black&white #45: The story of Canton 1843

5 minute steep

We set up the company in 2007 as a tiny, kitchen-table operation out of my home in Twickenham. We chose the name Canton because our focus was high grade Chinese tea and Canton was the earlier romanized name for Guangzhou, the traditional port at the entrance to the Pearl River and the epicentre of China's tea trade for hundreds of years.

We didn’t know then that the name Canton Tea Co. had been around for more than 170 years – and we had inadvertently followed in the footsteps of British apothecary and marketing savant Richard Davies. He set up the first Canton Tea Co. in New York in 1843 and wanted to create a good quality Chinese tea blend that would be instantly recognisable to American consumers.

Davies capitalised on the aspirational American’s penchant for all things English and called the blend ‘English Breakfast Tea’ – despite the infamous role tea had played in the Boston Tea Party a hundred years earlier. This was when American colonists protested against British rule and the heavy taxes they imposed, particularly on tea. They boarded the British East India Company ships and threw hundreds of chests of tea into Boston Harbour. It was the first significant act of defiance which is believed to have sparked the American Revolution.

But back to Davies. His marketing manoeuvre paid off and English Breakfast Tea became a hit with wealthy New Yorkers. Davies opened outlets across America – including one in St. Louis,  Missouri, where there is still a Canton Avenue. His fortunes continued to grow off the back of his English Breakfast blend until a cunning rival took the blend back to China where tea masters could dissect and reproduce the blend. Soon every tea company in the West had an English Breakfast blend.

Back in England, English Breakfast Tea was catching on. Queen Victoria is credited with popularising the tea in the UK, purportedly enjoying the blend in 1892 at Balmoral and taking a supply of it home to London.

The blends of English Breakfast tea have continued to develop and evolve over the years, but once Indian and then African teas were cheaper and more readily available, the English Breakfast blend declined in quality and kept tea prices scandalously low (but there’s another story). More expensive Chinese teas are rarely found in an English Breakfast blend today.

Canton 1843 is our tribute to the original English Breakfast tea, created by the first Canton Tea Co in New York in 1843. Like many commercially successful recipes the original mix was a little opaque, but with extensive research, we’ve recreated the blend as faithfully as possible. Entirely made up of Chinese teas it is a rich, indulgent blend with high grade Yunnan and Keemun black teas and Big Red Robe (or Da Hong Pao) oolong.