Until recently, the Jomon pots were thought to be the world’s oldest pots, which surprised experts as much as the association with hunting and gathering, since they believed that pottery originated in mainland Asia. Then in 2009, fragments of charred pottery were found in Yuchanyan cave in China’s Hunan province. By carbon dating fragments of bone and charcoal found close by, experts have dated this pottery to between 17,500 and 18,300 years old. If they are right (though the disturbed nature of cave floors means they cannot be sure[3]) then this is now the world’s oldest pottery.
That doesn’t mean it’s the first ceramic. People were moulding clay into figurines long before. The oldest are the ‘Venus figurines’, little statuettes of naked women, found in northern and eastern Europe. The Venus figurine found at Dolní Ve˘stonice in the Czech Republic dates back 27,000 years. The first pots came some time later.
Surprisingly few of the earliest pots show much sign of the soot that would suggest that they had been used for cooking. Nor are they the large pots that would later be used for storing food long-term. It seems the first pottery was actually crockery – bowls for serving food, or perhaps deeper dishes for heating shellfish with a hot stone. It may be that the early pots just weren’t up to much more. In time, however, bigger, tougher pots were made that could be used for cooking, for containing liquids and for storing food properly. These had a profound effect on our relationship with food.
Meat could be baked or roasted on hot stones or on a spit, but pots dramatically increased the range of foods that could be cooked by boiling them in water. Many otherwise inedible plants could be cooked this way. Pulses, cereals and root vegetables quickly became staple foods.
Pottery also, for the first time, provided good containers for liquids. It can’t have been long after the creation of the first storage jars that people noticed what happens when fruits and other plant material are stored in moist conditions. Whenever they contain sugars, they start to ferment, and as they ferment the sugars are converted to alcohol. Perhaps it was an accident at first, but people soon began to show a remarkable knack for creating alcohol from just about anything – honey, grapes and other fruits, cereals and so on. It’s probably fair to say that without pottery, there’d be no beer or wine.
The first pots were probably simple pinch-pots, made by pinching damp clay out between fingers and thumbs into the required shape.[4] Once shaped, the pot was simply left in the sun to dry and harden. Sun-dried pots will eventually collapse if filled with water, as the clay absorbs the water and softens. Before long, though, potters were making larger, deeper pots by rolling the clay into a long sausage shape and coiling it around to make a pot. These coiled pots were often fired, simply by putting them in an open campfire.
No one knows quite when the potter’s wheel first came into use, or where. Estimates of dates vary wildly, from 10,000 years ago to just 3,400 years ago, and varying experts say that it first appeared in Europe or China or Mesopotamia. The strongest early archaeological evidence – a stone potter’s wheel and fragments of wheel-turned pots – comes from Mesopotamia. These early wheels were what are called slow wheels. These are simply little round platforms for the clay that you can turn by hand to save yourself having to move as you shape the pot, and that help keep the pot always at the same distance from you. They dramatically increase the speed and accuracy with which a potter can make batches of very similar, and much larger, pots.
It was the appearance of the fast wheel about 2,700 years ago, though, that was the great technological breakthrough. This is the wheel, essentially, that most craft potters use today. With the fast wheel, the platform is raised on an axle so that the potter can work standing. Wrapped around the axle is a heavy stone wheel which can be set spinning with a push or kick. As the stone’s momentum keeps it spinning, the potter can run his hands over the clay to keep shaping it as it turns. To shape easily, the potter needs a softer, finer clay than with a slow hand wheel, so the pot needs to be fired in a kiln at a higher temperature to make it hard.
Using a fast wheel, a good potter can make a simple pot every minute or so, each pretty much identical. With the advent of the fast wheel, pot-making became an industry, and the volume of pots churned out in Greek and Roman times is astonishing. The Greeks in particular turned pottery-making into high art, with their decorations in black and then red.
