LUCKY DRAGON HYSON

Hyson, which means “flourishing spring,” is a tea kind that tastes much like a spring day. Traditionally, hyson has been used to describe the long, rolled, twisted, and often practically clam-shaped leaves of older and medium-aged bushes (those below the new emerging shoots at the top of the bush). The adjective “young” was added to the name to emphasise that the tea was produced using tender fresh leaves.

A higher British Tea Tax was levied on this type because of its greater demand in the 1700s. While it is made in the young hyson style, Lucky Dragon is far superior to regular young hyson and comes from a special factory that has since become known for its tea.

The Brits have always had a thing with tea, even before it was commercially available there in the 1600s. Aware of the opportunities, the government imposed steep taxes on tea that stayed in place until the late 1700s, along with additional levies on “young hyson.” The number of tax avoidance strategies is as long as the fingers on one hand. Workers in affluent households would recycle the wasted leaves by drying them and reselling them. Some shady characters would ‘cut’ the tea with beech or hawthorn leaves to make it taste better. Around the middle of the 1700s, smuggling of Chinese tea into England reached a fever pitch, with ports in France and Belgium serving as “jumping off” locations for covert trips to Cornwall and Wales. After tallying up their losses, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the East India Company concluded that only a sizable reduction in taxes would make legitimate tea imports competitive with illegal ones. The Commutation Act of 1784 made this possible at long last