Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea (2013) s01e01 Episode Script
Episode 1
I'm going to tell a story of two leaves and a bud.
It's a story of rivers, mountains, history, politics, imperialism, espionage and addiction.
It's the story of tea.
Those little green leaves that changed the world.
The plant loved so much by the British, we made it our very own national drink.
The thirst for tea led the British on an extraordinary adventure, travelling across the globe in search of this precious leaf.
Now I'm going to make that journey.
'I'm going to show you how our nice cup of tea 'brought East and West together.
' Thank you.
'How it triggered wars.
'Helped us win them and even sparked the occasional revolution.
' Hear ye, hear ye! From the back streets of Kolkata to the soaring skyline of Shanghai, we'll be delving into a world of chai wallahs, opium smokers and cross elephants.
And we're going to find out how this exotic fragrant leaf became an indispensable part of the British way of life.
Tea is a social drink.
You make a cup of coffee, you make a pot of tea.
How it helps us connect and pulls us together.
It can console you, there's the warmth and the ritual.
You've got to boil the kettle, get the sugar, ask what they want, engage with them.
How it keeps us going.
We can't really manage without it.
One day, I decided to try to have a complete day without tea.
I was quite shaken.
I was quite disturbed.
So, how did we get to be so crackers about tea? Out of all the drinks in all the world, why are we addicted to this one? I tell you what, put the kettle on, let's have a nice cup of tea and find out.
Hi.
Cup of tea, please.
This is such a familiar thing, isn't it, to most of us.
To come into a caff, plonk ourselves down, have a cup of tea.
Thank you.
Thanks.
We are a nation of tea drinkers.
It's a very British thing to have a nice cup of tea.
It's a dull, brown, mundane accompaniment to our ordinary life.
But tea is extraordinary.
And the passion the British felt for it altered history, started wars, drove the British Empire, changed political alliances.
And it's just a little leaf.
A little leaf and a bud, and it transformed the world.
Tea is the most popular drink on the planet, after water, which doesn't really count.
In this country, we get through more than 60 billion cups a year.
And it's trickled down through our society, starting at the top, naturally.
You can't trickle upwards.
Is this Earl Grey? This is Earl Grey.
Tea in Britain started life as an aristocratic luxury.
But it spilled out from our stately homes to every old home and every cafe and cab rank.
To ballrooms and building sites.
All I'd say is it's a long day without a cup of tea.
It's a very long day without a cup of tea.
And in the brave new world of macchiatos and flat whites, we still get through nearly three teas for every coffee.
How much do you drink, Tracy, in a day? Six, seven, eight.
It's good for you.
Cup of tea, cup of tea, cup of tea.
You've just got to take care of yourself.
And somehow for us, it's more than just a hot drink.
It's become the answer to everything.
A nice cup of tea.
More than just a soap opera staple, tea was part of our finest hour.
It played a big part, let me tell you.
To be without tea was to be without life, flying, you know.
Somehow, drinking tea has become part of being British.
Part of our DNA.
You need it to wind down from the stress.
It keeps you calm.
And it doesn't get more English than a cup of tea.
But tea isn't English or British.
I have to break the news to you, it's foreign.
And the story of tea starts almost 5,000 years ago, almost 5,000 miles in that direction.
There's nearly 40 different countries growing tea now, but in the 17th century, when we got our first taste of it, it was only grown in one country, China.
China then was a secretive and mysterious country Closed off from the West.
But their tea, and our need for it, would change all that.
Modern China is a nation of 1.
3 billion people.
A 21st Century superpower.
And it's the first step on my great tea odyssey.
Well, we've just landed in China.
This is Shanghai International Airport.
Just a little hint, bright-coloured tags on your luggage make it easier That's it, that's me.
Let's go and discover the exciting history of tea, shall we? When the first tea traders from the British East India Company arrived down the coast in Canton, it was just the halfway point in a hazardous round trip that would take more than two years.
So I shouldn't really complain about my journey, a flight and then a short ride in a fast machine.
This is the Maglev, short for magnetic levitation, obviously, they say the fastest train in the world.
I've sent a party of train spotters on ahead just to check the Chinese haven't made that up.
Sowe're whizzing into Shanghai.
And, yes, it's fast.
So is the British Pendolino.
Let's just think about tea, shall we? We think of ourselves as a nation of tea drinkers, but the Chinese make more tea than anywhere else in the world.
And they were drinking it long before we'd even heard of it.
But once we did hear about it, and once we'd tasted it, we loved it.
And if we wanted to get it, this is where we had to come.
Shanghai played a huge role in the story of China, Britain and tea.
When we went tea crazy, we were desperate to open Shanghai up to trade.
Which we probably didn't do in the most tactful way.
I'm coming to that later.
But it's partly because of tea that Shanghai is now China's most modern and westernised city.
In fact, to the casual glance, if it wasn't that I seem to be the only person with highlights, you could be anywhere in the Western world.
So I just need to track down the tea.
This is Nanjing Road in Shanghai, Shanghai's main shopping street.
It's like Oxford Street at Christmas Eve.
And one reason it looks like Oxford Street is that all the shops are very familiar.
But the only thing I've not managed to find so far is a teashop.
I don't feel I've quite plugged into the heart of ancient China.
I'm just taking part in traditional Shanghai life.
Yes, I'm in Starbucks.
And it's exactly the same as any other Starbucks.
It's absolutely heaving.
I've been queuing for days.
With a generation of young people all looking towards the West, I guess it's not surprising coffee would be taking over from But there is tea running through the heart of Shanghai.
One of the city's most interesting restaurants is Madame Quiping's.
She not only serves tea, her food is cooked with tea.
For once, as a vegetarian, there's lots for me to choose from.
And they really make it an event.
Oh, my Lord, it's a pagoda.
Thank you.
Yep.
Minestrone's off(!) Madame Quiping learnt about tea when she was sent to an ancient tea-growing area during the Cultural Revolution.
I know she looks like the love child of Mary Quant and a Bond villain, but she's really interesting to talk to.
'She's talking about the health properties of tea.
'It's antioxidant, anti-free radical, anti-ageing.
'She's saying she's 60 years old 'and she doesn't have a single white hair.
'Yeah, well, I'm 59, I have highlights.
'It's a different culture, get over it.
' Mm! That's really nice.
'I do love soup, but I'm not doing the story of soup, 'I'm trying to get to grips with tea, 'and I don't feel I've quite got to the heart of it yet.
'Shanghai's important, as we'll see, 'but it's not where the story truly begins.
' If I'm going to get to grips with the oldest, most sophisticated tea culture in the world, I'm going to have to go somewhere else.
This is one of the most spectacular places I've ever been to.
This is Wuyi Mountain on the northern border of Fujian Province.
I've left the city far behind to come to one of China's oldest tea-growing areas.
Some of the first tea we ever tasted in Britain more than 300 years ago, grew here on these hillsides.
It came right down from the top of the mountain.
It was carried by Chinese peasants in packs on bamboo poles.
They brought it down the mountain, it was rafted along.
So by the time it started its sea voyage, it had already travelled a thousand miles.
And that's why the tea was so precious.
It could easily be damaged or lost on the way.
The stuff that reached the London docks was incredibly expensive.
We're all drinking it now, but then, only the rich could afford it.
And it was kept in locked caddies so the servants could never have a sneaky cuppa.
Of course, we were desperate to find out how it grew, but the Chinese would never let us further inland than the coast.
Though one or two did try.
By the end of the 18th century, the British had gone absolutely crackers for tea.
And they literally couldn't get enough.
The hunt was on to find tea seeds, to find methods of growing tea to see if we could grow it somewhere else and not be dependent on the Chinese for trade.
So this gentleman called Robert Fortune, who worked in the Botanical Gardens in Chiswick in the 1840s, he actually came down this very river, which he calls the Stream of Nine Windings, to see if he could get seeds, get information, get plants and bring them back.
To penetrate into the heart of China, he had to dress as a Chinese person.
He even had to grow his hair into a pigtail, which must have been quite a novelty in Chiswick at that time.
I don't think we have botanical espionage in quite the same way.
But plants like the nutmeg, sugarcane and the rubber tree were hugely valuable to the Empire and the tea bush was the most sought after and would be the most lucrative, if they could find it.
And here it is.
This bush, the Camellia sinensis, is the tea plant.
And this is the plant that's become the most important plant in the world because all teacomes from this.
But those first tea hunters didn't know that.
They thought green tea and black tea came from different plants.
I'm sad for us.
We didn't know anything.
But the Chinese, they knew everything.
I'm here to meet a man who grows tea the traditional way.
The way they've been growing it for thousands of years.
Master Xu grows his tea in the shadow of Wuyi Mountain.
It's in demand from connoisseurs across the world.
Lu Zhou has come from her specialist tea company in London to sample the recent harvest.
Welcome.
Thank you very much.
It's very beautiful.
'When I asked him about his tea, 'I got something a bit more interesting than a sales pitch.
' He thinks the tealeaves bring friendship to other people.
And by drinking the tea from Wuyi Mountain, you can experience the nature and people's skill, as well.
So, Lu, what's the skill in plucking tea? The most important thing you need to remember is not just grab it.
You need to use two fingers to pick three to four leaves.
It's OK, and you see the bud, so you just pick like this.
That good? That's perfect.
Very good.
Is it fun? Yes, it's fun.
I'd love to do the whole four acres if I had more time(!) Is this plant, the Camellia, is it a tree or is it a bush? They're trees.
And you trim it to keep it this height.
If you don't trim it, see the taller trees? The scraggy ones? Yes.
These are also tea trees.
If you don't trim these trees, they grow.
Yeah.
Then you'd need very, very tall ladies.
I can't help noticing, looking at packets of tea it's always the ladies picking the tea.
Yes.
Why would that be? Because they care more about the details and also, they have a lot of heavier work for the man to do.
Right.
Do these ladies like picking tea, do you think? Shall I ask them? Yeah.
What choice does she have? She's going to say yes.
The man she's working for is around the corner.
So yeah, she loves it(!) The legend in China is that tea, or chai, was discovered by the Emperor Shennong in 2737 BC when some stray leaves blew into his cup of hot water.
Either not noticing or not caring that the water had turned brown, he drank it and found it refreshing and invigorating.
Just think, if he'd been washing his socks in hot water and a leaf had blown into one of them, he could have invented the teabag.
The Buddhists have their own myth about tea.
