Markets & Prices
The Tax Cut That Accidentally Lowered England's Death Rate
A 1784 law meant only to defeat tea smugglers pushed boiled water into English households at scale, and the parish records show a real, measurable drop in mortality that nobody who wrote the law intended or noticed.
When Assam's Tea Gardens Existed Only on Paper
Between 1860 and 1865 Indian tea was a speculative asset first and a crop second, and when it collapsed in 1866 a government enquiry had to certify the industry was real.
The Year Britain Bought India and Ceylon's Entire Tea Crop
In 1942 Britain's Ministry of Food became the sole buyer of India and Ceylon's whole exportable tea crop, 698 million pounds, negotiated directly with both governments, while the ration handed to its own households stayed at two ounces a week for a decade more.
The Tea With a Record Price and No Market
Twenty grams of mother-tree Da Hong Pao sold for 208,000 yuan in 2005, and every "world's most expensive tea" figure since is that one lot multiplied up to a kilogram. The five sales behind the record, and why the market that set it stopped in 2006.
The London Tea Auction's Priciest Sale Was Also Its Last
On 29 June 1998, a Ceylon Flowery Pekoe from a small Sri Lankan garden fetched the highest price the 319-year-old London tea auction had ever recorded, on the same day the sale closed for good. A 2025 Guinness record for a different charity tea sale shows the pattern was not a one-off.
The Tea Cartel That Worked, and the Farmers It Was Built to Keep Out
In 1933, India, Ceylon, and the Dutch East Indies ran the one tea cartel that ever actually moved the price. The same years, a Kenyan law barred African farmers from growing the crop at all. Both restrictions ended within about a year of each other.
Why Is Tea So Cheap?
Tea's auction price has gone nowhere for 20 years and now sits below what was paid a century ago, in real terms. Here is what the figures say is actually happening, and who is absorbing the squeeze.
Darjeeling's Priciest Tea Isn't Its Biggest Earner
A handful of spring-plucked Darjeeling lots sell for the price of silver, but the season's real income comes two months later, from a flush that never makes the headlines.
The World's Biggest Tea Growers Are Not Its Biggest Tea Drinkers
Turkey and Ireland top the per-person tea rankings. China, India, and Kenya, which grow and export almost all of the world's leaf, sit far down the list. The gap is not about taste. It is about how much of a harvest a country keeps for itself.