Academic Reading — All-Types Test 24

Reading passage

The history of tea cultivation A According to a story told for centuries in China, tea was discovered by accident when a few leaves drifted into a pot of water that a legendary emperor had left to boil. Whatever the truth of that pleasant tale, the plant from which the drink is made, an evergreen shrub native to the hills of south-western China and the neighbouring uplands of what is now Myanmar and India, has certainly been valued for a very long time. Early written references treat it first as a medicine, prized for keeping the mind alert, and only later as an everyday beverage. By the time of the Tang dynasty, more than a thousand years ago, tea-drinking had become so widespread that a scholar was able to compose a lengthy treatise setting out how the leaf should be grown, processed and brewed. B Turning a wild mountain shrub into a reliable crop was a gradual achievement. Left to itself, the tea plant grows into a straggling small tree, but growers learned to keep it clipped to waist height, both to encourage the tender young shoots that make the best tea and to make picking easier. They found that it thrived on sloping, well-drained ground where rain was plentiful but water never stood around its roots, and that a cover of light shade improved the flavour of the leaf. Altitude mattered too, for the cool air of higher ground slowed the growth of the bushes and, curiously, seemed to concentrate the qualities most prized in the cup. Because the finest tea depends on plucking only the bud and the top two leaves of each shoot, and on doing so by hand, cultivation remained stubbornly labour-intensive; a skilled picker might strip a bush many times in a single season, returning as each fresh flush of growth appeared. C For a long stretch of its history the plant was grown almost nowhere outside East Asia, and China guarded its knowledge closely. As demand in Europe soared, this near-monopoly became a source of deep frustration to foreign merchants, who paid for their cargoes in silver they could ill afford to lose. In the nineteenth century the trading company that dominated commerce with the East resolved to break the dependence by establishing plantations within its own territories in India. Seeds and skilled workers were quietly removed from China, and after many costly failures it was discovered that a hardy variety of the tea plant already grew wild in the hills of Assam. Crossed with the Chinese stock and planted on cleared hillsides, this local variety flourished, and within a few decades India had been transformed from a country that grew almost no tea into one of the world's largest producers. D The spread of cultivation did not stop there. Plantations were laid out in the highlands of Ceylon, in East Africa and elsewhere in the tropics, wherever the combination of warmth, rain and elevation suited the plant. The consequences reached far beyond the fields themselves. Vast numbers of labourers were moved, sometimes over great distances and often in grim conditions, to work the new estates, reshaping the population of whole regions. Land that had carried forest or other crops was given over to neat rows of clipped bushes stretching to the horizon. What had once been a rare luxury, sipped by the wealthy from delicate cups, became a cheap drink within the reach of ordinary households across much of the world, and the daily habits of millions were quietly rearranged around it. E Today the essentials of growing tea would still be recognisable to those first cultivators, even though machines now assist with pruning and, on flatter ground, with picking itself. The plant continues to demand a particular marriage of climate and terrain, and the very best grades are still gathered leaf by leaf, exactly as they were long ago. Growers have also come to appreciate that the character of a tea owes as much to how the plucked leaves are afterwards handled, whether left to wither and oxidise or quickly heated to arrest that change, as it does to the soil and weather in which the bush was raised. What began as leaves floating, so the story goes, into an emperor's cup has become one of the most widely consumed drinks on the planet, second only to water, and a crop on which the livelihoods of many millions of people now depend.