And it's that Buddha had taken a vow to meditate and stay awake And after seven years, he fell asleep and he was so enraged that he tore off his eyelids and threw them and scattered them on the ground and they took root and became tea.
And he took up a leaf and chewed it and that kept him awake.
The Buddhists were the first to cultivate tea.
They were the first to trim it down from a tree to a bush.
Fortune the plant hunter was heading here for the Tianxin Yongle Temple in Wuyi.
He'd heard stories of monks who grew their own tea.
A tea they called Da Hong Pao, Red Robe tea.
A tea whose taste was said to be beyond compare.
Of course, when monks were first using tea here and making tea, they were using it as a medicine, not as a drink.
And when tea first arrived in Britain, it was sold in apothecaries.
Today, the monks of Tianxin Yongle still drink and make their own tea.
Their head monk, Master Shi, told me it's a vital part of their daily ritual.
He told me they drink it in the morning, they offer it to the Buddha at noon, and they drink it in the evening when they meditate.
In ancient China, they believed that tea cleared the throat, brightened the eyes, comforted the muscles and eased the veins.
And they still feel now it's hugely beneficial.
That when they drink it, their qi and their blood are vitalised and they are stronger and more energetic.
Robert Fortune, our pigtailed plant hunter from Chiswick, was on the right track.
In the shadows of the temple lay the most famous tea bushes in China.
'All Red Robe tea came originally from these three bushes, 'known simply as the Mother Trees.
'They're one of China's top tourist attractions.
'I'm going to go and see them.
' So I'm very excited.
I'm a bit like David Attenborough on the hunt for a rare sort of lemur.
Because I'm looking for the Mother Trees and hundreds and millions of people in China come to see them.
I'm very excited.
That's them.
That's them! Yep, there's three bushes behind a wall.
That's what everybody else is looking at.
I suppose we'd be the same with privet, wouldn't we? If we had a privet museum and we sat in a teahouse and looked at some privet bushes behind a wall .
.
we'd be excited.
Or would we? It wouldn't be a visitor centre without a cafe.
And here they serve their local delicacy.
They're called tea eggs, and they are eggs which have been hardboiled in Red Robe tea.
OK, that's it.
It smells like an egg, actually, doesn't smell any different.
Mm! It's really nice.
It's really salty.
Really, because my palate was ruined by wine gums as a child, I probably can't really taste the Red Robe tea in the white, but I can taste the salt in the yolk.
It's really nice.
And then you have itexcuse me talking with my mouth full, you have it with the Red Robe tea, which is really, really diluted, otherwise this would be 500 quid's worth in this bowl.
It's really thinly let down.
It's really nice.
I've got it all.
Tea, egg, tea, bushes.
I'm living the dream(!) They're so respectful of their tea in China.
Not just preserving those rather straggly old bushes, but they have a beautiful, modern museum just devoted to tea.
This is the National Tea Museum in Hangzhou, full of gorgeous ancient objects, beautifully displayed.
There's a very hushed, reverential atmosphere.
Look at this.
This is really sweet.
The children possibly not quite up to speed with the whole reverence and respect thing, but very friendly, very keen to show off their English and very diligent in checking that the ancient tea-twisting machine was still just about working.
Now, green tea is a staple in every dreary detox regime, but when tea first came to Britain, it was green tea.
People were detoxing without even knowing about it.
And in modern China, green tea is still the thing, as I shall now demonstrate Tomorrow's World style.
We've just locked the children out so we can show you this very, very interesting pie chart, which will show you the green, that's the people that drink green tea in China.
12 percent of people drink oolong tea, which is not orange, but on this diagram, it is.
11 percent, that's rather vague.
Another tea.
I don't know what.
And seven percent drink black tea.
I hope that's made everything very clear.
Thank you.
Strangely, the centrepiece of the museum's garden isn't a pie chart, it's a statue.
This is Lu Yu, whose 8th century book, The Classic of Tea, is still the definitive work on the subject.
For Lu Yu, tea symbolised the harmony and unity of the universe.
So this is what Lu Yu wrote about his favourite drink.
"The best quality tea must have creases like the leather boot "Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock.
"Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine.
"Glean like a lake touched by a zephyr "and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.
" 'I suppose you couldn't really write that about cocoa.
' The Chinese turned the making and drinking of tea into an art form.
Lu Yu said tea had to pass through six stages involving 24 different implements before you could even get the biscuits out.
The plucking that we saw, that's just the first stage in a long and intricate process.
By shaking the leaves, they can make the edges of the leaves break and help the leaves to be oxidised.
And then the fragrance and the taste will improve.
Right.
Yeah.
So the ladies who plucked that tea They go rest.
They don't do this.
No, they don't do this.
It's a man's job.
It's a man's job to wave bamboo about.
It is.
So it's been plucked and tossed and now it's being rolled in a hot wok.
He says he doesn't burn his hands because he only touches the leaves, but looks dicey, doesn't it? Just so you know, black tea, green tea, white tea and oolong tea are all from the same bush, they're all from the Camellia bush.
Black tea is oxidised tea, green tea is tea that's been roasted but not oxidised, white tea, nobody's done anything to it at all, and oolong tea, which is what we're watching now, has been partially oxidised and the oxidisation stops with the roasting.
Everybody got that? When I said roasting, I meant toasting.
So sorry, everybody.
Please don't write in.
Just been toasted myself.
So what they're doing now with that rolling is that they're pressing the leaves and they're making them that long characteristic shape.
And oolong means black dragon.
So they're making them into the shape of a black dragon.
But it's also bringing out the flavour and the smell of the leaves.
And of course, having taken so much trouble to bring out the flavour, they're not going to stick it in a mug on the dashboard and grab a slurp at the traffic lights.
To examine if this tea's good, you need to brew it seven times, seven brewing, and then you smell the lid.
And you're supposed to still smell it.
And then the nice brew, you can still taste the aftertaste.
That means it's a good tea.
Right.
Can you slurp? I can't do that.
A, I can't do it and B, I can't do it with a really hot cup of tea.
I can't hold it, even.
It tastes of tea, real tea, but it smells of flowers.
And it smells like a real living thing, even though it's half a black tea.
Being up here in the mountains, seeing how they grow the tea, and the care with which they process it, all these little hand processes, and they treat it like a very rare and precious commodity.
And they drink it with great ceremony.
And all the days I've been in China, I've seen everybody drink their tea in that same way.
And they make a ritual of it, even though it's an everyday thing.
And it's a world away from how we treat our tea.
We buy it in big, cheap boxes, we buy as many teabags as we can, we just prod it with a spoon and we chuck it away.
But here, they make an everyday thingsomething special.
And I'm rather inspired now making a cuppa for me and my friends, to make it their way.
So I'm going to do what they do, which is you heat up the little jug and you heat up the little pot.
You put these leaves in which I think will be oolong leaves.
It's about perfection.
So that even in an anonymous hotel bedroom, you're in touch with your culture.
Or there is a box with two sachets of Mellow Bird's, so, you know, whichever you want.
Of course, we do love our tea in Britain, it's just not our way to make a song and dance about it.
Forget West End musicals and overpriced moth-eaten seats and the leading lady off with a cold, this is a spectacular musical.
Choreographed by the man who directed the opening ceremony it's called Impressions of Da Hong Pao, based on the legend of Red Robe tea.
There's about 600 people on stage.
The arena, a 2,000-seater, it revolves.
They light up the actual mountains in the distance.
Honestly, it's enough to make you vote communist.
It's all about tea.
They're tossing the tea.
And most extraordinary, at the end, they come out with a teapot and cups and everybody in the audience gets a hot cup of Red Robe tea poured out for you in front of your very eyes.
You don't get that at the end of Billy Elliot.
That fantastic show tells the story of how tea brings people together.
But away from legend, tea has driven nations apart.
Britain and China both loved tea.
They had it, we wanted it.
They let us buy it, but they didn't want us finding out how it grew.
Apart from the odd pigtail-disguised plant hunter, our traders were kept corralled on the coast, well away from Wuyi.
Any locals caught helping the British to travel inland or to learn the language, risked death.
It's hard to believe when you look at how cities like Shanghai have embraced Western commercialism, but back then, they had no interest in doing business with us.
We needed them, they didn't need us.
The problem was the Chinese didn't want anything we had to offer.
They didn't want our cotton, they didn't want our pianos.
And strangely, they didn't want our knives and forks.
But we did have one thing they wanted.
It was grown 1,500 miles away and they were mad for it.
Our determination to get as much tea as we wanted was about to turn Victorian Britain into the biggest drugs dealer in history.
This is opium.
Like tea, very sought after and even more addictive.
It was grown by tribes on the borders of India, which, at that time, belonged to the British.
It was bought by the East India Company and then smuggled into China, up to 40,000 chests a year.
The money we made from the opium meant we didn't have to use our precious silver reserves Professor John Wong is an historian with a specialist knowledge of the Opium Wars.
The tea trade was interlocked with the opium trade.
And these two together were the foundation of the British Empire.
It's all based on addiction.
Our addiction to tea.
Yes.
The British addiction to tea and the Chinese addiction to opium.
And what effect did opium have on Chinese society when it flooded in? Devastating.
Yeah.
When you are craving for the drug, you can't think.
And after you've taken the drug, you are so up in the skies, you can't work.
So from top to bottom in Chinese society, it was entirely rotten.
Right.
And it was a huge problem.
Right.
The Emperor of China tried to stop the opium trade, but we had a superior naval force and firepower.
We really did rule the waves.
So the British navy sailed into Shanghai, up the Yangtze River and blockaded the Grand Canal and China capitulated.
We'd shown the foreigners a thing or two.
We'd got Hong Kong on a long lease and we'd got the tea.
Result! Opium had solved our problems.
By the 19th century, it was the single biggest commodity traded in the world.
And as the opium flooded into China, the tea came pouring out.
This was the golden age of the tea clipper.
Slim, sleek ships designed to bring commodities into dock in the fastest time.
The first tea back would command the highest price.
They would race each other from Shanghai and Canton round the Cape of Good Hope en route to Britain.
This twist of the tea story brings me back to London, which, by the early 19th century, had become the centre of the international tea trade.
And with the speeds of the racing ships reported in the daily papers, people in sight of the Thames were in a lather of anticipation.
Tea's a very ordinary thing, isn't it? We don't get very excited about it.
I'm certainly less than excited about this.
But in the mid-19th century, people got really excited about it.
They'd stand on the sides of the docks waiting for ships to come in, looking out to where they thought China was, going, "The tea's coming! Wahey!" Reaching speeds of up to 17 knots, clippers like the Cutty Sark could bring home the tea in under 100 days.
