.9 | reckoning. Shoot. Standard oil only had their monopoly for not even 40 years. |
| 1:16.3 | It's really amazing that with tea growing in many other places besides China, after so long, no one except the Chinese had figured out how to turn those leaves |
| 1:27.9 | into teas that were so tasty they inspired a million poems, paintings, and countless literary and artistic works. |
| 1:36.7 | Not to mention probably no small amount of witty and interesting conversation. |
| 1:41.5 | The Koreans and Japanese of course had their great |
| 1:44.6 | contributions to tea culture but it's pretty well known from whom they |
| 1:49.0 | originally drew their earliest inspiration. In the last episode I introduced Mr. Robert Fortune, a botanist who lived a very charmed and adventurous life. |
| 1:59.0 | He had taken on this very dangerous and life-threatening assignment from the East India |
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