IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 4: Passage 1

Few things are as closely associated with Britain as a cup of tea. Yet tea is a relatively recent arrival, and for most of its history in Britain every leaf had to be brought from the other side of the world. The story of how it became the national drink is also a story of trade, taxation, smuggling and empire.

Tea reached England in the 1650s, some decades after Dutch traders had first brought it to Europe. It was first sold in London's coffee houses, and in 1658 one of them placed what is thought to be the first newspaper advertisement for tea in England. Two years later, the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded drinking a cup of 'tee', which he had never tasted before. The drink's status rose further after 1662, when Charles II married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza. Tea was already known in England when she arrived, but her fondness for it made it fashionable at court. It remained a luxury, however, and the leaves were often kept in locked boxes, known as caddies, to which only the mistress of the house held the key.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the price of tea was kept high by heavy taxes, which at times exceeded the value of the tea itself. The result was smuggling on an enormous scale. Gangs brought tea across the Channel from continental Europe and landed it on quiet beaches, and by some estimates more tea entered the country illegally than legally. Smuggled tea was not always what it seemed: dishonest dealers bulked it out with the leaves of other plants, or with used tea leaves that had been dried and dyed to look fresh. In 1784, in an attempt to put the smugglers out of business, the government cut the duty on tea from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Smuggling collapsed almost at once, and tea began its transformation from a luxury into an everyday drink for all classes.

All of this tea came from China, and this created a problem. The Chinese authorities had little interest in British goods and insisted on being paid in silver, so Britain's growing thirst for tea drained its reserves of the metal. The East India Company, which controlled much of Britain's trade with Asia, found a solution that was profitable but deeply damaging: it sold opium grown in India to merchants who smuggled the drug into China, and used the silver they paid to buy tea. Tension over the opium trade eventually led to war in 1839, and even before then, the British had begun to look for a source of tea under their own control.

In fact, tea plants had been found growing wild in Assam, in north-east India, in the 1820s. After some initial doubt about whether they were true tea, plantations were established there, and the first Assam tea was sold in London in 1839. Its early reputation was poor, however. Many buyers considered it inferior to Chinese tea, partly because the planters had little experience of how the leaves should be grown and processed.

To acquire that experience, the East India Company turned to Robert Fortune, a Scottish plant collector who had already travelled in China. In 1848 he set off for the tea-growing regions of the interior, which foreigners were not then permitted to visit, and to avoid attracting attention he shaved his head and travelled in Chinese clothing. Over the next few years he gathered thousands of tea plants and seeds, and he confirmed that green and black teas, which many Europeans believed came from different plants, were in fact made from the same plant processed in different ways. Since living plants rarely survived long sea voyages, Fortune shipped them in sealed glass cases that acted as miniature greenhouses, and he also recruited skilled Chinese tea workers to travel with them. Many of the plants were sent to the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India, and although a large proportion of them died, the knowledge brought by the Chinese workers helped Indian growers to improve their methods.

Production in India expanded rapidly, and in 1888 Britain imported more tea from India than from China for the first time. Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, soon became another major supplier after a disease destroyed its coffee plantations and planters replaced the coffee bushes with tea. The industry's success came at a heavy human cost, however: many plantation workers had been recruited from distant regions on long contracts and laboured in harsh conditions for very low pay.

Tea remained central to British life in the twentieth century. During the Second World War it was considered so important to public morale that it was rationed, and rationing did not end until 1952. Tea bags, which had been developed in the United States, were introduced to Britain in the 1950s but were slow to catch on; today, however, they are used to make the vast majority of the tea brewed in the country. In recent decades, consumption has fallen as coffee has grown in popularity, but tea is still drunk every day by millions of people.