The beverage that killed civilization
How tea inadvertently birthed Genghis Khan and the barbarian invasions
A few years ago I started getting into tea. When I mentioned this at a party, the entire circle of people I was conversing with dispersed. Besides being funny to watch, it was almost like a spell had been cast over the topic itself, like how history has been made so boring by our school system that most people would rather indulge in bastardized fantasies and distorted epics than learn the truth about where we all actually came from.
But tea, and its history, contains some pretty dark truths about the nature of civilization and why we get embroiled in international conflicts.
If nothing else, it will get you to see trade and warfare in a completely different light.
TEA: THE "MELANGE" OF OUR WORLD
The beverage itself was fairly interesting, being basically like coffee but less intense. Like any drug, tea has its own customs, paraphernelia, legends, etc., Given that for centuries China was the only place that knew how to make it, and it carried numerous medicinal properties, I'm pretty sure it's a major inspiration for Frank Herbert's Dune "Spice." This stuff, and access to it, literally built and felled empires.
Tea, along with silk, was for many centuries a vital part of the Silk Road trade. Caravans would travel from as far as Italy across the Middle East and into China bringing spices and gold to trade for these leaves. A major reason for this is actually due to a lack of understanding around biology and sanitation: in most parts of the world, water was drawn from polluted rivers and wells, which inevitably caused disease. The absence of refrigeration meant that people often ate spoiled food. Tea, in addition to being a cure-all for digestive issues, could only be made with boiling water, which effectively disinfected it. The myth was that some magical property in the tea made the water drinkable when in reality it was the preparation process!
In any case, tea wasn't just vital to trade with the peoples west of China's borders, but also the barbarians to the north. The ancient Mongolian diet contained very little roughage, being comprised mostly of meat and dairy, as nomadic peoples did not have the means to consistently grow greens or grains. This hard-drinking, high protein lifestyle left many Mongols with digestive problems and worse diseases. We see this even today amongst folks who booze a lot, eat a lot, and avoid veggies like the plague. Brock Lesnar being a prime example: The former UFC Heavyweight Champion was defeated by diverticulitis before he lost his belt (which would have been several notches tighter by the time he gave it up, given that he'd had several inches of his colon removed in order to beat the nasty gut bug).
Herein lies the key to understanding why those "savage Mongols" swept down from the Steppes and massacred so many civilized peoples.
MY DAD'S TEATIME STORY
When I told my dad I was looking into tea, he filled in some details about the "Tea for Horses" trade that took place along China's northern borders that never made it into any histories of tea I could find the West. Essentially, "Tea for Horses" was a policy put in place by China's rulers so that they could maintain strong cavalries. The empire required a great number of horses, and the best ones they could get their hands on came from the Steppes. Tea being a product exclusive to China, they were able to demand entire horses for a few pounds of Pu'er tea.
Turns out, the Mongols and other nomads were being regularly cheated out of this trade by Chinese merchants who just couldn't help themselves. The nomads would come with their horses and be shown a few bricks of genuine tea, then load up their horses with a year's supply of sawdust and grass. By the time they got back to their tribes, it would be too late.
The merchants, who likely didn't live in the border towns where the trades took place, would be long gone by the time a posse of warriors came back to get what was rightfully owed to them. So they'd pillage what they could as recompense, and word would get back to the capital that the Mongols were raping and looting the empire's fringes.
This wasn't how it always went down, sometimes the nomads would come to loot because the cold winter or hot summer was unusually brutal and their cattle had all died of starvation or something. But one imagines that the civilized peoples having reputations as liars and cheats didn't help when it came time for the chieftain to decide what to do about his food shortage problem.
And so it goes. The Mongols and their steppe raider ancestors were far from the yellow hordes of demonic murderers birthed out of Sauron's pit that civilized historians described. Nor were they bands of Eurasian ubermenschen adventurers that BAP twitter loves to imagine as the ideal man.
Perhaps the greatest half-truth perpetuated by many was that the Mongols had murderous contempt for agriculture-based civilizations simply because they lacked the spirit to roam the open plains and track their own food but scraped and sowed in the dirt instead. A sort of "They hate us for our freedom (to enjoy crop surpluses)" of the pre-modern era.
In reality, Genghis Khan and his brethren saw themselves as the prophesied comeuppance that the lying, cheating civilized peoples who had stolen their horses and caused them so much hardship deserved.
There are also, perhaps, parallels which cannot be ignored as our empire seems ever on the verge of collapsing. Having long headed off the cliff and now floating on cheap debt and inflated assets over a chasm whose bottom we dare not look at, today’s global civilization chooses instead to persist on rescue fantasies of “quantitative easing” and “cryptocurrencies” to keep this going forever.
The civilized peoples of China and its many semi-civilized neighbors and Han-adjacent kingdoms bordering the Steppes saw people like the Mongols as hapless yokels, fur-covered savages just asking to be fleeced. Such is the attitude of many who now occupy our higher offices towards the people they purport to serve and the people they purport to defend us from. But after generations of managed boom-bust cycles and quantitative fleecing, those who carry the true measures and weights within them, the ones who know the objective truth of what they are owed and how little has been delivered, will one day come back to collect.
Their vengeance only seems excessive to those who don’t see the ledger of cheated souls and starving families they’ve kept for centuries. We may wipe our slates clean every harvest and treat the barbarians who come to trade like naive newbies, but they do not forget. And they will be back.
And this is just a tiny part of the strife-ridden story of tea. Because once the Dutch and British enter the trade, things really get violent. Tea for Opium, anyone? No? How about Tea for naval warfare and then opium? Nor is tea the only beverage. Coffee has an equally brutal history attached to it, but in the Arabian-African-South-American direction. We expect such capitalist insanity to surround hard commodities like gold and diamonds, but the same methods were used on things as seemingly insignificant today as the bland little paper bags of leaves they freely give away in hotel lobbies.
So the next time you brew yourself a cuppa, just be glad the leaves are no longer steeped in blood.