Which was good, because Britain by then was very, very thirsty.
Between 1801 and 1911, the population of Britain quadrupled, but the amount of tea we drank increased twelvefold.
Which, if you don't have O-level maths, which I don't, it means people were drinking a lot more tea.
That's all you need Tea was taking over.
Rather like the Chinese with their opium, we were pretty much hooked, as I found out from historian Amanda Vickery.
It's one of the first extra-European drugs that really captures the British imagination.
I suppose the one before would be tobacco, but if you think about what are those great exotic groceries, they'd be tobacco, sugar, coffee and tea.
And tea is the one that really, really takes for the British.
It wasn't just the tea from China the aristos loved, it was the china from China that they coveted, as well.
Chinoiserie was so in.
Totes popular.
There was a craze for everything Chinese.
The porcelain was coming in on the ships with the tea and they were just in love with the whole look.
And a lot of stately homes had a Chinese room with all this lovely porcelain.
But by the 19th century, tea had poured down from the upper echelons and we were all at it.
The plebs had hold of the teapot.
Food historian Clarissa Dickson Wright says it was transforming the country.
I think it was very important.
And certainly, umby the Victorian and Edwardian era, everybody was drinking tea.
And they were drinking it in the factories.
So I think enormously important.
It probably led us to rule the world.
'We'll see how tea helped make Britain great,' but for now, we had a problem.
Everyone was drinking more tea, but we didn't really like having to deal with the Chinese to get it.
They were foreign, they didn't wear proper trousers, we needed to get it from somewhere else.
So although we'd thrashed the Chinese in round one, we couldn't be sure they would play the game.
And tea was now too popular to risk them taking their teapot home, so to speak.
We had to have our own tea.
'Let's think, can't grow it in England, 'not till we get global warming, 'I know, let's go to one of our other countries that we own.
'One of the hot ones!' I've come to the very north-east corner of what used to be British India.
And this is where the British found the solution to their tea problem.
Somehow, the opium wars had left relations between China and Britain a little bit strained.
But India, India was British, so no problems there.
Which bit of India? Let's think.
Assam! Assam was the perfect place to go to.
It's fertile, it has a gentle, undulating landscape and it has tons of rain.
We're in the middle of the rainforest in monsoon season.
We're staying in this little eco lodge.
We had dinner by candlelight because there was no power.
I had a bat in my bedroom all night, luckily I didn't find that out until the morning.
I'm having a lovely time(!) We don't question now that tea comes from India, but for centuries, a bit like the two old ladies locked in the lavatory, nobody knew it was there.
That's nice, isn't it? Elephant pulling over to let us overtake.
To find out how we did discover it, I'm going to meet an ancient tribe called the Singpho.
They had already played a big part in our tea story by helping supply the opium that we smuggled into China.
In fact, they still smoke opium today.
Boots off when you go into an opium den.
Thank you.
This gentleman is chopping up fresh banana leaves, then they're drying them on that sort of lacrosse racquety thing over the flames.
And that gets mixed with the opium.
And that's what you need to do before you can smoke it, I think.
'As with many addictions, as with tea, 'it's the ritual that becomes as important as the drug.
' Thank you very much.
'And the accoutrements.
'Instead of the tea strainer and the cake stand, 'they've got the banana leaves and the crucible.
'But they drink tea with their opium, made by the ladies, 'The men are busy with the drug faffing.
'And it was the tea, when the British first came to Assam, 'that they were interested in.
' We weren't sure at first if it was tea.
It didn't taste like the stuff from China.
It was from a leaf the Singpho called phalap.
It grew very tall and they used elephants to harvest it.
Was it tea? Was it not tea? This is how the Singpho used to harvest their bushes.
They'd just let them grow, then they'd go round with an elephant, machete the branches off and somebody else picks them up.
I love elephants.
I do love elephants.
And this is wonderful to see them so near.
They're just a wonderful part of nature.
And we don't usually get the chance to see them.
I rode on an elephant when I was about four, which you could do in the '50s at Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester.
It's nice to see them just doing what they do.
Like getting really cross and trampling about angrily.
Baby's caused a lot of trouble.
I think it just wanted to galumph about, but a baby elephant galumphing is a lot more frightening I was frightened.
Once the leaves were harvested, the poor baffled British tea detectives were no wiser when they saw the next part of the process.
I should say they're not normally dressed like this.
They've put on their ceremonial costumes as a welcome to us.
And I've put on my ceremonial fleece.
And I hope they appreciate it.
There's something we haven't talked about.
There's an elephant in the room.
No, there is.
An elephant in the room.
It's funny to be in a room and you realise it's gone dark because there's an elephant in the doorway.
Not a thing you get much in Muswell Hill.
So the Singpho would dry the phalap on the fire and then pack these unidentified leaves into bamboo shoots for roasting.
All very intriguing.
And one person in particular wanted to know more.
In 1823, a Scottish soldier called Robert Bruce visited this area and was invited in by the then-king for a drink.
He was given a drink, was very intrigued by its flavour and asked what plant it had come from.
What Bruce wanted to know was, was it tea? From the taste, it was hard to tell.
It's really bitter.
Very strong.
Blimey! But you could get used to it, though.
The Singpho seeds eventually ended up at India's Botanical Gardens, where plants from all over the world would be sent to see if they could be grown in British, in the sense of Indian, soil.
You remember Robert Fortune, pigtail, Chiswick, plant hunter? His tealeaves from China had also been smuggled back here.
This is where the first tea seeds were brought from China and they were planted over there because the British were desperate to find tea that they could grow themselves in India.
What they didn't know was it was already here.
It was ten years before experts here decided those Singpho leaves from Assam were really tea.
Assam leaves look very different from Chinese leaves.
But eventually, they all agreed.
Camellia sinensis variety Assamica was a true tea.
Yes, finally! We could grow our own proper tea what British people would like in a country where people had to do what we said.
Cue the music! Within 20 years of the confirmation that the Assam plant was tea, more than 50 tea gardens had sprung up.
I'm visiting the very first one.
This is the Chubwa tea estate, which is the oldest tea estate in India.
It began in 1836.
Chabua is Cha for tea and bua for planting.
This is the tea plantation.
These huge estates like Chubwa signalled the way forward for a new kind of tea production.
It won't fit, I've got a huge head.
Brilliant! Chinese tea culture was very sophisticated.
But its cultivation methods were pre-industrial and small scale.
Tea in British India would be cultivated the British way.
We weren't actually going to pick it ourselves, obviously.
The local chaps could do that.
But we would be in charge.
Using modern, efficient methods learnt from the Industrial Revolution.
I wish you could smell the smell.
The smell is absolutely intoxicating.
So the tea's been squished, I don't want to get too technical, and tumbled, and now it's going along here.
And in this process, you can see it's already what they call coppery, I'd call brown.
It's gone from green to brown just in these processes.
At Chubwa, tea would be produced to order.
Millions of leaves plucked, processed and packed.
All whizzing their way home to the tea tables of Britain.
With mass-produced tea growing safely within the British Empire, and with good old British Empire cheap sugar to take some of the taste away, tea could make the leap from top-drawer delicacy to mass-market necessity.
Hot, sweet, milky, affordable, lovely.
It smells like tea.
It's still damp.
But it looks like tea, I've got to admit.
And that's what goes into teabags.
I was going to say it's not the sweepings off the floor.
Except they have just swept it off the floor.
But that's because it fell on the floor, not because it's sweepings.
We had applied the principles of science and technology to the production of tea, but there was one process that couldn't be mechanised.
Even today, the plucking is mostly done by hand and mostly done by women.
How young are they when they start? 18 years plus, they have to be.
And do you have a retirement age? 58? Yes.
I'm too old to do it, then.
Sorry.
No plucking.
Plucking's off.
In spite of my great age of 59, I'll give it a go.
How dangerous can it be? I sometimes think, was that two leaves and a bud, was it one leaf and a bud, or was it three leaves and a bud? So it's making me very anxious, actually.
I'm trying to keep cool, but I don't want to ruin the whole next batch of tea by the wrong plucking.
She's taken everything.
There's nothing left.
I need to move on.
I need to go to another bush.
Give us your other hand.
Oh, gosh! Are you all right? Yes, I am, actually.
'Where was I? Oh, yes, in an irrigation ditch.
' The British dug miles of ditches as they created these tea gardens out of raw jungle.
We didn't dig them ourselves.
We had chaps to do that for us.
They were very happy working all hours for low pay in terrible conditions.
And it wasn't easy for us either.
There's not even a cushion on that chair.
He had to pay out all those low wages before he could go home and have a drink on the veranda.
We've got many lovely words from India.
Pyjamas, khazi, one of my favourites, and bungalow.
That is a classic bungalow.
You'll see these all over the British Empire.
And that's a planter's bungalow.
And it's built on stilts.
And that was for many reasons.
That was because they thought malaria germs came up from the swampy water underneath, so it was to get them raised up above that.
They had a big open veranda where they could sit and get drunk.
And also, if they were getting on an elephant, because they weren't Indian and couldn't climb an elephant's trunk, the elephant could come alongside the veranda and the British man could just step on and go off and kill something.
With his gin and tonic, tiger hunts and tiffin, the tea planter would come to occupy an unique place in the British psyche.
Half admirable and half not.
I'm home! Tarquin! Surprised? I-I thought you'd be away working on the tea plantation for at least another two days.
Good Lord, no! These are modern days, you know.
That quick brew goes in no time at all.
Tea planting in Assam in the early days was a very tough job.
You had to be physically and mentally very resilient.
But in a post-colonial era, the tea planter went from being a rather heroic, romantic type to a stock comic character.
Tarquin, there's something I must tell you.
I have fallen in love with another man.
A very successful tea planter.
What?! You brazen Docksey! What was the attraction, eh? Bigger perforations? It's great to be standing in a real planter's bungalow.
Now, this has been done up, but it is very old.
It's 160 years old this year.
Or, if you're watching the repeat, it's 161 years old.
Or if you're watching on UK Gold, it's probably fallen down by now.
So it's been done up, but you still get a sense of the scale of the rooms.
They're very light, it's very airy.
It's been done up in a style I would say was 1950s Chorlton.
It reminds me a bit of my grandmother's house in the decor and the flowery curtains.
But it's lovely.
It must have been a nice place to live.
It's just the alcoholism and the tiger shooting I wouldn't fancy.
