photo by Calydel http://www.flickr.com/photos/calydel/306461658/
(gathered by using Microsoft Encarta and Bookshelf)
-2000: Watermelon is cultivated in Africa, figs in Arabia, tea and bananas in India, apples in the Indus Valley; agriculture is well established in most of the central isthmus of the Western Hemisphere.
222: Tea will be mentioned as a substitute for wine for the first time in Chinese writings of the next half century.
708: Tea drinking gains popularity among the Chinese in part because a hot drink is far safer than water that may be contaminated and may produce intestinal disease if not boiled. Tea is also valued for its alleged medicinal values.
805: Tea is introduced to Japan as a medicine. The Buddhist bonze (priest) Saicho, 38, has spent 3 years visiting Chinese Buddhist temples on orders from the emperor, and he returns with tea.
1191: Zen Buddhism is introduced to Japan by the priest Aeisai, 50, who returns from a visit to China. Aeisai plants tea seeds, making medicinal claims for tea that will be published in 1214.
1484: The tea ceremony has been introduced by Japan's Yoshimasa. Now 48, the shogun has encouraged painting and drama, his reign has otherwise been disastrous, but the tea ceremony will remain for centuries a cherished part of Japanese culture.
1591: Japanese teamaster Rikyu Sen commits ritual suicide (seppuku) on orders from Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Sen has formalized the tea ceremony.
1597: The first English mention of tea appears in a translation of Dutch navigator Jan Hugo van Lin-Schooten's Travels. Van Lin-Schooten calls the beverage chaa.
1657: Public sale of tea begins at London as the East India Company undercuts Dutch prices and advertises tea as a panacea for apoplexy, catarrh, colic, consumption, drowsiness, epilepsy, gallstones, lethargy, migraine, paralysis, and vertigo.
1657: Tea is offered to Londoners at Thomas Garraway's coffee house in Exchange Alley between Cornhill and Lombard streets.
1658: The London periodical Mercurious Politicus carries an advertisement: "That excellent and by all Physitians approved China Drink called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay, alias Tea, is sold at the Sultaness Head, a cophee-house in Sweeti Rents."
1662: Catherine da Braganza introduces to the London court the Lisbon fashion of drinking tea; she also introduces the Chinese orange
1665: England imports less than 88 tons of sugar, a figure that will grow to 10,000 tons by the end of the century as tea consumption (encouraged by cheap sugar) increases in popularity.
1684: Tea sells on the Continent for less than 1 shilling/lb, but an import duty of 5 shillings/lb makes tea too costly for most Englishmen and encourages widespread smuggling. The English consume more smuggled tea than is brought in by orthodox routes.
1708: The United East India Company created by a merger of Britain's two rival East India companies is the strongest European power on the coasts of India. The company ships China tea as well as other goods and it will pay regular dividends of 8 to 10 pent.
1712: The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope is a mock-heroic poem describing a day at Hampton Court where Queen Anne does "sometimes counsel take_and sometimes tea".
1723: Robert Walpole reduces British duties on tea.
1767: The Townshend Revenue Act passed by Parliament June 29 imposes duties on tea, glass, paint, oil, lead, and paper imported into Britain's American colonies in hopes of raising £40,000 per year.
1767: A town meeting held at Boston to protest the Townshend Act adopts a nonimportation agreement.
1768: The East India Company imports 10 million pounds of tea per year into England.
1770: The Boston Massacre March 5 leaves three dead, two mortally wounded, and six injured following a
disturbance between colonists and British troops.
1770: Parliament repeals the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 in a bill passed April 12. Prime Minister North has used his influence to have the act repealed.
1773: Tea is left to rot on the docks at Charleston. New York and Philadelphia send tea-laden ships back to England, but men of "sense and property" such as George Washington deplore the Boston Tea Party.
1773: The Boston Tea Party December 16 demonstrates against the new English tea orders. Led by Lendall Pitts, scion of a Boston merchant family, a group of men, including silversmith Paul Revere, 38, disguise themselves as Mohawks.
1773: The Boston Tea Party Group board East India Company ships at Griffen's Wharf, and throw 342 chests of tea (valued at more than £9,650) from the London firm of Davison and Newman into Boston Harbor.
