I will always love fresh coffee, but I find the coffee merchants charging far too much for ordinary beans. One home-roasting specialist used to sell me beans, but he was WELS and someone apparently threatened him in some way. No more beans, no explanation, silence! How small! What a charming cult!
Our sojourn in Canada made tea a norm and coffee an extra, so I began drinking Constant Comment tea most of the time. It kept me up all night for getting independent studies done. Cinnamon tea was a great supplement and so were others. So I went back to Constant Comment, urged by experts to try other teas as well. They arrive tomorrow.
By chance I fell upon a documentary on silver since I have been discouraged to talk or write about Egyptian pyramids. After all, the country has 2,000 specialists with 4,000 theories, so it was getting to be a very dry topic.
Silver began the video and moved to shipping vast amounts of silver to Manilla, in the Philippines. China solved its taxation problems by changing to silver, since paper money was problematic (don't we know). I am getting to the point, be patient.
The cultivation of tea grew rapidly in China and made the item desirable everywhere - Russia, the British Empire, and Boston Harbor. Tea became a staple throughout the British Empire, which we noticed in Canada. Asking for coffee was like ordering moonshine or tapwater, not classy. We reverted to coffee in the US but still enjoyed tea.
The great, world-wide connection in all this is staggering. China manufactured all kinds of goods that other nations lacked, but China did not need anything from those countries. The solution was to sell Chinese tea and other goods in exchange for silver for its economy. This led to all kinds of conflicts, especially when the British East India Company - almost a nation on its own - increased its bullying. As many know, the British shipped opiates from India to China to offset the cost of tea, opening the way to opium dens and our current situation in America.
I am going to finish the documentary series, Empires of Silver, and learn more about tea. The factual movies are about 1% of the streaming offerings and yet 100 times better.
