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.
