lycoris

I've got a week to get my shadow priest to level 70, so I can take full advantage of Wrath of the Litch King when it comes out on the 13th! Just four levels to go ... I can do it.

So, if you know me at all, you hopefully know that I love tea. I want to be a tea sommelier, I want to grow my own tea plants, I want to learn how to brew tea properly for as many cultural contexts as I can, and I want to know the history of tea in each region. It's really an enormous task, but it's so, so fascinating to me. I'm a bit enamoured with the Colonial period (one reason why I love steampunk), despite the horrible human rights abuses that occurred during that time under various colonial occupations. The age of exploration, the expansion of world trade, the beginnings of connecting the whole world together ... and tea was at the centre of it all!

I'm not kidding; tea has been the trigger for significant historical events. When China had a monopoly on tea, the British were drinking so much of it that they were putting the country into considerable debt. In order to pay for the tea, the British decided to offer something other than silverware and money in exchange ... opium. The Chinese government couldn't shut down the trade, and that led to the Opium Wars, which in turn led to Hong Kong being a British territory for 99 years.

Closer to home for many of you, how about the Boston Tea Party? American colonists, tired of paying taxes to the King of England and seeing little benefit, dumped crates and crates into the harbour. They refused to allow tea ships to dock, they even switched to (shudder) coffee! It's only now, more than two hundred years later, that tea is becoming popular again in the United States.

Tea ... it is good.