EAST ASIAN GARDEN LECTURE SERIES: Green Tea Across the Pacific: Japanese Producers and American Consumers, 1870–1940

Illustration from a tea box made by an American department store that sold Japanese green tea, circa 1910 

Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 7:30pm 

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Ahmanson Room, Brody Botanical Center
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan emerged as a tea exporting nation, the first to effectively challenge China’s centuries-old monopoly of the world tea market. The tea trade not only boosted Japan’s economic development but also provided jobs for groups dislocated by the Meiji Restoration, notably ex-samurai.

Japanese producers focused on green tea, shipping it almost exclusively to the United States, which since the early days of the republic had been a green-tea consuming nation.

The talk will offer perspectives on the Japanese farmers, factory workers, and merchants involved in the trade. It will also detail trends in U.S. tea drinking, highlighting how the Midwest formed the largest green-tea consuming region until Americans began to drink more black teas in the first decades of the twentieth century.