"tboft11" - читать интересную книгу автора (Okakura Kakuzo)

esteem. The white man has scoffed at our religion and our
morals, but has accepted the brown beverage without
hesitation. The afternoon tea is now an important function
in Western society. In the delicate clatter of trays and
saucers, in the soft rustle of feminine hospitality, in the
common catechism about cream and sugar, we know that
the Worship of Tea is established beyond question. The
philosophic resignation of the guest to the fate awaiting him
in the dubious decoction proclaims that in this single instance
the Oriental spirit reigns supreme.

The earliest record of tea in European writing is said to be
found in the statement of an Arabian traveller, that after the
year 879 the main sources of revenue in Canton were the
duties on salt and tea. Marco Polo records the deposition of
a Chinese minister of finance in 1285 for his arbitrary
augmentation of the tea-taxes. It was at the period of the
great discoveries that the European people began to know
more about the extreme Orient. At the end of the sixteenth
century the Hollanders brought the news that a pleasant
drink was made in the East from the leaves of a bush. The
travellers Giovanni Batista Ramusio (1559), L. Almeida
(1576), Maffeno (1588), Tareira (1610), also mentioned
tea. In the last-named year ships of the Dutch East India
Company brought the first tea into Europe. It was known
in France in 1636, and reached Russia in 1638. England
welcomed it in 1650 and spoke of it as "That excellent and
by all physicians approved China drink, called by the
Chineans Tcha, and by other nations Tay, alias Tee."

Like all good things of the world, the propaganda of Tea
met with opposition. Heretics like Henry Saville (1678)
denounced drinking it as a filthy custom. Jonas Hanway
(Essay on Tea, 1756) said that men seemed to lose their
stature and comeliness, women their beauty through the
use of tea. Its cost at the start (about fifteen or sixteen
shillings a pound) forbade popular consumption, and made
it "regalia for high treatments and entertainments, presents
being made thereof to princes and grandees." Yet in spite
of such drawbacks tea-drinking spread with marvelous
rapidity. The coffee-houses of London in the early half of
the eighteenth century became, in fact, tea-houses, the
resort of wits like Addison and Steele, who beguiled
themselves over their "dish of tea." The beverage soon
became a necessity of life--a taxable matter. We are
reminded in this connection what an important part it plays
in modern history. Colonial America resigned herself to
oppression until human endurance gave way before the
heavy duties laid on Tea. American independence dates
from the throwing of tea-chests into Boston harbour.