Cloud Tea Monkeys

by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham 

Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard 

A young girl named Tisha and her mother in in a small mountain village. While her mother works at a tea plantation, Tisha will spend her day playing with monkeys. One day her mother gets extremely sick and cannot work at the tea plantation. Tisha knows that she will have to do her mothers job or else they would have no money to pay a doctor to help her mother get well. When Tisha arrives at the tea plantation, the Overseer starts to laugh because he knows Tisha cant pick tea from bushes that are taller than her. Tisha then runs away to hide and cry because she knows she cant help her mother. While crying, Tisha's friends, the monkeys, come and take her empty tea basket and start to carry it up to the high part of the mountains. After awhile they come back down, with the basket full of tea leaves. With this, Tisha heads back to the plantation to show to the Overseer but when she arrives the Royal Tea Taster himself is there to inspect and taste the tea from the plantation. The tea taster goes through all the baskets of leaves and is not impressed until he reaches young Tisha's basket. The tea taster is overjoyed when he learns Tisha has cloud tea, a very very rare type of tea. Extremely happy the tea taster exchanges Tisha's tea leaves for a bag of money, which solves all of Tisha's problems all together. 

Authors Note: 

Many of the simple things we can buy easily and cheaply today in shops were once rare and precious. Merchants undertook hard, dangerous journeys to find and trade goods like salt, spices, sugar, cocoa-- and tea. 

Our story was inspired by this notion, and by the many tea-picking tales we found from the high mountain countries of the Himalayan region, where the finest tea grows. One tale tells of tells of monkeys who were taught to pick tea by monks. Another tells of farmers who drove monkeys away from their villages, and when the angry monkeys threw sticks back, the farmers discovered that the leaves on them made a wonderful drink.

Cloud Tea Monkeys is set in the past, but you can still buy "monkey-picked tea," though where or not it is really picked by monkeys is another story again....... 

This is a great book to talk to students about diversity and different life styles. It could be a great introduction to a history topic of how some things we take for granted and the issue of child labor and how that in some parts of the world not all children are granted the excess to education.