And if it was a tough life for the planters, in some ways, it must have been even harder for the memsahibs who came with them.
As more and more men who couldn't get work in England came to India, more and more ladies who couldn't get husbands in England And of course, it was a terrible culture shock for them.
A strange land, languages they didn't understand, people they absolutely didn't understand, didn't want and just saw as a complete alien race, so there was a very handy book compiled for the memsahibs of India called The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, which gave you advice as to how to run your house in the British way and teach your servants to be British.
This was their attitude to the Indian people working for them.
"The Indian servant is a child in everything except age "and should be treated as a child, "that is to say, kindly, but with the greatest firmness.
" When you get past that attitude, which is the underlying attitude it is full of very sensible advice on where to buy everything, how to preserve your furniture, how to stop everything rotting in the endless monsoons.
But the best bit of advice I took from it is if you want to get a bit of fluff off your jacket, you get a chapatti, you open it up until you get the doughy bit and you make a ball.
Dandruff, fluff, everything, sorted.
By 1888, so really, in just over 50 years from a standing start, India had overtaken China as our main supplier of tea.
And copying from the British they were working alongside, the Indians started to drink tea themselves.
Though that's only happened since about the 1920s.
Now it's their national drink.
But as at any motorway services, you're not going to always get it exactly how you like it.
We've just stopped for a cup of tea.
We've ordered tea and this is what we've got.
I'll just show you what theCan you see the spoon? That is something you would associate with cocoa.
So this is the cocoa version of tea.
It comes with loads of sugar and condensed milk.
It's really treacly.
And this is what British soldiers used to drink in WWI.
I suppose compared with drowning in a shell hole, it was a big treat, but for those of us of the modern age, it's not doing it.
From Assam, tea spread across India to Kerala in the south, Darjeeling in the North and, of course, to the island of Sri Lanka.
But if you're looking for an Indian city that lives, breathes and drinks tea .
.
we have to go to Kolkata.
Showing me round is Sangeeta Kichlu.
She's a planter's daughter.
Please note the lack of resemblance to Les Dawson.
She's been in the tea business for more than 30 years.
Well, all her life.
Why do you think of all the leaves and all the bushes in the world, tea is the leaf that everybody chooses to make their drink out of? Well, tea calms you, it energises you, it's a pick-me-up drink.
Each cup of tea, I drink for different reasons.
Yes.
In the morning, it starts my day.
Mid morning, it kills my hunger.
In the evening, it calms me after a hard day's work.
Like the poor man on the street, it's a beverage that can be had on the go.
It's a beverage for all occasions, for all times, for all seasons.
Although mass-market tea came to India via the British, it's now completely absorbed into their own culture.
Today is the Festival of Vishwakarma, the Hindu god of engineers and machinery.
So today in this teabag factory, the workers get a big feast.
Then the priest will bless them.
And then he blesses all the teabag machines.
And that's to help ensure a safe, breakdown-free year ahead.
Hopefully.
So, what's actually happening now? He's blessing? Yes.
He's just performed the puja at the god.
Basically, he's bringing the god to the machine.
Right.
By putting the symbol on, he's now ensured that this machine has the blessings of the god.
If you do not do this puja well, there is a superstition that the chances of accidents are very high.
I tell you what was really nice about that was that we had to do it a few times for the camera, the blessing of the machines.
And each time they did it, they did it absolutely sincerely.
The gentleman showing me around said he didn't mind how many times because that meant extra blessing for the machines.
And the more blessing the machines get, the better their safety record.
And I was very chuffed with that.
When the festival is over, and those teabag machines should be good to go for another year, and they get regular maintenance, please don't write in, they take the icons down to the banks of the Hooghly at dusk and throw them in the river.
They're not supposed to because they want to keep the river clean, but they just seem to do it anyway.
Kolkata is heaving with tea stalls and there's one down here on the riverbank that's supposed to be a bit of a cut above.
This is Sadhu.
And this is his stall.
He's a chai wallah.
His family have been making tea on the banks of the Hooghly for 80 years.
He's been doing it himself for 20 years.
And he makes special tea with milk and cardamom seeds and rosewater.
And it's very spectacular.
And I'm going to have one.
I was ready for a merry debate about whether the milk should go in first, but quite frankly, it seems like the whole thing is milk.
There's a bit of tea.
Oh, and some very fancy extras.
Apart from being slightly apprehensive about the pan, can't help thinking a bit of Brillo wouldn't come amiss, that's just my English narrow-mindedness, the whole thing is so different from ordering a British cuppa.
It's literally a world away from being given a cardboard cup full of not-quite-boiling water with a teabag and a stick to try and fish it out with.
When my father used to drink tea when I was very small, he used to hold the teapot up quite high.
He said it brought out the flavour.
But looking at this, there's not really a huge comparison.
Thank you.
It's likehot milk, really.
Sorry not to be more analytical.
That's a sort of sweet mint.
I'm not getting any tea yet, but it's really lovely.
It's really nice.
Thank you very much.
He might need to think about doing a skinny version.
Thank you very much.
It's beautiful.
Thanks a lot.
'If you thought that looked colonial and careless, 'me chucking my teacup on the ground, that's what they do here.
'Plastic cups are out, and all the tea from the chai stalls 'is served in these little terracotta cups.
'The tea industry is big business in this part of India, 'employing nearly two million people.
'And down these back streets are the potters 'who are in their tiny workshops, making the cups, 'literally slaving over a hot stove.
' So they're making the cups that the chai wallahs use in the tea stalls.
And they're making them out of mud that comes from the Ganges.
And these gents who are making the teacups, all day and all night, they work.
It's absolutely boiling hot in here.
And it's I think it's the kiln that smells of anthracite.
It's a smell from my childhood.
But they do have the telly.
Looks like Crossroads, what they're watching.
I can't be absolutely sure.
It does look like the Kolkata version.
'These men are living away from home and their families, 'working day and night to send money back to their villages.
'It's a very hard way of life.
'But it's to their advantage that every cup will only be used once.
' When people have had a cup of tea, they smash it on the ground and that eventually turns back into mud and goes back into the river.
So it's very ecologically sound, the whole thing.
'Tea is such an all-consuming and visible passion in India 'that I'm still surprised 'they didn't drink it before the British came.
'Mind you, having tasted the bitter brew of the Singphos 'and the condensed milk version they seem to prefer now, 'you can understand why steaming leaves in bamboo pipes 'never really caught on.
'So, the British did do something good, didn't we? 'Please say we did.
' Whatever Kolkata is today is whatever the British left behind.
And for us, for the tea industry, we're indebted.
Because we're still functioning on that framework, you know? Yes.
We're still using the same machines.
We're still using the same methods of sale.
Yes.
So the tea industry owes a lot to the British.
'There are remnants of the British presence everywhere in Kolkata, 'but one of the biggest reminders of our legacy is tea itself.
' Thank you.
'In the boardroom of one of 'Kolkata's top tea merchants, J Thomas, 'you'll spot that's not an Indian name, 'they've got records and photographs going back to the days of the Raj.
' There's even a rare sighting of two pith helmets, which you might think was just from terrible old novels, and obviously, they actually wore them.
'Downstairs, the tasting room hasn't changed much since colonial times.
'Here, teas from all over India 'are tasted and analysed the traditional way.
'And what's becoming very familiar is the passion and pride 'people who work in tea in China and India 'feel for the product they work with.
' There's so much care, attention and passion that goes into producing these teas.
Each of these individual gardens are run by proud men.
Why don't you taste one? Which one should I taste? Any one you like.
OK.
OK.
Soslurp.
Do what you will.
A silent appreciation, is it? And then you taste this one.
OK.
That tasted stronger Yes.
.
.
and more bitter.
Yes.
And that tasted sweeter and lighter.
That's wonderful.
Would you like a job? Yes, I would.
But not here.
'Some of the tea they taste here will end up in Britain, 'but most Assam and Darjeeling tea is brokered through Kolkata.
'They taste it, then set the price.
' This is a tea auction.
Now, I don't have any experience of auctions apart from Flog It! I think this will be different because probably, they're selling something people want to buy.
SoI'll go in.
(What's he shouting about?) The person who shouts first, his bid gets picked up as soon as the hammer goes down.
'They've been holding tea auctions here for 150 years.
'And in the old days, they could be quite raucous.
'But today, more and more tea is auctioned online, 'and in any case, India is no longer one of the big exporters.
'They have such a big domestic market.
'We taught them to drink it and now they're drinking it.
'Well, older people are.
' The younger generation, they find tea fuddy-duddy.
So richer people tend to migrate to maybe wine, or fizzy beverages Yes.
.
.
or carbonated drinks.
Yeah.
And that's a challenge that we face for the future.
'Tea's facing a similar challenge in Britain, as we'll see.
'In a changing world, India is now one of many tea-growing countries.
'Kenya exports more, and we don't own that now either.
'But there is a tea estate in Cornwall, 'so we might yet get back in the game.
'And even in China, the first port of call on our tea journey, 'there seems to be a little crack in 'that old wall of respect for the leaf.
'It was the British passion for tea that helped drag China, 'forcibly, into the modern world.
'But as with India, the young 'are preferring the coffee shop to the ancient ritual.
'But my money's on tea.
It's a survivor.
' What a journey I've been on with tea.
I've been up rivers, down mountains, across continents.
And I still find it extraordinary to think that it's two leaves and a bud and hot water and that's made a drink that's conquered the world.
'And my journey's not over.
'Because now I want to know how tea conquered, 'seduced and enslaved the British.
' As soon as you could start work, a cup of tea.
And then you have a break, and you have a cup of tea.
Then you have a lunch break, you have a cup of tea.
And then there's normally, like, an odd one squeezed in.
Earl Grey's not Chinese! Blimey, it is! Hold on tight, everybody.
OK! 'I'm going to explore tea's unique contribution 'to the British way of life.
' The three things that we needed to get through the war were food, fuel and tea.
I'm coming around your way.
Oh, without the tea, we would've lost the war.
'And why it's only us that can make a really nice cup of tea.
' Have you tasted the tea in America? Terrible! 'And is it the only beverage to link revolution, spitting and chimps?' Coo-ee, Mr Shifter! Light refreshments.
Oh, thank you most kindly, madam.
These are the best ads ever! Well, it's the most successful advertising company.
One way of shifting it.
'How did this strange exotic leaf become, 'got to say it, our cup of tea?' So next time, you'll see about the British love affair with tea.
Well, it's not really a love affair, it's more of adull marriage.
