Royal Inspiration

We go abroad today to learn from the past.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Some aspects of culture are so ingrained that we cannot
imagine a time without them. It's easy to picture what
it was like to not have cars or cell phones
or email, but conceive what human life was like before
the invention of water filters requires a more subtle stretch
of the imagination. The same can be true of other
drinks and foods. The origins of alcohol, bread, and more.

(00:58):
We've known these things for so long the original incidents
that led to their invention are the stuff of myth.
And this is true for tea. It comes in such
a wide variety of flavors, green, black, herbal mint. It
has iterations that span an equally wide variety of cultures.
English breakfast tea, Darjeeling chai. They say more about the

(01:19):
people who prepared them than they do about their own history,
which makes you wonder where did tea come from in
the first place. We know it originated in East Asia
and slowly spread to the rest of the world. But
once you go far enough back in history, you find
yourself in a realm where myth and history intersect. In
the early two thousands BCE, Yan emperor shen Nong was

(01:41):
traveling with the column of Servants, a mythic figure in
Chinese folklore. It said in some stories that he was
born after his mother inhaled the breath of a dragon.
By the time he had grown into adulthood, he was
a polymath, an herbalist, and a scientist with an extremely
curious mind. In fact, it said that he journeyed all
the way across China to record every herb that grew

(02:03):
in the wild and what medicinal effects they might have.
As the story goes, during his travels, he stopped in
order to catch his breath. His servants dutifully began to
boil some water. Now shen Nong had learned a while
back that boiling water makes it safe to drink. While
the emperor sat patiently waiting for that, enjoying the summer air,
dried leaves from a nearby plant fell into the boiling water,

(02:26):
and the smell caught shen Nong's attention. Immediately, he experimentally
sipped the leaf infused water and was delighted by the
taste as well. He called his servants to gather around him,
and he declared that the drink made from these leaves
was healthy and refreshing and must be remembered. This plant,
according to the legend, was the camellia bush. Future botanists

(02:47):
when named this the Camellia sinensis or tea tree for short.
The drink made from this plant, tea would become a
global sensation. Although it started as a purely medicinal beverage,
historical records of tea started to appear some three thousand
years later in three hundred CE, where it was still
primarily used for medicine. It was during the Tang dynasty

(03:09):
from the six hundreds to the nine hundreds that tea
became a ubiquitous beverage to enjoy socially rather than just
for the health benefits. This period would become known as
the Classic Age of tea, and curiously, it's around this
time that we find another legend about the origin of tea,
this time from a Buddhist perspective, the man who would

(03:30):
bring Buddhism to China was an Indian monk called Bodhidharma.
The real man who bore that title likely lived in
the four hundreds, and the legend is without a date.
It is, like so many fables, timeless. It begins with
Bodhadharma meditating while staring at a cave wall. He would
stare at this cave wall for nine whole years in
an effort to clear his mind and focus on achieving enlightenment. However,

(03:54):
as soon as he'd begun, he became frustrated. His eyes
kept drifting clothes, and he kept dozing off. In order
to keep himself awake, the monk tore off his eyelids
and threw them to the ground where they had fallen.
A strange plant began to grow, a tea plant. Now,
these two origin stories of tea, where the plant came
from and who discovered the drink are incompatible if you

(04:17):
think about them as history, because it certainly wouldn't be
possible for the first tea plant to grow three thousand
years after the drink was discovered. But if you think
about them as culture, the stories seem not just possible
but inevitable. Tea is such a humble drink that it
only makes sense to attach its discovery to great figures
of myth and legend, characters that represent curiosity, discovery, and thoughtfulness,

(04:42):
all the qualities one would hope to cultivate while having
a peaceful cup of tea on a quiet afternoon. If
a cultural practice becomes common enough and inevitably becomes a legend,
all it needs is the right amount of time to steep.

(05:10):
Some stories are curious because of how delightful they are. Others, though,
have a bit of darkness, and today's tale is part
of the latter. That said, there's always something to learn
from history, so hold on and stay curious. The backdrop
of this story is unavoidably tragic that takes place on
the Islands of Hawaii during the late nineteenth century, when

(05:30):
the Kingdom of Hawaii was in the process of being
usurped by the Dull Pineapple Company in an illegal coup.
But even during such a dark period of Hawaiian history,
there is a glimmer of light, inspiring people whose tireless
work preserve their culture even in the face of aggressive
industrial exploitation. One of these was a member of the

(05:51):
Hawaiian royal family, a young woman named Kayo Lani, the
daughter of Princess Leke Leke and the Scottish businessman Archibald Scott.
She was the fourth in line to the Hawaiian throne.
Like any child in a royal family, she had responsibilities
thrust on her from an early age. According to those
who knew her, she loved to paint and she loved

(06:12):
to surf, and this latter hobby was frustrating to the
more conservative Christian residents of Hawaii, who disapproved of surfing
as an uncivilized native practice. As a child, she also
had a fondness for the peacocks kept on the grounds
of the Royal Hawaiian State. She would earn the nickname
the Peacock Princess due to the time she spent among

(06:33):
these colorful birds. In order to protect her from the
instability of the political situation in Hawaii, she was sent
to a boarding school in England, where she became fluent
in German and French on top of her native languages
of Hawaiian and English, and then, at the age of fifteen,
she was named Crown Princess of Hawaii by Queen Lily Ukulani.

(06:54):
Even while studying abroad, there's some evidence that she still
found time to surf, possibly become the first woman to
write a surfboard in the British Isles. Her cousins had
been the first men to do so, setting the record
a number of years earlier. Her education, sadly, though, would
be cut short by the political turmoil in Hawaii as
the kingdom was deposed. She and the queen became strong

(07:16):
advocates for Hawaiian independence, speaking out for the country that
they believed was being taken from them. She traveled to
Washington to make her case before Congress and President Grover Cleveland.
As she traveled through America, newspapers followed her closely. She
was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing Hawaii annexation and returned to

(07:36):
her home in Hawaii to join Queen Lili Okolani and
her father, and there she and the queen protested the
annexation ceremony by wearing black funeral dresses and refusing to attend.
You know, today we live in a post monarchy world.
Most kings and queens that still exist are ceremonial roles,
relics of great imperial past. Like the British Royal family,

(07:59):
but dedicateations to the Hawaiian royal family have a different
tone than Buckingham Palace. They were powerful monarchs, to be sure,
and the legacy of the Kingdom of Hawaii has a
purity to it before the sugar plantations and pineapple farmers arrived.
The island spirit that survives today somehow is undeluded by
its status as an American state. And as for Kaiolani herself,

(08:21):
while she's a figurehead of the spirit, the surfing painting
princess who traveled the world and then came home to
fight for the dignity of her people. If you were
on the island of Owahu in eighteen ninety you might
have caught a glimpse of this image at sunset, a
man and a young woman sitting beneath a banyan tree
near the Hawaiian Royal residence. And this woman, of course,

(08:42):
would be Princess Kaiolani, and the man, a Scotsman of
about thirty eight years, was author and poet Robert Lewis Stevenson,
writer of Treasure Island. He had made friends with the
Hawaiian royal family, and Kaiolani was quite fond of him.
Before he left the islands, he wrote a poem for her,
referencing her travels and indomitable spirit. It goes in part

(09:05):
like this fourth from her land to mine, she goes
the island made the island rose, But our Scott's Islands
far away shall glitter with unwonted day and cast for
once their tempest. Buy to smile in Kyle Lani's eye.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet

(09:27):
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the

(09:49):
Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.