The History of Tea
The story of tea begins in China. According to legend, in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting beneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water. Shen Nung, a renowned herbalist, decided to try the infusion that his servant had accidentally created. The tree was a Camellia sinensis, and the resulting drink was what we now call tea. It is impossible to know whether there is any truth in this story. But tea drinking certainly became established in China many centuries before it had even been heard of in the West. Containers for tea have been found in tombs dating from the Han Dynasty (206 BC—220 AD) but it was under the Tang Dynasty (618—906 AD), that tea became firmly established as the national drink of China.
It became such a favourite that during the late eighth century a writer called Lu Yu wrote the first book entirely about tea, the Ch'a Ching, or Tea Classic. It was shortly after this that tea was first introduced to Japan, by Japanese Buddhist monks who had travelled to China to study. Tea received almost instant imperial sponsorship and spread rapidly from the royal court and monasteries to the other sections of Japanese society.
So at this stage in the history of tea, Europe was rather lagging behind. In the latter half of the sixteenth century there are the first brief mentions of tea as a drink among Europeans. These are mostly from Portuguese who were living in the East as traders and missionaries. But although some of these individuals may have brought back samples of tea to their native country, it was not the Portuguese who were the first to ship back tea as a commercial import. This was done by the Dutch, who in the last years of the sixteenth century began to encroach on Portuguese trading routes in the East. By the turn of the century they had established a trading post on the island of Java, and it was via Java that in 1606 the first consignment of tea was shipped from China to Holland. Tea soon became a fashionable drink among the Dutch, and from there spread to other countries in continental western Europe, but because of its high price it remained a drink for the wealthy.
Britain, always a little suspicious of continental trends, had yet to become the nation of tea drinkers that it is today. Starting in 1600, the British East India Company had a monopoly on importing goods from outside Europe, and it is likely that sailors on these ships brought tea home as gifts. The first coffee house had been established in London in 1652, and tea was still somewhat unfamiliar to most readers, so it is fair to assume that the drink was still something of a curiosity. Gradually, it became a popular drink in coffee houses, which were as many locations for the transaction of business as they were for relaxation or pleasure. They were though the preserve of middle- and upper-class men; women drank tea in their own homes, and as yet tea was still too expensive to be widespread among the working classes. In part, its high price was due to a punitive system of taxation.
One unforeseen consequence of the taxation of tea was the growth of methods to avoid taxation—smuggling and adulteration. By the eighteenth century many Britons wanted to drink tea but could not afford the high prices, and their enthusiasm for the drink was matched by the enthusiasm of criminal gangs to smuggle it in. What began as a small time illegal trade, selling a few pounds of tea to personal contacts, developed by die late eighteenth century into an astonishing organised crime network, perhaps importing as much as 7 million lbs annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million lbs! Worse for die drinkers was that taxation also encouraged the adulteration of tea, particularly of smuggled tea which was not quality controlled through customs and excise. Leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried, were added to tea leaves. By 1784, the government realised that enough was enough, and that heavy taxation was creating more problems than it was words. The new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, slashed the tax from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Suddenly legal tea was affordable, and smuggling stopped virtually overnight.
Another great impetus to tea drinking resulted from the end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China, in 1834. Before that date, China was the country of origin of the vast majority of the tea imported to Britain, but the end of its monopoly stimulated the East India Company to consider growing tea outside China. India had always been the centre of the Company's operations, which led to the increased cultivation of tea in India, beginning in Assam. There were a few false starts, including the destruction by cattle of one of the earliest tea nurseries, but by 1888 British tea imports from India were for the first time greater than those from China.
The end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China also had another result, which was more dramatic though less important in the long term: it ushered in the era of the tea clippers. While the Company had had the monopoly on trade, there was no rush to bring the tea from China to Britain, but after 1834 the tea trade became a virtual free for all. Individual merchants and sea captains with their own ships raced to bring home the tea and make the most money, using fast new clippers which had sleek lines, tall masts and huge sails. In particular there was a competition between British and American merchants, leading to the famous clipper races of the 1860s. But these races soon came to an end with the opening of the Suez Canal, which made the trade routes to China viable for steamships for the first time.
Reclaiming the Night
A On a summer's day, apart from the intermittent drizzle and lowering sky, South Street in Romford looks as close to an Englishman's dream of a continental-style piazza as it is possible to get. Leafy trees line the extended pavements crowded with seats and tables as young families, pensioners, teenagers and businessmen tuck into a variety of faux-European dishes for lunch. Local cafes serve the full range of meaningless variations on the theme of coffee, from cappuccino through mochaccino to doppos, all at top prices. Round the corner, in the Market Place, it is French week. There are several stalls, complete with real Frenchmen, selling claret and cheeses.
