After defending the alluring woman from a stranger’s advances, our hero Matthew Townes is invited to drink tea and talk with her. In this post, I wanted to talk about how tea traveled from China to Europe, eventually allowing the main characters in Dark Princess to enjoy this drink. Due to sea exploration and trade, European countries had at least heard of tea by the 1600s. However, the first to bring tea over was the Dutch East India Company in 1610. This is likely due to the fact that they had a much larger starting budget than other trading companies (ten times the initial capital of the British East India Company). In addition, the Dutch East India Company, or the VOC, created a monopoly on the spices of the Maluku Islands by destroying the ships and goods of the Portuguese, who had established ports there already. The new, “exotic” drink quickly became popular in the Netherlands and Germany, which brings us to the scene in W.E.B. Du Bois’s novel. It’s surprising that a drink that is used as a symbol of peace and calm in our current society has a violent history associated with its international diffusion.
http://history.emory.edu/home/documents/endeavors/volume3/BrianGoodman.pdf
https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/history-tea%C2%A0