A Tea Reader (29 page)

Muriel Harris
had a lengthy career in journalism with the
London Daily News
,
the
Daily Telegraph
,
and
The Manchester Guardian
.
She was the first to review George Orwell's work. Harris's first book,
The Seventh Gate
,
received a $5,000 prize. Her second book was
The Clinic of Dr. Aicadre
.

FOURTH STEEP
Tea Careers

George Constance
,
a native of New Orleans, has a B.S. in Geology and worked as a micro-paleontological consultant for over 20 years. He developed his love of tea after meeting his Indian-born wife, Daya. In January 2004 they opened the Indonique Tea & Chai Café which was forced closed by Hurricane Katrina sixteen months later. George and Daya currently reside in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Indonique, now also based in Connecticut, continues to sell tea online.

Dheepa Maturi
,
a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, practiced law in a variety of settings—law firms, a public hospital, private practice—before launching her specialty tea brand, Chai, Baby! The Chai, Baby! product line includes all natural, 100% organic, and Fair Trade Certified teas, as well as tea-related gift items.

Thomas J. Lipton
was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1848. His parents ran a grocery store and Lipton left school at 13 to work to support his family. He became a cabin boy at age 16 and picked up odd jobs throughout the United States. In 1870 he came back to Scotland with the hopes of revitalizing the family business. He eventually developed a chain of stores throughout Britain. At age 40 he began his tea business, purchasing tea estates throughout Sri Lanka. He was best known for his phenomenal skills in marketing and his passion for yachting. Lipton died in 1931, at age 83. His tea business continues to be a household name.

Cynthia Gold
has been the Tea Sommelier at Swan's Café at The Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers since 2004. Gold left her corporate career to pursue her culinary arts education at Johnson & Wales University, graduating Summa Cum Laude. She later attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, studying pastry and baking. She has cooked in many restaurants and also owned two of her own: Tea Tray in the Sky, and Elements. Her career and writing has been featured in magazines including
Art Culinaire
,
Boston Magazine
,
Yankee Magazine
,
Imbibe Magazine
,
and
Plate Magazine
,
among others.

Ahmed Rahim
,
a native of Iraq, founded Numi with his sister Reem in 1999. They began the business out of Reem's Oakland, California apartment and introduced little known herbs to the United States tea market, including
rooibos
,
lemon myrtle, honeybush, and dry desert lime. They have now grown the business to operations in a 25,000 square foot space and continue to make a name for themselves with their high quality products and their commitment to sustainability.

William Gordon Stables
was a Scotsman born in 1840. He was a surgeon in the Royal Navy and also wrote adventure fiction for boys and books about animals, health, and history. He composed more than 130 books in his lifetime. He was married in 1874 and died in 1910 at age 69.

Rob Nunally
has been the owner of Onomea Tea Company in Hawaii since 2004, when he founded the company with his partner Mike Longo. Nunally is also President of Meta Technologies, a technology sales and solutions company. He graduated from California State University, Hayward's School of Business and Economics with a B.S. in Information Systems. Onomea Tea Company currently has more than 2,200 tea plants and they hope to have three acres of plantings by 2012.

Le Yih
was born and raised in Hae-yang, a coastal city in eastern China's Shandong province.

Sebastian Beckwith
is the founder of In Pursuit of Tea and is a ranking American tea authority based in New York City. He teaches educational seminars at New York City's China Institute and the Institute of Culinary Education, as well as at museums and other venues. He also leads presentations with the internationally known, integrative health expert Dr. Andrew Weil at Columbia University. He spends several months each year in Asia sourcing teas.

Jane Pettigrew
left her career as a language and communications trainer to open her shop, Tea-Time, in Clapham Common, U.K. She has since become a lecturer, writer, and consultant about the world of tea. She has written 13 books on the many and varied aspects of tea, its production, history and culture, and she writes for tea-related magazines and journals. Ms. Pettigrew teaches tea masterclasses and tea tastings, speaks on radio and television, and acts as a consultant to tea companies, new tea businesses, and tableware and teaware companies.

FIFTH STEEP
Tea Travels

Acclaimed filmmaker
Les Blank
has made numerous documentary films since 1960, including
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
(1979),
Burden of Dreams
(1982),
Gap-Toothed Women
(1987), and
The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists
(1994).
Chulas Fronteras
(1976) and
Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers
(1980) have been selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Retrospectives of his films have taken place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Cinémathèque Fran-çaise in Paris. In 1990, Blank received the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award for outstanding lifetime achievement, and in 2007 he was the forty-eighth recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to the field. For more information about Mr. Blank and his films, visit
www.lesblank.com
.

