Baildon’s argument initially rests on the vague and shadowy legends that surround the beginning of the history of tea. According to one popular legend circulating in China (and reported in nearly every nineteenth-century article and treatise on tea), an Indian Buddhist prince named Dharma was traveling through China during a self-imposed penance of forgoing sleep for some years. At one point, Dharma grew too tired to resist sleep any longer. When he awoke, frustrated and saddened by his failure to remain awake, he tore off his eyelids and threw them on the ground. Later, he found that an unknown shrub had grown upon the spot, and Dharma found that eating the leaves helped him to stay awake. Baildon seizes upon Dharma’s nationality: “The Chinese and Japanese versions of the first phases of tea in their respective countries are thus attributed to a native of India.” Moreover, he supposes that Dharma, rather than discovering tea growing in China, actually introduced the tea plant into those countries from India (9).
Baildon’s rhetoric draws heavily from Darwinian theories of evolution and the arguments about degeneration and devolution that followed Darwin’s work. Baildon admits that the tea industry in India was still in its infancy and in need of the boost his proof would provide, but he claims that this fact does not detract from his argument: “[The Indian tea industry] is as yet only a child, striving against the Chinese giant; but, fortunately, the natural order of things is for the giants to die before the vigorous children” (5). Baildon focuses on the “natural order of things,” casting a political and commercial battle in terms of agricultural and evolutionary cycles. He argues that the tea plant was most likely “indigenous to India, and extended its growth to China, deteriorating as it did so” (11). According to Baildon, the tea plant traveled from its indigenous India to China and, over the miles and centuries, gradually assumed an inferior appearance and form in its new Chinese guise. Baildon offers an analogy that depicts this degeneration in disturbingly human terms:
We will put this degenerated Indian tea-plant of China, in its origin, in the position of a traveller; and, remembering that plant-life is more easily influenced by climate than human life, suppose that an European was cast upon the world, and travelling gradually farther and farther from his native land, eventually settled down in a climate altogether unsuitable for his successful development. After the lapse of a great number of years, he would nominally remain an European, but virtually be an established member of another community, and affected by habits of life, climatic influences, and intimate associations with things and people around him. His nationality would have been abandoned for the adoption of that of an inferior country, and have resulted in his decline. In the course of time we see him—or his progeny—stunted, changed, coarse, in every way degenerated; in fact, changed physically from his original state.
So with China tea: originally part of the one Indian family, now a distinct and separate member. (12–13)
Remarkably, tea mutates, in this analogy, from an Indian native to a European, suggesting that tea is a British citizen—part of an “Indian family,” which necessarily belongs to the British Empire. This European traveler makes his way to China, where he gradually assimilates to the climate and culture and, in the process, loses his identity—he “abandoned” his nationality and adopted that of an “inferior country.” This process of assimilation is reported by Baildon to be a process of “decline” that presents itself in essentialized, racialized, extraordinarily physical terms that translate to his offspring and therefore taint his descendants, who appear “stunted, changed, coarse, in every way degenerated.” Describing Indian tea, Baildon offers the counterpoint to the stunted, coarsened Chinese tea plants; Indian tea, in contrast, is “[t]all, vigorous, of increased stature, with larger leaves, and full of sap; giving a greater return, and of a richer kind” (14). Employing noble rhetoric, Baildon describes Indian tea plants—nurtured by British tea planters—as standing up straight and tall next to their stunted, miniature, dried-up Chinese neighbors.
An 1889 article in Chambers’s Journal echoes Baildon’s emphasis on the superiority of Indian tea. The author reports that “[b]etween 1866 and 1886 the exports of China tea doubled; but in the same period the exports of Indian tea increased fourteen fold,” and he entitles this historical moment “The Revolution in Tea.”46 Suggesting rebellion through this title, the author hints that Britain has successfully thrown off the yoke of Chinese oppression by cultivating its own, British-owned and -controlled source of tea. The author of this article goes on to detail the exact ways in which the Indian tea industry has managed to achieve this “revolution,” specifically by replacing small familygrown plots of Chinese tea, which passed through multiple hands of processors, transporters, and brokers, with mechanized plantation systems in India, in which every step of the process from seeding to the final auction was under the supervision of a single British planter. Baildon similarly praises this innovation of the Indian tea industry: “In India, from first to last, producing the crop and hearing of its sale is the care and anxiety of one man” (33). The author of “The Revolution in Tea” sums up his article with a rousing moral, “illustrating how a great nation may lose a great industry by carelessness and dishonesty, and how a few energetic and honest traders may build up in a short time an enormous traffic. It is natural and proper that our sympathies should be with the triumph of our Indian industry” (504). Echoing Baildon’s Darwinian rhetoric, this author returns to the concept of “natural” to justify and encourage individual tea drinkers’ participation in the British Empire through drinking Indian tea.
According to Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s anthropological investigation of the correlation between eating habits and identity, “Food tells not only how people live but also how they think of themselves in relation to others.”47 By the early nineteenth century, tea had penetrated the inner workings of British daily life, becoming a central part of physical existence and social interaction. Victorian tea histories exhibit anxiety over the extent to which tea drinkers had become immured to tea’s foreign origins and to the distinction between self and other that had become blurred by the adoption of tea as a daily necessity. Although tea had become known as the “national beverage” during the eighteenth century, due to the fact that English consumption of tea far outstripped that of other European nations, tea nevertheless remained a foreign import and contained potentially dangerous implications of dependency and pollution. But during the course of the nineteenth century, as Britain began producing tea for its own consumption within its “Indian empire,” the significance of tea’s label as “the national beverage” acquired new meaning. Consuming tea became a method of absorbing British imperialism, of literally and physically participating in the vital circulation of goods maintained by the British Empire. According to nineteenth-century tea histories, tea constituted British national identity both metaphorically and bodily, contributing to the continued strength of Britain and its people.
The Necessary Luxury of Tea: Defining a Nation and an Empire
The crucial role of tea in the process of creating and strengthening the British Empire stemmed in part from its status as a commodity that crossed ideological boundaries. On the one hand, tea was an exotic luxury imported over vast distances from a culture that was very different from Britain. On the other hand, tea had become an irreplaceable necessity of English everyday life. The position of tea, straddling the boundaries between the ontological categories of luxury and necessity, was critical in the ideological development of an imperial nation. Historically, luxuries have been viewed as potentially dangerous for the continued success of empires. According to Roman writers toward the end of the Roman Empire, the importation of foreign luxuries drained resources—both financial resources of monetary