Oh, you'll see what I mean.
It's a story of rivers, mountains, history, politics, imperialism, espionage and addiction.
It's the story of tea.
Those little green leaves that changed the world.
The plant loved so much by the British, we made it our very own national drink.
The thirst for tea led the British on an extraordinary adventure, travelling across the globe in search of this precious leaf.
Now I'm going to make that journey.
'I'm going to show you how our nice cup of tea 'brought East and West together.
' Thank you.
'How it triggered wars.
'Helped us win them and even sparked the occasional revolution.
' Hear ye, hear ye! From the back streets of Kolkata to the soaring skyline of Shanghai, we'll be delving into a world of chai wallahs, opium smokers and cross elephants.
And we're going to find out how this exotic fragrant leaf became an indispensable part of the British way of life.
Tea is a social drink.
You make a cup of coffee, you make a pot of tea.
How it helps us connect and pulls us together.
It can console you, there's the warmth and the ritual.
You've got to boil the kettle, get the sugar, ask what they want, engage with them.
How it keeps us going.
We can't really manage without it.
One day, I decided to try to have a complete day without tea.
I was quite shaken.
I was quite disturbed.
So, how did we get to be so crackers about tea? Out of all the drinks in all the world, why are we addicted to this one? I tell you what, put the kettle on, let's have a nice cup of tea and find out.
Hi.
Cup of tea, please.
This is such a familiar thing, isn't it, to most of us.
To come into a caff, plonk ourselves down, have a cup of tea.
Thank you.
Thanks.
We are a nation of tea drinkers.
It's a very British thing to have a nice cup of tea.
It's a dull, brown, mundane accompaniment to our ordinary life.
But tea is extraordinary.
And the passion the British felt for it altered history, started wars, drove the British Empire, changed political alliances.
And it's just a little leaf.
A little leaf and a bud, and it transformed the world.
Tea is the most popular drink on the planet, after water, which doesn't really count.
In this country, we get through more than 60 billion cups a year.
And it's trickled down through our society, starting at the top, naturally.
You can't trickle upwards.
Is this Earl Grey? This is Earl Grey.
Tea in Britain started life as an aristocratic luxury.
But it spilled out from our stately homes to every old home and every cafe and cab rank.
To ballrooms and building sites.
All I'd say is it's a long day without a cup of tea.
It's a very long day without a cup of tea.
And in the brave new world of macchiatos and flat whites, we still get through nearly three teas for every coffee.
How much do you drink, Tracy, in a day? Six, seven, eight.
It's good for you.
Cup of tea, cup of tea, cup of tea.
You've just got to take care of yourself.
And somehow for us, it's more than just a hot drink.
It's become the answer to everything.
A nice cup of tea.
More than just a soap opera staple, tea was part of our finest hour.
It played a big part, let me tell you.
To be without tea was to be without life, flying, you know.
Somehow, drinking tea has become part of being British.
Part of our DNA.
You need it to wind down from the stress.
It keeps you calm.
And it doesn't get more English than a cup of tea.
But tea isn't English or British.
I have to break the news to you, it's foreign.
And the story of tea starts almost 5,000 years ago, almost 5,000 miles in that direction.
There's nearly 40 different countries growing tea now, but in the 17th century, when we got our first taste of it, it was only grown in one country, China.
China then was a secretive and mysterious country Closed off from the West.
But their tea, and our need for it, would change all that.
Modern China is a nation of 1.
3 billion people.
A 21st Century superpower.
And it's the first step on my great tea odyssey.
Well, we've just landed in China.
This is Shanghai International Airport.
Just a little hint, bright-coloured tags on your luggage make it easier That's it, that's me.
Let's go and discover the exciting history of tea, shall we? When the first tea traders from the British East India Company arrived down the coast in Canton, it was just the halfway point in a hazardous round trip that would take more than two years.
So I shouldn't really complain about my journey, a flight and then a short ride in a fast machine.
This is the Maglev, short for magnetic levitation, obviously, they say the fastest train in the world.
I've sent a party of train spotters on ahead just to check the Chinese haven't made that up.
Sowe're whizzing into Shanghai.
And, yes, it's fast.
So is the British Pendolino.
Let's just think about tea, shall we? We think of ourselves as a nation of tea drinkers, but the Chinese make more tea than anywhere else in the world.
And they were drinking it long before we'd even heard of it.
But once we did hear about it, and once we'd tasted it, we loved it.
And if we wanted to get it, this is where we had to come.
Shanghai played a huge role in the story of China, Britain and tea.
When we went tea crazy, we were desperate to open Shanghai up to trade.
Which we probably didn't do in the most tactful way.
I'm coming to that later.
But it's partly because of tea that Shanghai is now China's most modern and westernised city.
In fact, to the casual glance, if it wasn't that I seem to be the only person with highlights, you could be anywhere in the Western world.
So I just need to track down the tea.
This is Nanjing Road in Shanghai, Shanghai's main shopping street.
It's like Oxford Street at Christmas Eve.
And one reason it looks like Oxford Street is that all the shops are very familiar.
But the only thing I've not managed to find so far is a teashop.
I don't feel I've quite plugged into the heart of ancient China.
I'm just taking part in traditional Shanghai life.
Yes, I'm in Starbucks.
And it's exactly the same as any other Starbucks.
It's absolutely heaving.
I've been queuing for days.
With a generation of young people all looking towards the West, I guess it's not surprising coffee would be taking over from But there is tea running through the heart of Shanghai.
One of the city's most interesting restaurants is Madame Quiping's.
She not only serves tea, her food is cooked with tea.
For once, as a vegetarian, there's lots for me to choose from.
And they really make it an event.
Oh, my Lord, it's a pagoda.
Thank you.
Yep.
Minestrone's off(!) Madame Quiping learnt about tea when she was sent to an ancient tea-growing area during the Cultural Revolution.
I know she looks like the love child of Mary Quant and a Bond villain, but she's really interesting to talk to.
'She's talking about the health properties of tea.
'It's antioxidant, anti-free radical, anti-ageing.
'She's saying she's 60 years old 'and she doesn't have a single white hair.
'Yeah, well, I'm 59, I have highlights.
'It's a different culture, get over it.
' Mm! That's really nice.
'I do love soup, but I'm not doing the story of soup, 'I'm trying to get to grips with tea, 'and I don't feel I've quite got to the heart of it yet.
'Shanghai's important, as we'll see, 'but it's not where the story truly begins.
' If I'm going to get to grips with the oldest, most sophisticated tea culture in the world, I'm going to have to go somewhere else.
This is one of the most spectacular places I've ever been to.
This is Wuyi Mountain on the northern border of Fujian Province.
I've left the city far behind to come to one of China's oldest tea-growing areas.
Some of the first tea we ever tasted in Britain more than 300 years ago, grew here on these hillsides.
It came right down from the top of the mountain.
It was carried by Chinese peasants in packs on bamboo poles.
They brought it down the mountain, it was rafted along.
So by the time it started its sea voyage, it had already travelled a thousand miles.
And that's why the tea was so precious.
It could easily be damaged or lost on the way.
The stuff that reached the London docks was incredibly expensive.
We're all drinking it now, but then, only the rich could afford it.
And it was kept in locked caddies so the servants could never have a sneaky cuppa.
Of course, we were desperate to find out how it grew, but the Chinese would never let us further inland than the coast.
Though one or two did try.
By the end of the 18th century, the British had gone absolutely crackers for tea.
And they literally couldn't get enough.
The hunt was on to find tea seeds, to find methods of growing tea to see if we could grow it somewhere else and not be dependent on the Chinese for trade.
So this gentleman called Robert Fortune, who worked in the Botanical Gardens in Chiswick in the 1840s, he actually came down this very river, which he calls the Stream of Nine Windings, to see if he could get seeds, get information, get plants and bring them back.
To penetrate into the heart of China, he had to dress as a Chinese person.
He even had to grow his hair into a pigtail, which must have been quite a novelty in Chiswick at that time.
I don't think we have botanical espionage in quite the same way.
But plants like the nutmeg, sugarcane and the rubber tree were hugely valuable to the Empire and the tea bush was the most sought after and would be the most lucrative, if they could find it.
And here it is.
This bush, the Camellia sinensis, is the tea plant.
And this is the plant that's become the most important plant in the world because all teacomes from this.
But those first tea hunters didn't know that.
They thought green tea and black tea came from different plants.
I'm sad for us.
We didn't know anything.
But the Chinese, they knew everything.
I'm here to meet a man who grows tea the traditional way.
The way they've been growing it for thousands of years.
Master Xu grows his tea in the shadow of Wuyi Mountain.
It's in demand from connoisseurs across the world.
Lu Zhou has come from her specialist tea company in London to sample the recent harvest.
Welcome.
Thank you very much.
It's very beautiful.
'When I asked him about his tea, 'I got something a bit more interesting than a sales pitch.
' He thinks the tealeaves bring friendship to other people.
And by drinking the tea from Wuyi Mountain, you can experience the nature and people's skill, as well.
So, Lu, what's the skill in plucking tea? The most important thing you need to remember is not just grab it.
You need to use two fingers to pick three to four leaves.
It's OK, and you see the bud, so you just pick like this.
That good? That's perfect.
Very good.
Is it fun? Yes, it's fun.
I'd love to do the whole four acres if I had more time(!) Is this plant, the Camellia, is it a tree or is it a bush? They're trees.
And you trim it to keep it this height.
If you don't trim it, see the taller trees? The scraggy ones? Yes.
These are also tea trees.
If you don't trim these trees, they grow.
Yeah.
Then you'd need very, very tall ladies.
I can't help noticing, looking at packets of tea it's always the ladies picking the tea.
Yes.
Why would that be? Because they care more about the details and also, they have a lot of heavier work for the man to do.
Right.
Do these ladies like picking tea, do you think? Shall I ask them? Yeah.
What choice does she have? She's going to say yes.
The man she's working for is around the corner.
So yeah, she loves it(!) The legend in China is that tea, or chai, was discovered by the Emperor Shennong in 2737 BC when some stray leaves blew into his cup of hot water.
Either not noticing or not caring that the water had turned brown, he drank it and found it refreshing and invigorating.
Just think, if he'd been washing his socks in hot water and a leaf had blown into one of them, he could have invented the teabag.
The Buddhists have their own myth about tea.
And it's that Buddha had taken a vow to meditate and stay awake And after seven years, he fell asleep and he was so enraged that he tore off his eyelids and threw them and scattered them on the ground and they took root and became tea.
