Britain’s oldest tea (and first modern commodity)

Dr Richard Coulton, based at QMUL's School of English and Drama, reflects on the discovery of Britain's oldest tea. Dr Coulton is one of three authors of a forthcoming book, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. Last week we released a news story about our discovery of Britain's oldest tea leaves alongside colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London. They had been a gift from the Scottish trader and ship's surgeon James Cuninghame to collector extraordinaire Hans Sloane around the turn of the eighteenth century (Sloane labelled them 'A sort of tea from China', and they were catalogued as number 857 among his ' Vegetable Substances '). Our encounter with the tea was a heart-stopping moment. The last thing that we expected while researching the cultural history of a biodegradable food product was to encounter the stuff itself in the form of manufactured seventeenth-century green tea. But there it was, archived in a modest boxboard container, utterly familiar and hauntingly strange.