1773: Agitator Samuel Adams has organized the Boston Tea Party action with support from John Hancock, whose smuggling of contraband tea has been made unprofitable by the new measures.
1773: The Tea Act passed by Parliament May 10 lightens duties on tea imported into Britain to give relief to the East India Company which has 7 years' supply in warehouses on the Thames and is being strained by storage charges.
1773: The Tea Act permits tea to be shipped at full duty to the American colonies and to be sold directly to retailers, eliminating colonial middlemen and undercutting their prices.
1773: "Two Letters on the Tea Tax" by John Dickinson are published in November.
1774: The British ship London docks at N.Y. April 22, and the Sons of Liberty prepare to follow the example set at Boston 4 months earlier. While they are making themselves up as Mohawks an impatient crowd boards the vessel and heaves the tea into the Hon.
1774: Colonists at York, Maine, and Annapolis, Maryland, conduct tea parties like the one at Boston.
1774: News of last year's Boston Tea Party reaches London January via John Hancock's ship Hayley. Parliament passes coercive acts to bring the colonists to heel.
1774: George III gives assent March 31 to the Boston Port Bill and Boston Harbor is closed June 1 until the East India Company shall have been reimbursed for its tea and British authorities feel that trade can be resumed and duties collected.
1780: English sugar consumption reaches 12 pounds per year per capita, up from 4 in 1700, as Britons increase coffee and tea consumption.
1784: Parliament further lowers British import duties on tea. The lower duties end the smuggling that has accounted for so much of the nation's tea imports and hurt the East India Company as the rewards become too small to justify the risks.
1790: Boston merchants starts a triangular trade with clothing, copper, and iron to the Columbia River to be bargained for furs. The sea captains will sell the cargoes at Canton and return round the Cape of Good Hope with Chinese porcelains, teas, and tiles.
1797: English tea consumption reaches an annual rate of 2 pounds per capita, a figure that will increase fivefold in the next century.
1820: "Adulteration of Foods and Culinary Poisons" by English chemistry professor Frederick Accum enrages the vested interests. The book shows among other things that counterfeit China tea is made from dried thorn leaves colored with poisonous verdigris.
1820: Caffeine is isolated by the German chemist Friedrich Ferdinand Runge as the component which makes coffee such a powerful stimulant. It is said that he did this because Johann Wolfgang von Goethe asked him to investigate the matter.
1823: Acting for the British government, Charles Bruce smuggles knowledgeable coolies out of China and puts them to work transplanting young tea bushes into nursery beds to begin tea plantations.
1824: Cadbury's Chocolate has its beginnings in a tea and coffee shop opened by Birmingham, England, Quaker John Cadbury, 23, who has served an apprenticeship at Leeds and for bonded London tea houses. He will employ a Chinese to preside over his tea cter.
1824: The Royal Navy reduces its daily rum ration from half a pint to a quarter pint, and tea becomes part of the daily ration.
1825: British colonists in Ceylon plant coffee bushes.
1826: The first tea to be retailed in sealed packages under a proprietary name is introduced by English Quaker John Horniman whose sealed, lead-lined packages have been designed in part to protect his tea from adulteration.
1830: Mormonism is founded by Joseph Smith. Their "Word of Wisdom" is a code of health prohibiting tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco.
1830: Congress reduces U.S. duties on coffee, tea, salt, and molasses imports.
1831: Boston's S. S. Pierce Co. has its beginnings in a shop opened to sell "choice teas and foreign fruits" by local merchant Samuel Stillman Pierce.
1832: Frances Trollope deplores American eating habits. Suppers, she reports, are huge buffets that may include "tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe cake, johnny cake, waffle cake, and dodger cake, pickled peaches, and preserved cucumbers, ..."
1833: The East India Company loses its prized monopoly in the China trade (most of it in tea) by an act of the British prime minister Charles Grey, 69, second Earl Grey.
1837: Major Samuel Shaw barters the cargo for $30,000 worth of tea and silk, the investors receive a 25 percent return on their capital, Shaw becomes first U.S. consul at Canton, and more Americans are encouraged to enter the China trade.
1839: Some 95 chests of Assam tea arrive at London and are sold at auction. Unlike green China tea, the leaves from India are fermented and the new black tea, less astringent than green tea, begins to gain popularity.