And he took up a leaf and chewed it and that kept him awake.
The Buddhists were the first to cultivate tea.
They were the first to trim it down from a tree to a bush.
Fortune the plant hunter was heading here for the Tianxin Yongle Temple in Wuyi.
He'd heard stories of monks who grew their own tea.
A tea they called Da Hong Pao, Red Robe tea.
A tea whose taste was said to be beyond compare.
Of course, when monks were first using tea here and making tea, they were using it as a medicine, not as a drink.
And when tea first arrived in Britain, it was sold in apothecaries.
Today, the monks of Tianxin Yongle still drink and make their own tea.
Their head monk, Master Shi, told me it's a vital part of their daily ritual.
He told me they drink it in the morning, they offer it to the Buddha at noon, and they drink it in the evening when they meditate.
In ancient China, they believed that tea cleared the throat, brightened the eyes, comforted the muscles and eased the veins.
And they still feel now it's hugely beneficial.
That when they drink it, their qi and their blood are vitalised and they are stronger and more energetic.
Robert Fortune, our pigtailed plant hunter from Chiswick, was on the right track.
In the shadows of the temple lay the most famous tea bushes in China.
'All Red Robe tea came originally from these three bushes, 'known simply as the Mother Trees.
'They're one of China's top tourist attractions.
'I'm going to go and see them.
' So I'm very excited.
I'm a bit like David Attenborough on the hunt for a rare sort of lemur.
Because I'm looking for the Mother Trees and hundreds and millions of people in China come to see them.
I'm very excited.
That's them.
That's them! Yep, there's three bushes behind a wall.
That's what everybody else is looking at.
I suppose we'd be the same with privet, wouldn't we? If we had a privet museum and we sat in a teahouse and looked at some privet bushes behind a wall .
.
we'd be excited.
Or would we? It wouldn't be a visitor centre without a cafe.
And here they serve their local delicacy.
They're called tea eggs, and they are eggs which have been hardboiled in Red Robe tea.
OK, that's it.
It smells like an egg, actually, doesn't smell any different.
Mm! It's really nice.
It's really salty.
Really, because my palate was ruined by wine gums as a child, I probably can't really taste the Red Robe tea in the white, but I can taste the salt in the yolk.
It's really nice.
And then you have itexcuse me talking with my mouth full, you have it with the Red Robe tea, which is really, really diluted, otherwise this would be 500 quid's worth in this bowl.
It's really thinly let down.
It's really nice.
I've got it all.
Tea, egg, tea, bushes.
I'm living the dream(!) They're so respectful of their tea in China.
Not just preserving those rather straggly old bushes, but they have a beautiful, modern museum just devoted to tea.
This is the National Tea Museum in Hangzhou, full of gorgeous ancient objects, beautifully displayed.
There's a very hushed, reverential atmosphere.
Look at this.
This is really sweet.
The children possibly not quite up to speed with the whole reverence and respect thing, but very friendly, very keen to show off their English and very diligent in checking that the ancient tea-twisting machine was still just about working.
Now, green tea is a staple in every dreary detox regime, but when tea first came to Britain, it was green tea.
People were detoxing without even knowing about it.
And in modern China, green tea is still the thing, as I shall now demonstrate Tomorrow's World style.
We've just locked the children out so we can show you this very, very interesting pie chart, which will show you the green, that's the people that drink green tea in China.
12 percent of people drink oolong tea, which is not orange, but on this diagram, it is.
11 percent, that's rather vague.
Another tea.
I don't know what.
And seven percent drink black tea.
I hope that's made everything very clear.
Thank you.
Strangely, the centrepiece of the museum's garden isn't a pie chart, it's a statue.
This is Lu Yu, whose 8th century book, The Classic of Tea, is still the definitive work on the subject.
For Lu Yu, tea symbolised the harmony and unity of the universe.
So this is what Lu Yu wrote about his favourite drink.
"The best quality tea must have creases like the leather boot "Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock.
"Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine.
"Glean like a lake touched by a zephyr "and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.
" 'I suppose you couldn't really write that about cocoa.
' The Chinese turned the making and drinking of tea into an art form.
Lu Yu said tea had to pass through six stages involving 24 different implements before you could even get the biscuits out.
The plucking that we saw, that's just the first stage in a long and intricate process.
By shaking the leaves, they can make the edges of the leaves break and help the leaves to be oxidised.
And then the fragrance and the taste will improve.
Right.
Yeah.
So the ladies who plucked that tea They go rest.
They don't do this.
No, they don't do this.
It's a man's job.
It's a man's job to wave bamboo about.
It is.
So it's been plucked and tossed and now it's being rolled in a hot wok.
He says he doesn't burn his hands because he only touches the leaves, but looks dicey, doesn't it? Just so you know, black tea, green tea, white tea and oolong tea are all from the same bush, they're all from the Camellia bush.
Black tea is oxidised tea, green tea is tea that's been roasted but not oxidised, white tea, nobody's done anything to it at all, and oolong tea, which is what we're watching now, has been partially oxidised and the oxidisation stops with the roasting.
Everybody got that? When I said roasting, I meant toasting.
So sorry, everybody.
Please don't write in.
Just been toasted myself.
So what they're doing now with that rolling is that they're pressing the leaves and they're making them that long characteristic shape.
And oolong means black dragon.
So they're making them into the shape of a black dragon.
But it's also bringing out the flavour and the smell of the leaves.
And of course, having taken so much trouble to bring out the flavour, they're not going to stick it in a mug on the dashboard and grab a slurp at the traffic lights.
To examine if this tea's good, you need to brew it seven times, seven brewing, and then you smell the lid.
And you're supposed to still smell it.
And then the nice brew, you can still taste the aftertaste.
That means it's a good tea.
Right.
Can you slurp? I can't do that.
A, I can't do it and B, I can't do it with a really hot cup of tea.
I can't hold it, even.
It tastes of tea, real tea, but it smells of flowers.
And it smells like a real living thing, even though it's half a black tea.
Being up here in the mountains, seeing how they grow the tea, and the care with which they process it, all these little hand processes, and they treat it like a very rare and precious commodity.
And they drink it with great ceremony.
And all the days I've been in China, I've seen everybody drink their tea in that same way.
And they make a ritual of it, even though it's an everyday thing.
And it's a world away from how we treat our tea.
We buy it in big, cheap boxes, we buy as many teabags as we can, we just prod it with a spoon and we chuck it away.
But here, they make an everyday thingsomething special.
And I'm rather inspired now making a cuppa for me and my friends, to make it their way.
So I'm going to do what they do, which is you heat up the little jug and you heat up the little pot.
You put these leaves in which I think will be oolong leaves.
It's about perfection.
So that even in an anonymous hotel bedroom, you're in touch with your culture.
Or there is a box with two sachets of Mellow Bird's, so, you know, whichever you want.
Of course, we do love our tea in Britain, it's just not our way to make a song and dance about it.
Forget West End musicals and overpriced moth-eaten seats and the leading lady off with a cold, this is a spectacular musical.
Choreographed by the man who directed the opening ceremony it's called Impressions of Da Hong Pao, based on the legend of Red Robe tea.
There's about 600 people on stage.
The arena, a 2,000-seater, it revolves.
They light up the actual mountains in the distance.
Honestly, it's enough to make you vote communist.
It's all about tea.
They're tossing the tea.
And most extraordinary, at the end, they come out with a teapot and cups and everybody in the audience gets a hot cup of Red Robe tea poured out for you in front of your very eyes.
You don't get that at the end of Billy Elliot.
That fantastic show tells the story of how tea brings people together.
But away from legend, tea has driven nations apart.
Britain and China both loved tea.
They had it, we wanted it.
They let us buy it, but they didn't want us finding out how it grew.
Apart from the odd pigtail-disguised plant hunter, our traders were kept corralled on the coast, well away from Wuyi.
Any locals caught helping the British to travel inland or to learn the language, risked death.
It's hard to believe when you look at how cities like Shanghai have embraced Western commercialism, but back then, they had no interest in doing business with us.
We needed them, they didn't need us.
The problem was the Chinese didn't want anything we had to offer.
They didn't want our cotton, they didn't want our pianos.
And strangely, they didn't want our knives and forks.
But we did have one thing they wanted.
It was grown 1,500 miles away and they were mad for it.
Our determination to get as much tea as we wanted was about to turn Victorian Britain into the biggest drugs dealer in history.
This is opium.
Like tea, very sought after and even more addictive.
It was grown by tribes on the borders of India, which, at that time, belonged to the British.
It was bought by the East India Company and then smuggled into China, up to 40,000 chests a year.
The money we made from the opium meant we didn't have to use our precious silver reserves Professor John Wong is an historian with a specialist knowledge of the Opium Wars.
The tea trade was interlocked with the opium trade.
And these two together were the foundation of the British Empire.
It's all based on addiction.
Our addiction to tea.
Yes.
The British addiction to tea and the Chinese addiction to opium.
And what effect did opium have on Chinese society when it flooded in? Devastating.
Yeah.
When you are craving for the drug, you can't think.
And after you've taken the drug, you are so up in the skies, you can't work.
So from top to bottom in Chinese society, it was entirely rotten.
Right.
And it was a huge problem.
Right.
The Emperor of China tried to stop the opium trade, but we had a superior naval force and firepower.
We really did rule the waves.
So the British navy sailed into Shanghai, up the Yangtze River and blockaded the Grand Canal and China capitulated.
We'd shown the foreigners a thing or two.
We'd got Hong Kong on a long lease and we'd got the tea.
Result! Opium had solved our problems.
By the 19th century, it was the single biggest commodity traded in the world.
And as the opium flooded into China, the tea came pouring out.
This was the golden age of the tea clipper.
Slim, sleek ships designed to bring commodities into dock in the fastest time.
The first tea back would command the highest price.
They would race each other from Shanghai and Canton round the Cape of Good Hope en route to Britain.
This twist of the tea story brings me back to London, which, by the early 19th century, had become the centre of the international tea trade.
And with the speeds of the racing ships reported in the daily papers, people in sight of the Thames were in a lather of anticipation.
Tea's a very ordinary thing, isn't it? We don't get very excited about it.
I'm certainly less than excited about this.
But in the mid-19th century, people got really excited about it.
They'd stand on the sides of the docks waiting for ships to come in, looking out to where they thought China was, going, "The tea's coming! Wahey!" Reaching speeds of up to 17 knots, clippers like the Cutty Sark could bring home the tea in under 100 days.
