Collection: BLACK TEA

Black tea, known as red tea in China, is the most oxidised of all the tea classifications. Most black teas are found in India, which is now the worlds leading producer, although tea was first produced in China during the Shang dynasty, 2nd millennium BC. In 1848AD the East India Company engaged a Scottish botanist called Robert Fortune to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China, a territory forbidden to foreigners, to steal the secrets of tea production from under the noses of China’s ruthless warlords and relocate the stolen seeds and plants to the Assam valley in India. The greatest theft of intellectual property rights in the history of the world. He succeeded, and those original teas; Darjeeling, Yunnan, Assam, are available below.