For everyday crockery, though, pottery seemed rather cheap and crude compared with glass and metals, and for a long while pottery fell out of use at the table. Then in the ninth century, a new and beautiful kind of pottery arrived in the Islamic world from China, now known as porcelain. Porcelain had been made in China for some time but was just reaching perfection under the Sui and T’ang dynasties (581–907 AD). Instead of being coarse-grained, thick, dull and opaque, this Chinese pottery or porcelain was white, smooth and so delicately thin and translucent you could see the shadow of your drink inside it. It also rang beautifully when you tapped it.
Chinese porcelain reached a degree of exquisite perfection in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when the distinctive blue and white decoration so associated with Chinese porcelain was developed. It was in the sixteenth century, during the Ming, that Europeans began to see china, as it became known in England, for the first time. They were so captivated by its beauty that they immediately set about trying to imitate it. The Chinese secret, though, proved hard to crack.
Because of its translucence, European potters thought they could match it by mixing powdered glass in with the clay. This looked quite similar but was softer and thicker, so inevitably it looked cruder. English potters added powdered bone to toughen it up, and created bone-china, which while attractive couldn’t match the delicacy and beauty of porcelain from China. It wasn’t until the 1760s that French and English potters discovered what made Chinese porcelain special.[5] It contains two substances known from their Chinese names as kaolin (a very fine white clay) and petuntse (a rock that fuses at a high temperature to form natural glass). Once they discovered the ingredients, they at first imported them from China and then realised that local china clay and china stone would work almost as well.
Since then, the production of pottery has changed dramatically. Very little is now made on potters’ wheels. Instead, it is made on a vast industrial scale by various automatic processes such as granulate moulding, which means pressing the clay into moulds while semi-hard and granulated. Most mass-produced plates are made like this. Though there is little art or skill involved in the production of the vast bulk of pottery sold in the shops, the pottery emerging from factories is attractive and does its job supremely well, and exquisite hand-made pottery can still be bought at a premium.
Meanwhile, ceramics may prove to be the wonder material of the century. For most people, ceramics, when they aren’t expensive works of art, are materials for the bathroom and kitchen. But ceramics technology is being developed for everything from bomb-proof shields for aircraft to high-efficiency engines for cars. Special ceramics are even being developed to work as replacement body parts. Maybe the phrase ‘feet of clay’ could one day be literally true.
[1] In medieval times, people in wealthy houses used to eat from squares of hard, stale four-day-old bread known as trenchers. At the end of the meal, the trencher could be eaten with sauce or perhaps collected by the almoner to give to the poor people who waited outside the door for scraps and leftovers. It was certainly cheaper than a dishwasher. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, particularly in northern Europe, trenchers were more typically wood or pewter, and wooden trenchers were in use into the nineteenth century alongside pottery plates.
[2]Excavations have uncovered evidence that the Jomon people ate smoked fish and drank wine made from elderberry, wild grape and strawberry. So, maybe far from leading a primitive subsistence life as archaeologists have often supposed, some hunter-gatherers were prehistoric connoisseurs, living the good life with no ties and few chores.
[3] In a BBC news report, one of the r
esearchers at Yuchanyan, David Cohen, admitted there are often problems dating cave floor artefacts. ‘The way people move around and mess up caves is very difficult to see archaeologically … Imagine you have a fire and then people come in again have another fire and another, so you have the ashes of all these fires building up but at the same time people are digging and clearing, pushing things to the side; this messes things up.’ But he believed they had taken care to make sure the dated fragments and the pottery matched.
[4] This technique is still used in the highly prized Japanese Raku ware, traditionally used in the Japanese tea ceremony. Raku pots are hand-moulded, then fired at low temperatures for a short period before being withdrawn while still glowing hot to be plunged into cold water or left to cool in the air.
