Tea picking at the Addabarie Tea Estate in Assam, India, one of 58 tea estates owned by McLeod Russel, the world’s largest tea growers. The tea-drinking habit spread around the globe during the 17th century. In 1660, London diarist Samuel Pepys ‘did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink) of which I never drank before’ and two years later, when Charles II was betrothed to Catherine of Braganza, the bride-to-be asked for a cup of tea when she disembarked in Portsmouth (the drink still being very rare at the time, she was offered ale instead). Tea increased in popularity throughout the mid-19th century after the seventh Duchess of Bedford invented the institution of afternoon tea. As dinner in fashionable society was taken later and later, the duchess found herself experiencing a‘sinking feeling’each afternooon. To raise her blood-sugar level, she began to drink tea served with small dishes of food at 5pm. The custom caught on, and the East India Company began shipping over increasing amounts of tea in clippers such as the Cutty Sark. When they began to lose their Chinese tea monopoly, the British began clearing vast tracts of land in India in order to create tea plantations. Today, tea is the world’s most popular drink after water, and India is the leading producer of black tea, which constitutes more than 70 per cent of the commercial tea consumed worldwide

28 www.geog raphical.co.uk FEBRUARY 2011