1839: The house Kingscote - built 1839 - on Bellevue Avenue is later acquired by William Henry King with money acquired in the tea trade and Newport becomes a favorite summer resort for the rich.
1840: Afternoon tea is introduced by Anna, the duchess of Bedford. The tea interval will become a lasting British tradition, but the English still drink more coffee than tea.
1844: The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the first modern cooperative society, opens a store in Toad Lane. Flour, oatmeal, butter, and sugar are its only initial wares but the store soon adds tea and groceries.
1849: Parliament abolishes Britain's Navigation Acts June 26, ending restrictions on foreign shipping. U.S. clipper ships are permitted to bring cargoes of China tea to British ports.
1849: Harrods has its beginnings in a London grocery shop at 8 Brompton Road that has been run by Philip Henry Burden. Tea wholesaler Henry Charles Harrod, 49, of Eastcheap takes over the shop that will grow to become one of the world's largest department stores.
1850: Tea catches up with coffee in popularity among the English.
1850: The first U.S. clipper ship to be seen at London arrives from Hong Kong after a 97-day voyage. The Oriental carries a 1,600-ton cargo of China tea and her $48,000 cargo fee nearly covers the cost of her construction.
1850: British shipbuilders are inspired to copy the Oriental's lines but are handicapped by English rules of taxation that consider length and beam in measuring tonnage while leaving depth untaxed.
1850: The short deep ships built at Aberdeen and on the Clyde do not approach the speed of the U.S. clipper ships, which soon abandon the China trade for the more profitable business of transporting gold seekers to California.
1851: The London Great Exhibition forbids sale of wine, spirits, beer, and other intoxicating beverages but permits tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, lemonade, ices, ginger-beer, and soda water.
1855: A Report of the Analytical Sanitary Commission of `The Lancet' is published at London. A. H. Hassall reports that all but the most costly food and tea contain trace amounts of arcenic, copper, lead or mercury.
1859: The A&P retail food chain has its beginnings in the Great American Tea Co. store opened at 31 Vesey Street, N.Y., by local merchant George Huntington Hartford, 26, who has persuaded his employer George P. Gilman to give up his hide and leather business.
1859: Hartford and Gilman buy whole clipper ship cargoes in New York harbor, sell the tea at less than 1/3 the price charged by other merchants, identify their store with flaked gold letters on a Chinese vermilion background, and start what will grow into A&P.
1861: U.S. tariffs rise as Congress passes the first of three Morrill Acts which will boost tariffs to an average of 47 percent. Duties on tea, coffee, and sugar are increased as a war measure.
1863: The Great American Tea Co. founded in 1859 grows to have six stores and begins selling a line of groceries in addition to tea.
1866: More than 90 percent of Britain's tea still comes from China.
1866: The Great Tea Race from Foochow to London pits 11 clipper ships who race to minimize spoilage of the China tea in their hot holds. The skippers crowd on sail but the voyage still takes close to 3 months.
1869: The A&P gets its name as the 10-year-old Great American Tea Company is renamed the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company to capitalize on the national excitement about the new transcontinental rail link.
1869: The coffee rust Hamileia vastatrix appears in Ceylon plantations and will spread throughout the Orient and the Pacific in the next two decades. It will destroy the coffee-growing industry, and soaring coffee prices will lead to wide-scale tea culttion.
1869: The English clipper ship Cutty Sark sails for Shanghai to begin a 117-day voyage with 28 crewmen to handle the 10 miles of rigging that control her 32,000 square feet of canvas. Built for the tea trade, the ship has a figurehead wearing a short chse.
1871: Huntington Hartford of the A&P sends emergency rail shipments of tea and coffee to Chicago, most of whose grocery stores have burnt in the great October fire. When the city is rebuilt, Hartford will open A&P stores.
1872: A strict Adulteration of Food, Drink and Drugs Act amends Britain's 1860 pure food laws, making sale of adulterated drugs punishable and making it an offense to sell a mixture containing ingredients added to increase weight without advising the comer.
1875: A new British Sale of Food and Drugs Law tightens restrictions against adulteration, making any adulteration injurious to health punishable with a heavy fine and making a second offense punishable with imprisonment.
