The author's grandmothers spent their lives in China and India, daily observing the imperial custom of afternoon tea. Inspired by their memories he set off to explore the fast-disappearing relics of their world - an exploration which reached back into the history of the tea trade. In a journey through the lost European cities of the China coast, the crumbling tea city of Calcutta, and the legendary gardens of Bohea and Darjeeling, the author evokes past and present with a sense of the ironies of history, following the tea trade from its origins in the Canton factories through the Opium Wars and the settlement of British India, to its influence in the present day.