Loose Leaf Tea

North of Xi'an, in the tomb of the Han emperor Jing, archaeologists found tea buds in 2016, about 2,100 years old. The plant they came from is an evergreen shrub of the borderlands where southwestern China, northeast India and northern Myanmar meet. Every true tea on this wall is that one plant.

In Tang China, about 760, Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea: eight tea regions ranked, and how to boil the water. In 1391 the Hongwu emperor decreed that only loose tea would be accepted as tribute, and by the end of the sixteenth century loose leaf had replaced cake and powder. Legend has it the whole thing began when leaves blew into the emperor Shennong's boiling water.

The leaf travelled. To Japan with the monk Eisai in the twelfth century. To Tibet, where a host still refills your bowl after every sip. To Russia by camel caravan from 1679. To London, where Thomas Garway first sold it in Exchange Alley in 1657.

Britain's thirst drained silver to China, and British merchants answered with opium; the First Opium War ended in 1842 with five treaty ports and Hong Kong ceded. Then the Empire broke China's monopoly: Chinese tea planted in India from 1836, Robert Fortune sent to steal the know-how, gardens raised in Assam, Darjeeling, the Nilgiris and Ceylon on indentured labour. By 1888 Britain took more tea from India than from China.

That is the wall behind the counter: the pine-smoked Lapsang Souchong, Organic, the camel-road Russian Caravan, Organic, Tibetan Monk's Blend for the bowl that is never empty, Matcha, Organic for Rikyu's one time, one meeting, and Earl Grey, Organic, with its mandarin's-gift legend.