1876: Glasgow grocer Thomas Johnstone Lipton opens his first shop at age 26. Lipton sailed to America at age 15 to spend 4 years learning the merchandising methods employed in the grocery section of a New York department store.
1878: Frank Hadow, 23, returns to England on leave from his Ceylon tea plantation and wins in Wimbledon singles play.
1879: "The Cup of Tea" is painted by Mary Cassatt.
1880: More than 95 A&P grocery stores are scattered across America from Boston to Milwaukee; the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. will not have a store on the West Coast for another 50 years.
1884: Ceylon's coffee output falls to 150,000 bags, down from 700,000 in 1870 when the rust disease caused by Hamileia vastatrix began making deep inroads. The last shipment of coffee beans will leave the island in 1899.
1889: Rust finishes off Ceylon's coffee industry. Demand increases for Latin American coffee.
1890: Thomas Lipton enters the tea business to assure supplies of tea at low cost for his 300 grocery shops. He offers "The Finest the World Can Produce" at 1d 7p lb. when the going price is roughly a shilling higher.
1893: Thomas Lipton registers a new trademark for the tea he has been selling since 1890 and which is sold only in packages. Over the facsimile signature "Thomas J. Lipton, Tea Planter, Ceylon," Lipton prints the words "Nongenuine without this signature".
1897: Britons begin to eat lunch, dooming the classic British breakfast.
1898: Annual British tea consumption averages 10 pounds per capita, up from 2 pounds in 1797.
1898: Congress imposes the first U.S. federal tax on legacies June 13 in a War Revenue Act that also provides for excise duties and taxes on tea, tobacco, liquor, and amusements.
1899: English tea magnate Thomas Lipton has the racing yacht Shamrock I built for the first of five efforts he will make to regain the America's Cup, but the U.S. defender Columbia defeats Lipton's boat 3 to 0.
1902: Barnum's Animal Crackers are introduced by the National Biscuit Co., which controls 70 percent of U.S. cracker and cookie output. It joins the line of Nabisco products that includes Social Tea Biscuits.
1904: Tea bags are pioneered by New York tea and coffee shop merchant Thomas Sullivan who sends samples of his various tea blends to customers in small hand-sewn muslin bags.
1904: Finding that they can brew tea simply by pouring boiling water over a tea bag in a cup, customers place hundreds of orders for Sullivan's tea bags, which will soon be packed by a specially developed machine.
1904: Green tea and Formosan continue to outsell black tea five to one in the United States.
1904: lced tea is created at the St. Louis fair by English tea concessionaire Richard Blechynden when sweltering fairgoers pass him by, but as in the case of the ice cream cone, evidence will be produced of prior invention.
1909: Thomas Lipton begins blending and packaging his tea at New York. His U.S. business will be incorporated in 1915, and 3 years after his death in 1931 his picture will begin appearing on the red-and-yellow packages that identify Lipton products.
1912: A new Filene's with a 7-foot doorman opens in Boston September 3 at the corner of Washington and Summer streets in a building designed by Daniel Burnham. Edward Filene will hold free tea dances.
1913: Swann's Way (Du Côte de chez Swann) is written by French novelist Marcel Proust, 42, whose memories of childhood have been revived by tasting shell-shaped madeleine cakes dipped in tea and who will follow his psychological novel with six more.
1918: British food rationing begins with sugar January 1 and is extended in February to include meat, butter, and margarine. Other rationed commodities include 4 ounces of jam and 2 ounces of tea (weekly).
1924: The song "Tea for Two" is written by Vincent Youmans.
1925: The revue "On with the Dance" is first set up on April 30 at London's Pavillion Theatre. It includes the song "Tea for Two" and will run for 229 performances.
1931: "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" by Sammy Fain
1947: "Tea with Mrs. Goodman" by English novelist Philip Toynbee, 31 is published.
1952: The film: Yasujiro Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice.
1953: White Rose Redi-Tea, introduced by New York's Seeman Brothers, is the world's first instant iced tea.
1953: The play "Tea and Sympathy" by Robert Anderson is first set up at September 30 at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater, with Deborah Kerr and John Kerr. It runs for 712 performances.
1953: The play "The Teahouse of the August Moon" by John Patrick is first set up on October 15 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with John Forsythe and David Wayne. It runs for 1,027 performances.
