Trade

Tea has almost never been drunk where it was grown. Nearly every cup in the world sits at the end of a journey: a garden, a factory, a warehouse, a port, a ship or a road, a warehouse again, a shop, a pot.

This section is about that journey. The caravans that carried bricks of pu-erh over the mountains into Tibet, and the camel trains that took tea across Siberia to Russia. The junks of the South China Sea, the East India Company's ships at Canton, the clippers that raced each other home to London with the new season's leaf, and the steamships and containers that ended the race. The auctions in Mombasa, Colombo and Kolkata, where a great deal of the world's black tea still changes hands, and the importers, blenders and shops between them and the cup.

Filed here: ships, routes, ports, the companies that did the carrying, and the arguments — over opium, over taxes, over who got paid — that trade in tea has always brought with it.

Every tea on this wiki can say where it was grown and who made it. This is where it can say how it got to you.