As we all know, China is the birthplace of tea. The ancient ruins of Tianluo Mountain in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, reveal that the ancients in China began tea cultivation as early as 6,000 years ago. Until the Tang Dynasty in 805 AD, Japan's most cheng monks and kukai masters went to the Tang Dynasty to learn the scriptures, and China's tea also began its overseas spread journey.
And China's tea is not only exported to Japan, even Europeans are impressed. Tea, silk and porcelain have been a sought-after commodity on the ancient Silk Roads since ancient times. The British scholar Alan McFarland, in his book "Green Gold: The Empire of Tea", is even more blunt: "Only tea has successfully conquered the world." ”
From ancient times to the present, tea has been regarded by Westerners as a magic leaf from China. Due to China's strict secrecy of tea planting, tea picking, and tea making technology, the global tea market has been completely monopolized by China for thousands of years. It is also tea, which has brought extremely considerable foreign exchange to the ancient feudal dynasties in China.
However, looking at the efficiency of China's tea overseas today, even the 1% share of the world market does not account for it. Why is it that China, which once occupied the dominant position in the world tea market, has now fallen to such a field?
Everything has to start from the modern Opium War period. In 1840, the Opium War broke out, and the Qing government closed the country for more than 200 years and was ruthlessly blasted open by the British powers. The purpose of the British was nothing else, but to do business with the Qing government. Earlier, due to the monopoly of some commodities in our country, the British could be said to have suffered a big loss.
This includes tea, and throughout Europe, the British are undoubtedly the most tea-loving people, and their invention of afternoon tea is still popular in the world. However, earlier, because China monopolized the tea market, the selling price of tea in Europe was particularly high. Therefore, in the early years, tea has always been the drink of the British nobility.
After the British violently opened the door of our country, the first thing they wanted to reverse was the plight of tea. As a result, they began to import a large amount of tea from Our country at zero tariff, which greatly enriched the British tea market. However, capital is always profit-seeking. Over time, the British found that zero-tariff imports were still not as cost-effective as their own species. As a result, they began to pay attention to China's tea planting technology.
Of course, for the sake of international trade interests, this kind of thing cannot be made clear. In 1848, an Englishman named Robert Fochón "took up the mission" and set out from England.
Robert Fochon was a British gardener who was fairly familiar with plant cultivation. In order for him to succeed in stealing tea secrets, the British government packaged him as a botanist. In order to mingle with the tea farmers, Robert Fuqiong even changed into a Qing Dynasty horse coat and tied long braids, as if he was no different from the people of the Qing Dynasty.
After several years of squatting in major tea producing areas such as Fujian and Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Robert Fuqiong touched the tea planting technology in China. After completing his studies, he brought the tea planting technique back to the UK only one foot away, that is, the tea plant seeds were transported back to the UK.
At first, Robert Fochón tried once, but due to the long distance, the seeds all came to England and were moldy, which made the British government quite distressed. Later, they thought about it, wasn't India also a British colony? Why not bring tea plant seeds closer to India?
Sure enough, soon, China's tea plant seeds were shipped to India in large quantities. In order to make tea plants grow quickly in India, Robert Fuqiong also hired 8 senior Chinese tea farmers with high salaries. With their help, India's tea industry has been able to develop rapidly. By 1887, the entire British tea market was almost entirely occupied by Indian tea, and Chinese tea quickly lost its advantage in Britain.
Of course, the British theft only cost our country the British market. In the global tea market, the Qing Dynasty at that time was still performing strongly. However, in order to compete with China for world market share, the later British government did another bad thing, which made China completely lose its position as the hegemon of the world tea industry.
What is this? To put it bluntly, it is actually related to opium. After the door of our country was opened that year, in addition to the tea being taken away by the British at a low price, they also dumped a large amount of harmful opium into our country. And Britain, as a monopoly of opium, naturally demanded high prices from our addicts.
At that time, the Qing government did not realize that opium was a drug (except for Lin Zexu), just as the British wanted to break the monopoly of tea in China, a minister named Xu Naiji in the Qing government also thought of introducing opium cultivation technology to achieve self-production and self-marketing, so as to realize the "opium freedom" of the Qing court. Therefore, he suggested to the Daoguang Emperor that opium cultivation technology be vigorously promoted throughout the country.
Dao Guang also felt that this method was good, and as soon as he slapped his head, he passed on the Holy Will. However, the environment in which opium is an economic crop and tea plants grow is quite close. Due to limited land, only one opium and tea tree can be left. Due to the difficulty of violating the king's order, most of the tea farmers in China's coastal areas at that time have eradicated tea trees and planted poppies instead. This move allowed China's tea production to rapidly decline, thus gradually losing the tea market that had monopolized the world earlier.
Because of these two historical lessons, the embarrassing situation of China's tea in today's world market has been promoted, and it is India that dominates the world tea market today.
Only by taking history as a mirror can we forge ahead. I hope that such lessons will not be repeated in our country.