Tea: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
In the period between 1946 and 1966 when Iris Macfarlane was married to an Assamese tea planter, she experienced the enormous contrast between the conditions in which the Managers and the labour force lived. The role of women as tea labourers was particularly important as they picked better and were cheaper.
A young woman who works in a tea market shop in Beijing demonstrates how tea is made in China. The tiny brown tea-ware comes from a particular region of southern China. Great attention is paid to cleaning the utensils with boiling water and the first infusion is thrown away as its taste is too bitter. The aroma of tea is tested and the steam applied to the eye for medicinal reasons. About 2004.
A tea market in Beijing in August 2002. Numerous shops sell many varieties of tea from all over China, including herbal teas. A variety of different kinds of tea are shown, including brick tea and tea in orange skins and jars.
Tea was re-introduced to Japan in the thirteenth century and around it a complex ceremony rapidly grew up. Here, at a tea house in a tea garden in Kyoto, the mistress of the garden prepares tea by adding boiling water to the tea with a bamboo ladle. Tea has deeply influenced every aspect of Japanese life, including the gardens, architecture, ceramics and etiquette of social life. Filmed in 1999.
In a tea shop in a market in Beijing in August 2002. The customers taste the tea before purchasing it. It is drunk from glasses so that the action of the hot water uncurling the leaves can be carefully studied.
Tea drinking is the most formal, yet relaxed, rule-bound, yet innovative activity in Japan. It takes many years to learn the right procedures and tiny gestures, and it is a highly prized art form. In this small private house in Sakura (near Tokyo), in the one tatami-floored room in the house, the hostess provides tea for Alan Macfarlane and other guests in beautiful bowls. The drinking of the tea together signifies intimacy and equality and tranquility.
Before the tea is auctioned, whether in Calcutta, London or elsewhere, it is tasted by professional tea-tasters. Here, in a tea-tasting room in Calcutta, the flavour and quality of the tea is being assessed. Tell-tale signs include the way the milk dissolves in the tea, the mark it leaves on the cup, the feel of the leaves after they have had water squeezed throught them and, of course, the actual taste before the tea is spat out again. A price is then suggested for the larger batch at the next auction. Filmed in about 2000.
The processing of tea has been highly mechanized. Here we see an Assamese tea factory in November 2001. Having been cut, torn and curled, the tea is now sifted through a number of old machines.
From the end of the nineteenth century, Calcutta was one of the great tea emporiums of the world. Here, in a small shop, in a street filled with similar shops, a family firm (stretching back to the 1940's) of tea sellers purhcase boxes of tea and retail them to the public. The portrait of the founder smiles down benevolently on the lucrative business. c. 2000
A short tour round an Assamese tea estate in November 2001. The tea bushes grow in orderly lines, shaded by trees and intersected by dirt roads. Women pluck tea, working at a moderately leisurely pace. A notice on a tree gives directions as to how the tea should be planted and spaced. A tea manager explains the process of picking the tip and two leaves.
Alan Macfarlane explains how his infancy and childhood as the son of a tea planter in Assam help to account for his interest in anthropology and tea. Likewise, Iris Macfarlane, the widow of a tea planter has long had an interest in the world of tea plantations. A collage of still images and sound, edited together by Mark Turin.
The processing of tea has been highly mechanized. Here we see an Assamese tea factory in November 2001. Only parts of the factory are working as it is a Sunday. The tea is first dried and then crushed in huge machines. Then it is cut, torn and curled in a special machine to give it a fuller flavour. Much of the machinery is old and was made in Britain before the Second World War.
Iris Macfarlane lived on a tea plantation in Assam for over twenty years after the Second World War. She was shocked by the awful conditions of the tea labourers, brought up from Bihar and Orissa and living in squalid huts with few facilities. comditions reminiscent of Britain during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. There were few improvements by 1966. Part of an interview from the background to a television series called 'Ruling Passions'.
It was not until the children left Assam that Iris started to look about her. She began to be aware of the gross inequalities and injustices. All her attempts to improve conditions were failures and she not only threatened her planter husband's status, but made herself miserable and very sick through her attempts. She did, however, learn Assamese and then wrote several books and articles about her experiences. Part of background filming for a television series called 'Ruling Passions'.
Iris Macfarlane tells of how many of the native Assamese had been removed from the areas where tea gardens were constructed, but some became clerks, doctors and teachers on the tea estates. When the British evacuated the estates during the Chinese invasion of 1963 the Assamese 'babus' ran them with great ability, suggesting that they had always done much of the actual work on tea estates. Background film for a television series called 'Ruling Passions'.
How tea may have made the industrial revolution possible
As populations grow denser and cities expand a number of diseases usually become more widespread. In particular water-borne diseases such as dysentery, typhoid and cholera kill large numbers. The drinking of tea in eighteenth century Britain and from the fourteenth century in Japan may have decreased the incidence of water-borne disease, both through boiling the water and because of anti-bacterial substances in the tea.
A clip from the Channel 4 millenium series 'The Day the World Took Off', with kind permission from Windfall Films