A Tea Reader (16 page)

Unfurled

BY
D
HEEPA
M
ATURI

Have you watched—really watched—your tea leaves steeping in your cup? At one time in my life, I would not have stopped long enough to do such a thing. During that time, I was a lawyer and a mother and a wife, and I barely paused to eat, much less contemplate the goings-on in a tea cup.

And yet, one day, that's what I did.

One evening, I sat down to tea with a good friend. I remember that I snatched that time out of my schedule, because she was soon relocating to another state. During our conversation, I reached into a tin of silken sachets and felt the lovely little bags slide and slip over my fingers. I placed one in a tea cup, poured boiling water over it, and then inhaled the scent of green leaves harvested from rich, fertile soil. And I watched those leaves, watched them swell with hot water and then twist and unfurl.

As I watched, I suddenly felt alone in the room. In that strange silence, I recognized that so much was swelling and twisting within my own head and heart that something inside me was ready to unfurl. I still recall that moment of stillness and clarity as the birth of my tea company and my own rebirth as an entrepreneur.

I was a lifelong tea drinker, but tea drinking certainly hadn't prepared me for tea entrepreneurship. After that evening, a great deal of research, learning, and work lay ahead of me. Those challenges, however, did not compare to the difficulty of foregoing my professional identity as a lawyer. In return for those hours of legal paperwork and drudgery, I had received instant respect and regard from my peers and my family. There was a feeling of belonging, of knowing my role in life. There was a feeling of security, of knowing where the long (although dull) hours were leading.

I had stepped off a sturdy platform that was reinforced with certainty and credibility. Without the knowledge base and experience to which I was accustomed, I felt alone and disoriented. Slowly—very slowly—I began to learn the ropes, immerse myself in a new industry, and lay the groundwork for a new company. I learned a great deal, very rapidly. And I found out quickly that counseling a business is entirely different from building an enterprise from the ground up.

Each step produced many new issues to handle. And each new issue required time and research and effort. I struggled to ignore the naysayers, the people who expressed astonishment about my choices and pessimism about my prospects. I grappled with recurring feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt. I experienced frustration, concern, and worry.…

And exhilaration.

After years of dragging myself out of bed in the morning, I was now leaping to start my days. After years of counseling caution and conservative steps, I was pushing through my own intense risk aversion. After years of limiting my professional interactions to the minimum necessary to complete the tasks at hand, I was expanding my networks assertively and finding people of varied voices, backgrounds, and visions. I was spending my days joyfully talking tea, business, and life. I was
living
.

Moreover, I was doing something I felt to be worthwhile. As the head of a tea company, I was teaching the benefits of tea drinking. I was explaining tea's wonderful wholesomeness and its utter compatibility with the body. Most importantly, I was helping others to understand that each cup is much more than a beverage, but rather, an invitation to pause; to savor sight, smell, touch, and taste; and to be mindful. Why should we schedule later times and faraway places for such moments? We can—and should—have them throughout our day, quiet moments to recharge and reset.

Only a few years have passed since that evening of tea and contemplation. At times, when remembering my pre-tea existence, I barely recognize my current life and self. The landscape around me has become dense with life, color, and sound. It has become full of people, and rich with support and encouragement. And I myself feel as though I am blooming, just as the flowers in my tea blends do. I have discovered in myself a woman who enjoys challenges, meeting new people, and striking up conversations. I've found a person who loves her work. Though the pace of life has not decreased (as any entrepreneur will tell you), in the mirror I see ease and happiness.

Certainly tea has given me a new identity, a new routine to my days, and a new relationship with the world. More importantly, tea has also taught me that all of our moments, no matter how small, carry the potential for our own transformation. Within each cup I drink, I remember an evening when a new path and dream unfolded before me. I remember that my own life, once rolled tight, suddenly unfurled, bloomed, and became full of possibilities.

Comedy at the Customs with a Barrel of Water and Other Stories

BY
T
HOMAS
J. L
IPTON
Excerpted from
Leaves from the Lipton Logs
,
1931.
¹

An early discovery which I made concerning tea was that it varied in taste and “body” according to the water in which it was brewed. Thus, a blend which excellently suited one town became flat and insipid as a beverage when brewed in another town perhaps forty miles away. The explanation, of course, lies in the varying chemical properties of the different water supplies. Accordingly I issued instructions to each of my branch managers to forward, periodically, samples of the water drunk by the inhabitants of his town or city to my tea tasters in London, and the latter, in their turn, were instructed to prepare the most suitable blends for the different districts. The result was that I was able to advertise “the perfect tea to suit the water of your own town,” an idea that had never been hit upon before and which scored heavily for Lipton's teas. I know that this may sound rather far-fetched but it is nevertheless true. The tea I was selling in Edinburgh was quite a different blend from that retailed in Glasgow, while the London tea, specially blended to suit the water, was a different article altogether to the hard-water tea sent from my headquarters to Manchester, for instance.

Even when I had started my continental branches the practice of testing the water was still adhered to. I remember a shop manager returning from Hamburg with a fairly large cask of water and finding great difficulty in getting his “luggage” past the Customs. The first official who fell foul of him simply stared when he was told that the cask contained nothing but water. Then he went and called the Chief Examiner.

“Come along, now, what have you got in that cask?” demanded the chief with some asperity.

“Drinking water!” explained my manager.

It was now the chief 's turn to stare. This was a new experience in a long life spent in the customs service!

“Plain drinking water?” he demanded, non-plussed. “Do you mean to tell us that you have traveled from Hamburg with a cask of water? What do you think we are—children? Open the cask an' let's taste this precious water of yours!”

Water, of course, it was, but only after every officer at Dover had carefully tasted and sniffed it did they allow our man to pass. And from the glances they bestowed upon his retreating figure they plainly took him for a harmless lunatic!...

