Price of tea in China

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"The price of tea in China" is an expression which is used to denote something which is unrelated to the current topic of discussion.

It has been said that this expression has stemmed from economists, who describe everything economic as affecting everything else, trying to find an expression which denotes the furthest logical connection from their current economic focus. In this way, the price of tea in China was used to denote the furthest possibility. It can also be used to denote an irrelevant topic.

It has the most common form "what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?", as a retort to an irrelevant suggestion. This facetious usage implies that the topic under discussion might as well be the price of tea in China for all the relevance the interlocutor's suggestion bears on it.

There may be a second explanation.

In the 19th century the price for tea in England was the highest when the first ship with the newly harvested tea from the tightly controlled Chinese markets came in. So for the ship owners it was important to be as fast as possible back to England with the load, otherwise the cost of the passage might not be recovered from the sale of the tea. Thus there were real races (the tea clipper races) where the sail ships managed to travel the whole distance from China to England in about 80 to 90 days.

The difference in prices from the first load to the later ones was so high that the original price which was paid for the tea in China was quite unimportant. So the "price of tea in China" was something that really didn't matter for the ship owners. They had to have the tea in England as fast as possible.

A similar phrase is "the price of fish in Ireland" which is used in the exact same sense, such as "what does that have to do with the price of fish?"