Tea Revives the World, 1940 (colour litho)

This map by MacDonald Gill, issued in 1940 for the International Tea Market Expansion Board Ltd., was produced to celebrate the origin and culture of tea. A scroll inserted at the lower left of the map includes three panels with facts about tea consumption and production, including an impressive statement that ‘Over 300,000,000,000 cups of tea are drunk a year’. Numerous annotations related to tea production, trade and consumption cover the face of the map, i.e. ‘The first shipment of Ceylon tea was sent to London in 1873, To-day Ceylon is the second largest supplier of tea in the World’ or ‘The British Navy drinks two tons of tea every day’. Each annotation is accompanied by a vignette emphasising the role of tea in modern society, drawing from history and different cultures, showing how the entire world depends on tea.