By Alyssa Hamer on Dec 14, 2016
Tea is a zodiacally dear beverage, ordering us all opposite language, age and even amicable barriers. Whether you’re prone to suffer a clever crater of nobleman grey, or are some-more prejudiced to a ethereal green, tea binds a tellurian experience. International Tea Day is distinguished annually on Dec 15.
The story of tea reaches behind to ancient China, with a Tang dynasty popularizing tea as a inhabitant libation between a 7th and 10th centuries. Tea shortly began to take reason in Japan, as a outcome of a introduction by Buddhist monks who had trafficked to China to study, and out of this grew a protocol of a Japanese Tea Ceremony. Eventually, Dutch merchants from Europe determined a trade track shipping tea from China to Holland in a 17th century, nonetheless for some time tea remained a splash roughly exclusively for a wealthy.

Tea Plantation in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), ca. 1929

Tea residence in Shanghai, China, 1930’s

Photograph of women celebration tea, 1909

Ritsumeikan sell students perform Japanese tea ceremony, 1997

Tea Ceremony during a Asian Centre, 1987
Today tea is one of a many renouned beverages on earth, with many of a leaves constructed in countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China, Kenya, Uganda and India. Now a multibillion dollar industry, tea prolongation supports a lives and livelihoods of millions of people around a world. Because of this, International Tea Day acts as an critical time to commend those workers who grow and collect a tea products we have come to love. Challenges for these workers can embody low-wages, prolonged hours and bad vital conditions. Advocates for tea workers continue to call for larger cost supports and satisfactory trade standards.

Child labourers on tea camp in India, ca. 1937
So, as we suffer your “cuppa” on this day, take some time to conclude not usually a story of a beverage, though also those people operative currently to safeguard your sideboard is always stocked with your favorite brew.
Sources:
UK Tea Infusions Association. “Tea – A Brief History of a Nation’s Favorite Beverage” https://www.tea.co.uk/tea-a- brief-history
Fairtrade Canada. “Tea” http://www.fairtrade.ca/en-ca/farmers- and-workers/tea
Permalink | No Comments