Which was good, because Britain by then was very, very thirsty.
Between 1801 and 1911, the population of Britain quadrupled, but the amount of tea we drank increased twelvefold.
Which, if you don't have O-level maths, which I don't, it means people were drinking a lot more tea.
That's all you need Tea was taking over.
Rather like the Chinese with their opium, we were pretty much hooked, as I found out from historian Amanda Vickery.
It's one of the first extra-European drugs that really captures the British imagination.
I suppose the one before would be tobacco, but if you think about what are those great exotic groceries, they'd be tobacco, sugar, coffee and tea.
And tea is the one that really, really takes for the British.
It wasn't just the tea from China the aristos loved, it was the china from China that they coveted, as well.
Chinoiserie was so in.
Totes popular.
There was a craze for everything Chinese.
The porcelain was coming in on the ships with the tea and they were just in love with the whole look.
And a lot of stately homes had a Chinese room with all this lovely porcelain.
But by the 19th century, tea had poured down from the upper echelons and we were all at it.
The plebs had hold of the teapot.
Food historian Clarissa Dickson Wright says it was transforming the country.
I think it was very important.
And certainly, umby the Victorian and Edwardian era, everybody was drinking tea.
And they were drinking it in the factories.
So I think enormously important.
It probably led us to rule the world.
'We'll see how tea helped make Britain great,' but for now, we had a problem.
Everyone was drinking more tea, but we didn't really like having to deal with the Chinese to get it.
They were foreign, they didn't wear proper trousers, we needed to get it from somewhere else.
So although we'd thrashed the Chinese in round one, we couldn't be sure they would play the game.
And tea was now too popular to risk them taking their teapot home, so to speak.
We had to have our own tea.
'Let's think, can't grow it in England, 'not till we get global warming, 'I know, let's go to one of our other countries that we own.
'One of the hot ones!' I've come to the very north-east corner of what used to be British India.
And this is where the British found the solution to their tea problem.
Somehow, the opium wars had left relations between China and Britain a little bit strained.
But India, India was British, so no problems there.
Which bit of India? Let's think.
Assam! Assam was the perfect place to go to.
It's fertile, it has a gentle, undulating landscape and it has tons of rain.
We're in the middle of the rainforest in monsoon season.
We're staying in this little eco lodge.
We had dinner by candlelight because there was no power.
I had a bat in my bedroom all night, luckily I didn't find that out until the morning.
I'm having a lovely time(!) We don't question now that tea comes from India, but for centuries, a bit like the two old ladies locked in the lavatory, nobody knew it was there.
That's nice, isn't it? Elephant pulling over to let us overtake.
To find out how we did discover it, I'm going to meet an ancient tribe called the Singpho.
They had already played a big part in our tea story by helping supply the opium that we smuggled into China.
In fact, they still smoke opium today.
Boots off when you go into an opium den.
Thank you.
This gentleman is chopping up fresh banana leaves, then they're drying them on that sort of lacrosse racquety thing over the flames.
And that gets mixed with the opium.
And that's what you need to do before you can smoke it, I think.
'As with many addictions, as with tea, 'it's the ritual that becomes as important as the drug.
' Thank you very much.
'And the accoutrements.
'Instead of the tea strainer and the cake stand, 'they've got the banana leaves and the crucible.
'But they drink tea with their opium, made by the ladies, 'The men are busy with the drug faffing.
'And it was the tea, when the British first came to Assam, 'that they were interested in.
' We weren't sure at first if it was tea.
It didn't taste like the stuff from China.
It was from a leaf the Singpho called phalap.
It grew very tall and they used elephants to harvest it.
Was it tea? Was it not tea? This is how the Singpho used to harvest their bushes.
They'd just let them grow, then they'd go round with an elephant, machete the branches off and somebody else picks them up.
I love elephants.
I do love elephants.
And this is wonderful to see them so near.
They're just a wonderful part of nature.
And we don't usually get the chance to see them.
I rode on an elephant when I was about four, which you could do in the '50s at Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester.
It's nice to see them just doing what they do.
Like getting really cross and trampling about angrily.
Baby's caused a lot of trouble.
I think it just wanted to galumph about, but a baby elephant galumphing is a lot more frightening I was frightened.
Once the leaves were harvested, the poor baffled British tea detectives were no wiser when they saw the next part of the process.
I should say they're not normally dressed like this.
They've put on their ceremonial costumes as a welcome to us.
And I've put on my ceremonial fleece.
And I hope they appreciate it.
There's something we haven't talked about.
There's an elephant in the room.
No, there is.
An elephant in the room.
It's funny to be in a room and you realise it's gone dark because there's an elephant in the doorway.
Not a thing you get much in Muswell Hill.
So the Singpho would dry the phalap on the fire and then pack these unidentified leaves into bamboo shoots for roasting.
All very intriguing.
And one person in particular wanted to know more.
In 1823, a Scottish soldier called Robert Bruce visited this area and was invited in by the then-king for a drink.
He was given a drink, was very intrigued by its flavour and asked what plant it had come from.
What Bruce wanted to know was, was it tea? From the taste, it was hard to tell.
It's really bitter.
Very strong.
Blimey! But you could get used to it, though.
The Singpho seeds eventually ended up at India's Botanical Gardens, where plants from all over the world would be sent to see if they could be grown in British, in the sense of Indian, soil.
You remember Robert Fortune, pigtail, Chiswick, plant hunter? His tealeaves from China had also been smuggled back here.
This is where the first tea seeds were brought from China and they were planted over there because the British were desperate to find tea that they could grow themselves in India.
What they didn't know was it was already here.
It was ten years before experts here decided those Singpho leaves from Assam were really tea.
Assam leaves look very different from Chinese leaves.
But eventually, they all agreed.
Camellia sinensis variety Assamica was a true tea.
Yes, finally! We could grow our own proper tea what British people would like in a country where people had to do what we said.
Cue the music! Within 20 years of the confirmation that the Assam plant was tea, more than 50 tea gardens had sprung up.
I'm visiting the very first one.
This is the Chubwa tea estate, which is the oldest tea estate in India.
It began in 1836.
Chabua is Cha for tea and bua for planting.
This is the tea plantation.
These huge estates like Chubwa signalled the way forward for a new kind of tea production.
It won't fit, I've got a huge head.
Brilliant! Chinese tea culture was very sophisticated.
But its cultivation methods were pre-industrial and small scale.
Tea in British India would be cultivated the British way.
We weren't actually going to pick it ourselves, obviously.
The local chaps could do that.
But we would be in charge.
Using modern, efficient methods learnt from the Industrial Revolution.
I wish you could smell the smell.
The smell is absolutely intoxicating.
So the tea's been squished, I don't want to get too technical, and tumbled, and now it's going along here.
And in this process, you can see it's already what they call coppery, I'd call brown.
It's gone from green to brown just in these processes.
At Chubwa, tea would be produced to order.
Millions of leaves plucked, processed and packed.
All whizzing their way home to the tea tables of Britain.
With mass-produced tea growing safely within the British Empire, and with good old British Empire cheap sugar to take some of the taste away, tea could make the leap from top-drawer delicacy to mass-market necessity.
Hot, sweet, milky, affordable, lovely.
It smells like tea.
It's still damp.
But it looks like tea, I've got to admit.
And that's what goes into teabags.
I was going to say it's not the sweepings off the floor.
Except they have just swept it off the floor.
But that's because it fell on the floor, not because it's sweepings.
We had applied the principles of science and technology to the production of tea, but there was one process that couldn't be mechanised.
Even today, the plucking is mostly done by hand and mostly done by women.
How young are they when they start? 18 years plus, they have to be.
And do you have a retirement age? 58? Yes.
I'm too old to do it, then.
Sorry.
No plucking.
Plucking's off.
In spite of my great age of 59, I'll give it a go.
How dangerous can it be? I sometimes think, was that two leaves and a bud, was it one leaf and a bud, or was it three leaves and a bud? So it's making me very anxious, actually.
I'm trying to keep cool, but I don't want to ruin the whole next batch of tea by the wrong plucking.
She's taken everything.
There's nothing left.
I need to move on.
I need to go to another bush.
Give us your other hand.
Oh, gosh! Are you all right? Yes, I am, actually.
'Where was I? Oh, yes, in an irrigation ditch.
' The British dug miles of ditches as they created these tea gardens out of raw jungle.
We didn't dig them ourselves.
We had chaps to do that for us.
They were very happy working all hours for low pay in terrible conditions.
And it wasn't easy for us either.
There's not even a cushion on that chair.
He had to pay out all those low wages before he could go home and have a drink on the veranda.
We've got many lovely words from India.
Pyjamas, khazi, one of my favourites, and bungalow.
That is a classic bungalow.
You'll see these all over the British Empire.
And that's a planter's bungalow.
And it's built on stilts.
And that was for many reasons.
That was because they thought malaria germs came up from the swampy water underneath, so it was to get them raised up above that.
They had a big open veranda where they could sit and get drunk.
And also, if they were getting on an elephant, because they weren't Indian and couldn't climb an elephant's trunk, the elephant could come alongside the veranda and the British man could just step on and go off and kill something.
With his gin and tonic, tiger hunts and tiffin, the tea planter would come to occupy an unique place in the British psyche.
Half admirable and half not.
I'm home! Tarquin! Surprised? I-I thought you'd be away working on the tea plantation for at least another two days.
Good Lord, no! These are modern days, you know.
That quick brew goes in no time at all.
Tea planting in Assam in the early days was a very tough job.
You had to be physically and mentally very resilient.
But in a post-colonial era, the tea planter went from being a rather heroic, romantic type to a stock comic character.
Tarquin, there's something I must tell you.
I have fallen in love with another man.
A very successful tea planter.
What?! You brazen Docksey! What was the attraction, eh? Bigger perforations? It's great to be standing in a real planter's bungalow.
Now, this has been done up, but it is very old.
It's 160 years old this year.
Or, if you're watching the repeat, it's 161 years old.
Or if you're watching on UK Gold, it's probably fallen down by now.
So it's been done up, but you still get a sense of the scale of the rooms.
They're very light, it's very airy.
It's been done up in a style I would say was 1950s Chorlton.
It reminds me a bit of my grandmother's house in the decor and the flowery curtains.
But it's lovely.
It must have been a nice place to live.
It's just the alcoholism and the tiger shooting I wouldn't fancy.
And if it was a tough life for the planters, in some ways, it must have been even harder for the memsahibs who came with them.