Gina Leibrecht
is a filmmaker and editor living in San Francisco. In 2007 she completed the feature documentary
All in this Tea
with the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Her work has screened in festivals and been broadcast worldwide.

Robert Fortune
,
born in 1812, was a botanist from Scotland who was responsible for first bringing many of the secrets of tea out of China. As a young man, Fortune worked and trained at Edinburgh's Botanic Gardens. He eventually became London Horticultural Society's collector of Chinese plants and then was hired by the East India Company to sneak into China and bring out as many tea plants and seedlings and as much information about cultivation and production as possible. He brought 20,000 tea plants and seedlings to India's Darjeeling region. He published five books about his travels. Fortune died in 1880.

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore
was a writer, photographer, and geographer born in 1856 in Wisconsin. She was the first female board member of the National Geographic Society. She frequently visited Japan. Scid-more was the original advocate for the planting of the now-famous cherry trees in Washington D.C. She died in 1928.

James Norwood Pratt
was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and brought up on land that has been in his family since before the American Revolution. Pratt was educated at Chapel Hill and abroad, and published his first book on tea in 1982. He is one of the world's most widely read authorities on tea and tea lore, thanks to books translated into multiple languages, and numerous columns, articles, and print and TV interviews in U.S. and overseas media. The landmark
James
Norwood Pratt's Tea Dictionary
was published in 2009. He appears in several films and the theatrical production of
Okakura
and lives with his wife Valerie Turner in San Francisco.

Laura Childs
is the author of ten
Tea Shop Mysteries
.
They have been named to the
USA Today
and
New York Times
bestseller lists. For more information, go to
www.laurachilds.com
.

Brother Anthony
of Taizé was born in England in 1942. He has been living in Korea since 1980 and became a citizen in 1994 with the name An Sonjae. He is a professor emeritus at Sogang University, Seoul. He has published many translations of modern Korean literature. He is the co-author of
The Korean Way of Tea
and of
Three Korean Tea Classics
.
His home page (
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/
) is well-known.

Danielle Beaudette
,
owner of The Cozy Tea Cart, in Brookline, NH, is one of forty in the world who is certified as a Tea Specialist through the Specialty Tea Institute, NY and has completed more than thirty-five tea seminars at the World Tea Expo. She's traveled to China as part of a trade delegation, and to India and Sri Lanka to further her knowledge on the production of tea in these countries.

John Millstead
is a police officer in Texas. Prior to that he taught conversational English in China. He was also an international equity trader in Alaska. John has been married to his wife, Anna for over twenty years and they have two wonderful children: J.T. and Marlina.

Stefani Hite
is a former public relations/marketing art director turned educator. After several years of teaching and working as a school administrator, Stef and her husband Gary began organizing and leading student exchanges in the firm belief that there is no educational substitute for “being there” and that culture-based travel should be a component of every child's learning experiences.

Information about
Sir Edwin Arnold
can be found in the “About the Writers: THIRD STEEP: Tea Rituals”
section on page 249.

G. J. Gordon
,
Esq. was the committee secretary for the Tea Committee established by the British Government in the 1830s to examine the possibility of creating a tea industry in India. Gordon was sent on a mission to China to obtain tea seeds and plants, as well as trained tea makers.

Winnie W. Yu
is the Director/Founder of Berkeley, California's Teance. Winnie's passion for tea began at a young age in Hong Kong, an international mecca of local and foreign cuisines. Although fermented
pu-erh
teas were preferred by the old and
Tikuanyins
by the young, Winnie developed a taste for a wide range of teas, from green to black. After moving to the U.S., she was unable to find quality authentic and unblended teas, so she decided to import them herself. After working several years to establish sourcing and infrastructure, Winnie decided to challenge the project further by setting up a new concept of tea—that of a tea tasting program, expertly prepared and education-oriented, to properly introduce tea to the public in the U.S. To this end, Teance was created.

Elizabeth Knight
,
a former Tea Sommelier at the St. Regis Hotel, is regarded as one of America's foremost authorities on tea and entertaining. Knight is a certified English Tea Master, after studying with Edward Bramah of the Bramah Tea & Coffee Museum and completing the Whittard Tea Course and Examination in London, England. She has published several books on tea and entertaining including
Tea with Friends, Celtic Tea with Friends, Welcome Home,
and
Tea in the City: New York
.
Her writing has appeared in
Romantic Homes
,
Tea & Coffee Asia
,
and
TEA: A Magazine
and she speaks all over the country.

The Artists

Katie Sloss
has been studying, teaching, and enjoying art at Kaji Aso Studio in Boston for thirty-five years. She also teaches at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

Stephane Sewhuk Thomas
is a New Hampshire-based artist, former teacher, and mother of three boys.