B The cafes are open during the day, and the clubs stay open until two or three in the morning most nights. In this respect, Romford is typical of contemporary Britain. In the late 1980s, the centres of many towns and cities went into decline as retailers, and particularly supermarkets, moved to new big, out-of-town shopping centres. So in the early 1990s, many local councils, in league with local businesses, re-developed their increasingly desolate town centres into "leisure zones". They looked to continental Europe for the inspiration to create modern 24-hour environments, mixing cafes, bars and clubs to keep people in the centres spending money for as long as possible.
C By night however, South Street turns into a very different place. The street becomes a mass of 18-26-year-olds, drinking as much as they can. For anyone else, the place becomes almost a no-go area. Gillian Balfe, the council's town-centre manager and a strong supporter of the "leisuring" of South Street, concedes that the crowds become uncontrollable, and the atmosphere quickly turns "hostile and threatening". Buses are now barred from going down South Street after 9.30pm: there are too many drunken people milling about.
D In a survey for the local council done last year, 49% of the residents of the surrounding areas of South Street confessed that they did not want to come to the city centre any more for fear of crime. The local police concede that they are virtually overwhelmed. Violence is commonplace. There has only been one consequent fatality in the area in the past couple of years, but the police say that this is mainly thanks to the merciful proximity of the local hospital. Romford's dilemma is typical of what has happened in the other "leisure zones" in towns and cities throughout the country. What were meant to be civilised places for entertainment and shopping have too often turned into alcoholic ghettos for the young.
E For all the problems, however, Romford's local authority thinks that the idea of a 24-hourcity is already too profitable to be stopped. Local authorities think that new repressive legislation, or even a decision not to reform the licensing laws, would be unworkable. So instead of trying to pack everyone back off to bed, Romford is trying to reclaim the town centre for a broader mix of people, and so to fulfil the original ambitionsofthe24-hour-city dreamers.
F The first part of the strategy involves security. The police accept that, with their current resources, they will never be able to make South Street safe on their own. So they now work closely with the 528 "door-staff ", previously known as bouncers, to target drug-dealers in the bars and clubs. In the year since that scheme came into effect, there have been more than 300 arrests for drugs. In the six months before that, there had been only one. All the premises now have a radio link to the police station for an instant response to trouble.
G The second part of the strategy involves trying to encourage more, and different kinds of people to use the town centre at night. New attractions are opening next year to rival the pubs. On the site of the old Romford brewery there will be a 16-screen cinema and a 24-hour supermarket. A new health and leisure centre, open on some nights until 9pm, starts up soon. The hope is that these facilities will draw in a different, more sober and ethnically diverse crowd. The police have bravely encouraged one club to start a gay night on Wednesdays.
H Together with other measures such as better street lighting, Romford hopes that it can show that the phrase "24-hour city" can be more than a euphemism for an all-night drinkathon. As the new licensing laws delegate the job of granting alcohol licences to local councils, cities across England will be trying to reclaim the night.
Paper or Computer?
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Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn't happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance – the most common kind of office paper – rose almost fifteen per cent in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don't agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, the paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk – or the spectacle of air-traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips – arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives.
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The case for paper is made most eloquently in "The Myth of the Paperless Office", by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conducted at the International Monetary Fund, in Washington, D.C. Economists at the I.M.F. spend most of their time writing reports on complicated economic questions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of a computer. Nonetheless, the I.M.F. is awash in paper, and Sellen and Harper wanted to find out why. Their answer is that the business of writing reports – at least at the I.M.F. – is an intensely collaborative process, involving the professional judgments and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one other. They go back to their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, the author spreads out all the pages with comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer – moving the pages around as he works, organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.
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Without paper, this kind of collaborative and iterative work process would be much more difficult. According to Sellen and Harper, the paper has a unique set of "affordances" – that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text. Digital documents, of course, have their own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared, stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material. But they lack the affordances that really matter to a group of people working together on a report. Sellen and Harper write:
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Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles – piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artefacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile, the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.
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But why do we pile documents instead o filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologists Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.
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This idea that paper facilitates a highly specialized cognitive and social process is a far cry from the way we have historically thought about the stuff. Paper first began to proliferate in the workplace in the late nineteenth century as part of the move toward "systematic management." To cope with the complexity of the industrial economy, managers were instituting company-wide policies and demanding monthly weekly, or even daily updates from their subordinates. Thus was born the monthly sales report, and the office manual and the internal company newsletter. The typewriter took off in the eighteen-eighties, making it possible to create documents in a fraction of the time it had previously taken, and that was followed closely by the advent of carbon paper, which meant that a typist could create ten copies of that document simultaneously. Paper was important not to facilitate creative collaboration and thought but as an instrument of control.
