Why do we drink tea?
People drink tea for all sorts of reasons. For some, it wakes them up at the start of the day, for others it comforts them at a tough time. It revitalises, hydrates, comforts and pleases. There are many different ways to drink tea and the way it’s consumed can be really personal and special.
What are the types of tea?
There are many different types of tea. To truly be tea the leaves have to come from the Camellia sinensis plant. Black tea is the most popular tea in the UK.
Did you know? Green tea, white tea, black tea, oolong and pu’er tea all come from the Camellia sinensis plant. The difference is how they are processed and how long they are processed for.
Why is it called a cup of char?
There are a few different schools of thought as to the origin of the phrase ‘a cup of char’.
One is that ‘char’ is the anglicisation of the Bengali ‘cha’. Another is that it is an anglicisation of the Mandarin ‘tcha’. The ‘ar’ sound comes from the way the ‘a’ sound is said in British English.
Why is it called tea?
‘茶’ is widely accepted as the Chinese hàn zì (character) for tea. Its pronunciation differs across the richly diverse peoples, cultures and language groups of China.
In Cantonese and Mandarin, it is generally pronounced ‘Chá’; while across Wu Chinese dialects it can be ‘Zo’ or ‘Dzo’, and in Min Chinese, ‘Te’, ‘Tey’ or ‘Tê’.
Sellers and buyers from places using the Silk Road and Mongol trade routes adopted the northern Chá, while European maritime traders used the southern pronunciation, Tê.
茶 can be broken into three parts (or ‘radicals’). The top section means grass, the middle part, people, and the bottom, tree. Together, these speak of the relationship between people, land and nature that is central to the cultivation of tea.
Together these speak of the relationship between people, land and nature that results in the tea that we drink.
Where did chai tea originate?
In the West we might think of ‘chai tea’ as different to ‘a cup of tea’ but ‘chai’ literally translates to ‘tea’ in Hindi – so it doesn’t really make sense to say ‘chai tea’ at all.
In India, chai is drunk everywhere and anywhere and can be bought from vendors on the street, in shops and on trains. Chai is the standard way of preparing tea.
What’s in chai tea?
For the most part, chai is made up of black tea, whole milk, and a selection of spices including cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, star anise and cloves. It is sweetened with or jaggery (unrefined cane sugar) or white sugar. To make chai these ingredients are slowly added to boiling water, before being strained.
How valuable is tea?
In 2022 the global tea market was valued at 220.7 billion US dollars.
When tea was introduced to Great Britain in the mid-17th century it was a novelty, and mostly for the wealthy and upper classes. It was kept in locked tea chests to stop it from being stolen and domestic servants like maids were given a tea allowance as part of their wages. At this time, more tea was smuggled into the UK yearly than was legally imported.
In the 18th Century, the import tax on tea was lowered from 119% to 12.5%.
This meant that the East India Company didn’t have the monopoly on the tea industry that they had once had, as tea was now affordable. Smuggling became less and less necessary – tea was accessible to everyone in Britain.
Tea bricks were used as a form of currency in China, Mongolia, Tibet, Russia and other central Asian nations until the early 1900s.
The indentations helped the owner to break off portions to either use as currency, eat, or brew. You can see tea bricks with various patterns on in the 茶, चाय, Tea (Chá, Chai, Tea) exhibition.