...I had been in the tea trade barely a year when an opportunity presented itself for me to go out to Sri Lanka. This was after the coffee crop failure in the Island.
²
Certain London bankers, representing a group of Sri Lanka estates, had approached me with the object of prevailing upon me to purchase these and go in for tea planting on a large scale. I was already buying tea in stupendous quantities; why not grow a lot of the commodity myself?—they urged. The idea did not displease me in the least. It coincided entirely with the rule I had laid down for the abolishing, wherever possible, the middle-man or intermediary profiteer between the producer and the consumer. But I did not intend to buy a “pig in a poke.” So instead of coming to a decision with the bankers I secretly booked a passage to Australia on the first available liner, but got off at Colombo, Sri Lanka.

On arriving at Colombo I at once went up-country to the Kandy and Matele tea districts where I inspected the estates for sale. Although I knew as much about tea planting as Euclid knew about motoring, I liked the look of the estates. They seemed good to me. Without further consideration of the matter I cabled off a very low offer to the London bankers and when they replied “Can't you do better?” I knew the plantations were mine! Within a few hours, and at the small additional cost of one or two more cables, I became their sole proprietor. That I was not likely to repent of my hurried bargain was made fairly clear to me no later than next morning when another would-be buyer, one with some experience, too, of the planting business came along and offered me ten thousand pounds profit on my deal....

...I would not like you to imagine that in these early Sri Lanka transactions, and in the subsequent important developments of my eastern interests, everything “came off” for me as easily as if I had been shelling peas. Far from it. A lot of hard thinking had to be done and much more hard work. Many problems had to be faced, human and economic. I had to apply myself diligently to a completely new set of facts and circumstances. “East is East and West is West!” and I speedily found it out. But, East or West, common sense generally comes out on top and my chief aim, after becoming a tea planter on a large scale, was to improve my properties and the conditions of my native employees, banish waste, introduce up-to-date methods and install modern machinery. Without doing all these things I could see that my investments were not going to be so profitable as at first seemed likely....

...“Direct from Tea Garden to the Teapot!” This was the slogan I came home with from my trip to Sri Lanka and I made the utmost of it in all my advertising for several years thereafter. It must have made a very strong appeal, too, for my sales of tea went up by leaps and bounds. Often, in spite of my Sri Lanka supplies and the great parcels I continued to purchase in Mincing Lane and subsequently at the Colombo Tea Sales I was actually hard put to it to let all my branches have all that they required so that my millions of customers could be satisfied.

In Mincing Lane, opposition against me became rife. It was but to be expected that the man who was running his own plantations and selling “direct from the tea garden to the teapot” would not be joyfully received in the Lane devoted to brokers and middlemen, but all the same I got as much tea as I wanted there because they knew that my money was good and always forthcoming on the spot. Several attempts were made to belittle “cheap tea” by running up prices for specially-selected and extra fine packets of tea to as much as five and ten guineas per pound. However, I proved more than a match for tactics of this kind. To prove to the Lane and to the public that my estates in Sri Lanka were capable of producing the best tea in the universe, I cabled my manager in the island to send me home a parcel of the very finest, gold-tipped tea grown on our own ground. In due course it arrived and was sold by public auction in Mincing Lane at the amazing price of thirty-six guineas per pound! After this there was no further attempt to decry Lipton's tea; it had set up a record difficult, almost impossible, to beat.

1
[Certain British spellings and archaic terms have been amended. Ed.]

2
In the mid-1800s, the coffee growing industry in Sri Lanka was devastated by a leaf disease. The hope was that replacing the coffee plantations with tea farms could save their agricultural industry.

There's Nothing Like the First Time

BY
C
YNTHIA
G
OLD

I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to visit a wide variety of tea farms, tea gardens, and tea estates throughout the world. Each time is a pleasure and an honor, as well as a tremendous learning experience. Still, nothing will ever match the impact on me of my first experience.

It was in Hangzhou, China—a beautiful family-owned tea farm producing Lung Ching tea, also known as Dragonwell. It was a cool and misty day. Throughout the morning I was able to participate in the harvest. After teaching me the right flicking motion to harvest the leaves without bruising them or getting farther down the stem than was desired, I set to work filling my basket. By midday—several baskets later—I was soaked but very happy. We brought the leaves in and laid them out for a brief wither. While waiting, the farmer lit a fire outside and we huddled around it to warm up and possibly dry off a touch. In the glow of that fire I watched those around me, and although nobody seemed in any way unhappy, part of me wondered why they didn't have the same wide grin on their faces that I did! Wet or not, I couldn't think of a single place on earth that I'd rather be.

It was time to fire the leaves. After several demos, I sat down at my wok and began to wok fire the leaves. The gentleman who had loaned me his wok was careful to watch and correct my hand movements and guide me through knowing when each batch was adequately fired. Batch after small batch, the repetitive movements where hypnotic. I was in a happy blur scooping out my leaves in batches to cool. When I got up from my wok at the end of the day it suddenly hit me as to what I had just been so fortunate and privileged to experience: to take those leaves from the field to the finished product. What an incredible feeling. I “lost it” then. I literally started to cry. The farmer was quite worried, thinking perhaps that I had burnt myself on the wok, but as a chef, I had long ago deadened my nerve endings, so that was no real risk for me. And even if I had, so what? What a small price that would have been to enjoy this incredible day. Our translator explained to him that I was simply overwhelmed by the beauty of the experience.

It was a life-changing experience for me. As clichéd as it sounds, at that moment, tea literally became a part of my soul. It was no longer a commodity that I respected and loved, but something much more. It is difficult to articulate, but I have never looked at tea the same way since.