As more and more men who couldn't get work in England came to India, more and more ladies who couldn't get husbands in England And of course, it was a terrible culture shock for them.
A strange land, languages they didn't understand, people they absolutely didn't understand, didn't want and just saw as a complete alien race, so there was a very handy book compiled for the memsahibs of India called The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, which gave you advice as to how to run your house in the British way and teach your servants to be British.
This was their attitude to the Indian people working for them.
"The Indian servant is a child in everything except age "and should be treated as a child, "that is to say, kindly, but with the greatest firmness.
" When you get past that attitude, which is the underlying attitude it is full of very sensible advice on where to buy everything, how to preserve your furniture, how to stop everything rotting in the endless monsoons.
But the best bit of advice I took from it is if you want to get a bit of fluff off your jacket, you get a chapatti, you open it up until you get the doughy bit and you make a ball.
Dandruff, fluff, everything, sorted.
By 1888, so really, in just over 50 years from a standing start, India had overtaken China as our main supplier of tea.
And copying from the British they were working alongside, the Indians started to drink tea themselves.
Though that's only happened since about the 1920s.
Now it's their national drink.
But as at any motorway services, you're not going to always get it exactly how you like it.
We've just stopped for a cup of tea.
We've ordered tea and this is what we've got.
I'll just show you what theCan you see the spoon? That is something you would associate with cocoa.
So this is the cocoa version of tea.
It comes with loads of sugar and condensed milk.
It's really treacly.
And this is what British soldiers used to drink in WWI.
I suppose compared with drowning in a shell hole, it was a big treat, but for those of us of the modern age, it's not doing it.
From Assam, tea spread across India to Kerala in the south, Darjeeling in the North and, of course, to the island of Sri Lanka.
But if you're looking for an Indian city that lives, breathes and drinks tea .
.
we have to go to Kolkata.
Showing me round is Sangeeta Kichlu.
She's a planter's daughter.
Please note the lack of resemblance to Les Dawson.
She's been in the tea business for more than 30 years.
Well, all her life.
Why do you think of all the leaves and all the bushes in the world, tea is the leaf that everybody chooses to make their drink out of? Well, tea calms you, it energises you, it's a pick-me-up drink.
Each cup of tea, I drink for different reasons.
Yes.
In the morning, it starts my day.
Mid morning, it kills my hunger.
In the evening, it calms me after a hard day's work.
Like the poor man on the street, it's a beverage that can be had on the go.
It's a beverage for all occasions, for all times, for all seasons.
Although mass-market tea came to India via the British, it's now completely absorbed into their own culture.
Today is the Festival of Vishwakarma, the Hindu god of engineers and machinery.
So today in this teabag factory, the workers get a big feast.
Then the priest will bless them.
And then he blesses all the teabag machines.
And that's to help ensure a safe, breakdown-free year ahead.
Hopefully.
So, what's actually happening now? He's blessing? Yes.
He's just performed the puja at the god.
Basically, he's bringing the god to the machine.
Right.
By putting the symbol on, he's now ensured that this machine has the blessings of the god.
If you do not do this puja well, there is a superstition that the chances of accidents are very high.
I tell you what was really nice about that was that we had to do it a few times for the camera, the blessing of the machines.
And each time they did it, they did it absolutely sincerely.
The gentleman showing me around said he didn't mind how many times because that meant extra blessing for the machines.
And the more blessing the machines get, the better their safety record.
And I was very chuffed with that.
When the festival is over, and those teabag machines should be good to go for another year, and they get regular maintenance, please don't write in, they take the icons down to the banks of the Hooghly at dusk and throw them in the river.
They're not supposed to because they want to keep the river clean, but they just seem to do it anyway.
Kolkata is heaving with tea stalls and there's one down here on the riverbank that's supposed to be a bit of a cut above.
This is Sadhu.
And this is his stall.
He's a chai wallah.
His family have been making tea on the banks of the Hooghly for 80 years.
He's been doing it himself for 20 years.
And he makes special tea with milk and cardamom seeds and rosewater.
And it's very spectacular.
And I'm going to have one.
I was ready for a merry debate about whether the milk should go in first, but quite frankly, it seems like the whole thing is milk.
There's a bit of tea.
Oh, and some very fancy extras.
Apart from being slightly apprehensive about the pan, can't help thinking a bit of Brillo wouldn't come amiss, that's just my English narrow-mindedness, the whole thing is so different from ordering a British cuppa.
It's literally a world away from being given a cardboard cup full of not-quite-boiling water with a teabag and a stick to try and fish it out with.
When my father used to drink tea when I was very small, he used to hold the teapot up quite high.
He said it brought out the flavour.
But looking at this, there's not really a huge comparison.
Thank you.
It's likehot milk, really.
Sorry not to be more analytical.
That's a sort of sweet mint.
I'm not getting any tea yet, but it's really lovely.
It's really nice.
Thank you very much.
He might need to think about doing a skinny version.
Thank you very much.
It's beautiful.
Thanks a lot.
'If you thought that looked colonial and careless, 'me chucking my teacup on the ground, that's what they do here.
'Plastic cups are out, and all the tea from the chai stalls 'is served in these little terracotta cups.
'The tea industry is big business in this part of India, 'employing nearly two million people.
'And down these back streets are the potters 'who are in their tiny workshops, making the cups, 'literally slaving over a hot stove.
' So they're making the cups that the chai wallahs use in the tea stalls.
And they're making them out of mud that comes from the Ganges.
And these gents who are making the teacups, all day and all night, they work.
It's absolutely boiling hot in here.
And it's I think it's the kiln that smells of anthracite.
It's a smell from my childhood.
But they do have the telly.
Looks like Crossroads, what they're watching.
I can't be absolutely sure.
It does look like the Kolkata version.
'These men are living away from home and their families, 'working day and night to send money back to their villages.
'It's a very hard way of life.
'But it's to their advantage that every cup will only be used once.
' When people have had a cup of tea, they smash it on the ground and that eventually turns back into mud and goes back into the river.
So it's very ecologically sound, the whole thing.
'Tea is such an all-consuming and visible passion in India 'that I'm still surprised 'they didn't drink it before the British came.
'Mind you, having tasted the bitter brew of the Singphos 'and the condensed milk version they seem to prefer now, 'you can understand why steaming leaves in bamboo pipes 'never really caught on.
'So, the British did do something good, didn't we? 'Please say we did.
' Whatever Kolkata is today is whatever the British left behind.
And for us, for the tea industry, we're indebted.
Because we're still functioning on that framework, you know? Yes.
We're still using the same machines.
We're still using the same methods of sale.
Yes.
So the tea industry owes a lot to the British.
'There are remnants of the British presence everywhere in Kolkata, 'but one of the biggest reminders of our legacy is tea itself.
' Thank you.
'In the boardroom of one of 'Kolkata's top tea merchants, J Thomas, 'you'll spot that's not an Indian name, 'they've got records and photographs going back to the days of the Raj.
' There's even a rare sighting of two pith helmets, which you might think was just from terrible old novels, and obviously, they actually wore them.
'Downstairs, the tasting room hasn't changed much since colonial times.
'Here, teas from all over India 'are tasted and analysed the traditional way.
'And what's becoming very familiar is the passion and pride 'people who work in tea in China and India 'feel for the product they work with.
' There's so much care, attention and passion that goes into producing these teas.
Each of these individual gardens are run by proud men.
Why don't you taste one? Which one should I taste? Any one you like.
OK.
OK.
Soslurp.
Do what you will.
A silent appreciation, is it? And then you taste this one.
OK.
That tasted stronger Yes.
.
.
and more bitter.
Yes.
And that tasted sweeter and lighter.
That's wonderful.
Would you like a job? Yes, I would.
But not here.
'Some of the tea they taste here will end up in Britain, 'but most Assam and Darjeeling tea is brokered through Kolkata.
'They taste it, then set the price.
' This is a tea auction.
Now, I don't have any experience of auctions apart from Flog It! I think this will be different because probably, they're selling something people want to buy.
SoI'll go in.
(What's he shouting about?) The person who shouts first, his bid gets picked up as soon as the hammer goes down.
'They've been holding tea auctions here for 150 years.
'And in the old days, they could be quite raucous.
'But today, more and more tea is auctioned online, 'and in any case, India is no longer one of the big exporters.
'They have such a big domestic market.
'We taught them to drink it and now they're drinking it.
'Well, older people are.
' The younger generation, they find tea fuddy-duddy.
So richer people tend to migrate to maybe wine, or fizzy beverages Yes.
.
.
or carbonated drinks.
Yeah.
And that's a challenge that we face for the future.
'Tea's facing a similar challenge in Britain, as we'll see.
'In a changing world, India is now one of many tea-growing countries.
'Kenya exports more, and we don't own that now either.
'But there is a tea estate in Cornwall, 'so we might yet get back in the game.
'And even in China, the first port of call on our tea journey, 'there seems to be a little crack in 'that old wall of respect for the leaf.
'It was the British passion for tea that helped drag China, 'forcibly, into the modern world.
'But as with India, the young 'are preferring the coffee shop to the ancient ritual.
'But my money's on tea.
It's a survivor.
' What a journey I've been on with tea.
I've been up rivers, down mountains, across continents.
And I still find it extraordinary to think that it's two leaves and a bud and hot water and that's made a drink that's conquered the world.
'And my journey's not over.
'Because now I want to know how tea conquered, 'seduced and enslaved the British.
' As soon as you could start work, a cup of tea.
And then you have a break, and you have a cup of tea.
Then you have a lunch break, you have a cup of tea.
And then there's normally, like, an odd one squeezed in.
Earl Grey's not Chinese! Blimey, it is! Hold on tight, everybody.
OK! 'I'm going to explore tea's unique contribution 'to the British way of life.
' The three things that we needed to get through the war were food, fuel and tea.
I'm coming around your way.
Oh, without the tea, we would've lost the war.
'And why it's only us that can make a really nice cup of tea.
' Have you tasted the tea in America? Terrible! 'And is it the only beverage to link revolution, spitting and chimps?' Coo-ee, Mr Shifter! Light refreshments.
Oh, thank you most kindly, madam.
These are the best ads ever! Well, it's the most successful advertising company.
One way of shifting it.
'How did this strange exotic leaf become, 'got to say it, our cup of tea?' So next time, you'll see about the British love affair with tea.
Well, it's not really a love affair, it's more of adull marriage.
Oh, you'll see what I mean.