The Bloody History of Chai

Tea is considered a symbol of civilization, but its history is absolutely barbaric - Mass famine, drug addiction, slavery, and wars can all be traced back to tea.

Here’s just one example: 

In the 1700s, the British East India Company (EIC) had a supply/demand problem. They wanted to satisfy English demand for tea, but Chinese tea merchants weren’t interested in what the EIC had to for trade.

The EIC was stuck. How could they get their hands on the highly-coveted tea? And then it finally hit them. 

Drugs.

The British EIC decided to make the Chinese merchants an offer they couldn’t refuse: opium for tea. 

The EIC didn’t get opium from their own homeland, of course. They were using South Asian opium. Opium was cultivated pretty sparingly in South Asia at that point, as it had traditionally been used for medicinal purposes. But this new trade route required vast amounts of opium. So the British incentivized Bengali farmers to convert their rice paddies and other crops into poppy fields. This caused a whole separate set of problems, but that’s another story. 

Anyway, the influx of opium led to a growing drug problem in China, so the Chinese government soon banned it.

The EIC was not happy about this decision and decided to fight back. Literally.