Caravans to Russia

Caravans to Russia

The first tea reached Russia in 1618, when a Chinese embassy presented some to Czar Alexis. After 1689, when the Treaty of Nerchinsk defined the border between the two, caravan trade began, at China's insistence, through the frontier town Usk Kayakhta ( or Kiahta) north of Ulan Bator, then on the Chinese border, today just inside the border of the USSR. Russian goverment camel trains would arrive laden with furs and return carrying tea. Ordinary caravans of two to three hundred camels took almost a year for the trek from Moscow to the border town and back. The entire journey from Chinese grower to Russian market took eighteen months.

By 1700 Russian was receiving over six hundred camel loads of tea annually, at a cost so great that only aristocrats could afford to buy it. In 1735 Czarina Elizabeth set up a regular private caravan route which made tea more plentiful.

By the death of Catherine the Great in 1796, Russia was consuming over six thousand camel loads of tea per year - something over three and a half million pounds. Regardless of their social or economic status, most Russians ate a single large daily meal and sipped glasses of tea the rest of the time.

Since Chinese ports were not open to Russian ships, the caravan trade continued until 1880 when the first link of the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed. After Guangzhou was opened as a foreign port, Russian entrepreneurs set up mechanized factories three making brick tea, which the Russians favored. In 1882 these were moved to Hankou on the middle Yangtze.

The samovar, a metal water container with a fire underneath and a pipe up the middle which keeps the water hot (to dilute strong tea from a pot on top) probably become widespread in Russia during Czarina Elizabeth's reign. Soon every home in Russia had one as the Russians became avid drinkers of strong tea sipped through a lump of sugar held between the teeth.

Peter Mundy, who chronicled his arrival with the first British ship in Macau in 1637, mentions a Chinese samovar three. The famous tea authority, William Ukers, says the samovar develop out of a Chinese teapot that sat atop a brass charcoal burner.

The charcoal gas escaped through a cone which passed upward through the pot and lid. It bears some relationship to the charcoal-heated firepot for cooking meat in broth still used today by the Mongolians. The samovar is a rarity in China today.

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