[5] The secret of china was actually discovered in Meissen half a century earlier by the young genius Johann Friedrich Böttger, but only through the extraordinary cruelty of Augustus the Strong, the elector of Saxony. Hearing of the teenage Johann’s alchemical skills, Augustus had him locked up until he found how to transmute base metal into gold. Taking pity, Dresden scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus persuaded Augustus to allow the boy to stay with him and work on the secret of china instead. Still under guard, Johann solved the problem in a year in 1708, and Meissen porcelain went into production in 1709. All the same, Augustus released Johann only in 1714. By that time, he was very ill from the effects of working in his laboratory, and in just five years he was dead.
#35 Coffee and Tea
Can you imagine going through a week or even a month, let alone a lifetime, without the steaming charms of coffee and tea? Rudyard Kipling couldn’t, writing of tea:
We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven’t had any tea for a week …
The bottom is out of the Universe.
Tea and coffee are such a part of the fabric of everyday life that it is easy to forget what amazing drinks they are. If they were in a fantasy novel, they’d seem almost like magic potions – richly tasting, delicious, warm drinks that instantly make you more alert and ready for life.
It’s no wonder, then, that legends have grown up about just who had the idea for each. It’s fairly certain that tea originated in China. There are historical records of tea farms dating back at least 3,000 years. There is genetic evidence, too, that all the modern varieties of tea plant are hybrids of the evergreen Camellia sinensis, which can be traced back to the mountains of northern Burma and the western Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. Indeed, it seems likely that tea originated in Yunnan, where wild tea trees thousands of years old can be found in the rainforests high in the mountains. It was in the west of China where 2,500 years ago the great Chinese philosopher Laozi met a customs official who encouraged him to write down his thoughts in the Tao Te Ching over his first cup of tea, a drink he later described as ‘the froth of the liquid jade’. And it may be here in the west of China that the Chinese legend of tea’s origin is set.
According to the legend, the Emperor Shen Nong was famous for his interest in herbal medicine. In 2737 BC, so one story goes, Shen Nong, out in the west with his army, was sipping a bowl of boiled water, when a few leaves of nearby tea fluttered into it. As the water turned brown and the emperor sipped on, he was pleasantly surprised by the flavour and the restorative qualities of the strange brew. Apparently, Shen Nong also discovered that tea was an antidote to various poisonous herbs. Whatever the truth, it seems likely that tea-drinking was widespread in China by 2,500 years ago, both for medicinal reasons and simple pleasure among ordinary people, as well as a status symbol at the Emperor’s court.
Coffee is much more recent in origin. The first historic records come from the Sufi monks who grew coffee in their gardens in Yemen in the fifteenth century. But the two main coffee plants, Coffea arabica and Coffea caneophora (which gives the ‘robusta’ beans), are natives of Ethiopia and sub-Saharan Africa respectively. And it is in Ethiopia, one legend has it, that coffee was discovered.
The coffee legend, perhaps tellingly, comes from the opposite end of the social scale. While it was the Emperor of China who is credited with tea, we owe coffee, apparently, to a poor goatherd named Kaldi, who lived in Ethiopia about 1,200 years ago. Apparently, Kaldi noticed his goats getting rather frisky after eating the red berries of a certain bush and decided to try them himself. Excited by the effects, Kaldi went to a holy man, who disapprovingly tossed them on the fire. Kaldi rescued the beans, by now roasted, ground them to a powder and added water to make the first cup of coffee.
Interestingly, despite their very different origins, coffee and tea both arrived in Europe within a decade or so, in the mid-seventeenth century. The first European coffee house opened in Italy in 1645, and England’s first, the still-running Queen’s Lane Coffee House in Oxford, just nine years later. Tea arrived in Europe around the same time, and came to England in the 1660s with King Charles II’s wife Catherine of Braganza, who picked it up as the new fad in her native Portugal.
