Mr Fix – even if my master really was the thief you were looking for – which I deny – He has been good, generous – betray him? – Never – not for all the tea in China!” ~ Passepartout, Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne (1873)Coffee, not tea, is my household’s preferred brew of any o’clock of the day. There is nothing like taking up a few spoonfuls of freshly ground coffee-powder, pouring hot-water all over it, getting the required decoction, adding the tiniest possible amount of milk to it – but I digress. Like a gently spiraling column of incense, coffee winds itself around you, drowning you with its fragrance when, by rights, it shouldn’t really be a part of this conversation.I’m a sucker for adventure stories (who isn’t?). Jules Verne’s eternal French classic was in the top ten of the list, in my younger days. It took me some time to understand that Phileas Fogg’s adventures must have originally been in French, and various translators had done a bang-up job of bringing it all to life to English. Even here, there were differences: the essential text might be the same, but said translators used different phrases to convey whirling emotions most effectively, as per their whims and fancies. Which is how, when told about Phileas Fogg being a thief and asked to betray him, Passepartout exclaims, in a very British fashion: “Not for all the tea in China!” (Elsewhere, he says, “Not for all the gold in the world!”).China, of course, was, and is a power to reckon with, when it comes to tea. Sara Rose’s 2010 book, For All the Tea in China, weaves a great tale about the fortunes of Robert Fortune, who infiltrates China’s mountains in the 19th century to bring back their deeply guarded secrets about preparing tea. Below are, as Fortune found, calligraphic words of praise, hanging on the wall in the entry to a tea factory: a selection from Lu Yu’s great work on tea, the classic Cha Ching.The best quality tea must have:Creases like the leather boots of Tartar horsemen, Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, Gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, And be wet and soft like Earth newly swept by rain.Talk about waxing lyrical on the subject. So well entrenched was the British love of tea (and soon, their Empire) that it was established as a way of life, and early 18/19th century writers began bringing in tea whenever they could, in conversation. The Australians got in the first word: they were seemingly the first to use it emphatically, to categorically refuse any remarkably enticing offer. Which is why I will never give up coffee. Not for all the tea in China.
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