Right from the start in Europe, it’s clear there was something of a divide between tea and coffee despite the coincidence of their arrival and their similarity as hot, pleasantly bitter, aromatic drinks full of stimulating caffeine. Tea was brought to England by the royals and was always very respectable, as befits its imperial Chinese origins. Coffee was first drunk by Oxford students and its image has always fallen on the louche side, a natural follow-on to its beginnings with an upstart goatherd.
Even before it came to Europe, tea was often the drink of the refined, sipped in reverence in Japanese and Chinese tea ceremonies. And few people doubted it was good for you on every level. For Buddhists, it had even spiritual value, while the first Japanese tea manual, dating from the thirteenth century and entitled How to Stay Healthy by Drinking Tea, asserted boldly that: ‘Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one’s life more full and complete’; while a Japanese proverb says: ‘If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.’
Coffee, on the other hand, always walked on the wild side. Like tea, coffee was drunk religiously, not for Zen-like Buddhist calm but to stimulate the spiritual excitement of the Sufis. It’s perhaps not surprising then that non-Sufi Muslims began to regard it as rather dubious or even haraam (forbidden), no doubt horrified at the sight of all those frenzied Sufi monks high on coffee. Indeed, unimaginable as Turkey without it would be today, coffee was actually banned there in the early seventeenth century. And ironically it was banned in its place of origin, Ethiopia, by Orthodox Christians until 1889.
In Europe and North America, while ladies took tea in their stately homes, students and intellectuals gathered in disreputable coffee houses to discuss revolutionary ideas or simply poke fun at the tea-drinking classes. In France, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot quaffed coffee to the Enlightenment and washed in the dreams of the French Revolution in Paris’s Café Procope. In America, countless cups of coffee in Boston’s Green Dragon coffee house fuelled the American rebellion as John Adams, James Otis and Paul Revere planned their campaign. And after the rebellion came around, and Americans dumped tea in Boston harbour in defiance against British taxes in the infamous Tea Party, many Americans refused to drink tea as a protest. Tea was tainted as a drink in the USA until quite recently when many Americans began to dip into high-end teas as a mark of refinement. The end of the revolution?
Tea was tainted in another way too, besides its association with British tea taxes. Just as the English poor adopted tea with affection to make it the national drink, and a ‘nice cuppa’ became the epitome of homely, unpretentious working-class life, so the tea trade was the crux of Victorian colonialism. In the early 1800s, the British were growing opium in India, then illegally importing it to China to get the Chinese hooked and willing to part with their tea at rock-bottom prices. Eventually, the British smuggled some tea plants out of China and planted tea all over India t
o earn Indians the money to buy British manufactured goods. Countless Indians lost their traditional farming way of life to become wage slaves.
While the real consequences of growing and producing tea had a profoundly negative effect on millions of people under the British Empire, at home it became associated with the most cherished and gentle sides of British culture – from tea on the lawn in an English summer to a mug of warm comfort in the Blitz. For the British, tea has always been the great remedy in a crisis. If you’ve had a nasty shock, a good cup of tea is the answer. If your boyfriend has just left you, it’s time to put the kettle on. Not everyone in England succumbed to tea’s spell, though. J.B. Priestley muttered cantankerously: ‘Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.’
Coffee, meanwhile, remarkably managed to maintain its reputation as the devil’s drink, as America’s Beat Generation and those first recalcitrant Teenagers of the 1950s hung out in espresso bars and defied their elders to the hiss of the Gaggia and the thump and wail of the jukebox.
Now the issues are slightly different. Coffee has lost any left-field association, as waves of low-level American colonialism sweep the world under the Starbucks logo, along with espressos and cappuccinos, not to mention lattes, mochas, and all kinds of other elaborate variations to pander to the discerning consumer. If anything, tea, drunk more by liberals and campaigners against poverty in reaction to the global culture of coffee, has become the protest option.
There are two things that seem to matter now in relation to tea and coffee. The first is the part they play in the global economy. The second is health issues. Are tea and coffee bad or good for your personal well-being?
The World's Greatest Idea Page 10
