The Tea Maven

“Tea” in European Languages (map)

This is what the tea that was dumped into the Boston Harbor would have looked like. In the 1700s, tea was compressed into planks; a plank this size could last a person roughly a year. They would be bought in sections, and small slivers would be shaved off into the kettle every time somebody wanted to make a cup of tea.

They dumped forty-six tons of the stuff into Boston Harbor; that’s worth $1.7 million USD adjusted for inflation.

Here’s one:

https://www.teasource.com/products/2013-yicha-shou-puer-tea-brick

(not gonna get into the differences between the bricks posted in the first image and the last, because that’d be nitpicking, but it is worth noting that one shows a black tribute brick meant to be ground up, while the other shows a single-use tab of compressed full-leaf puer tea)

This is one of those myths that has gotten so big that it ends up in textbooks, but it’s not true. Without getting into the history of compressed tea bricks and the boiled age of tea, they were commonly used as currency AND traded outside of China, but this was only by caravan, where compressed tea bricks were easier to transport by donkey/horse than was large chests of loose tea. It also lasted longer because travelling by horseback tended to take awhile, and it mostly disappeared when the main trade routes were updated to trains.

And it was only regions directly surrounding China, most notably Tibet, Russia and Mongolia, where tea was still commonly boiled, so old-skool bricks were more common.

In terms of tea-by-water, it is well documented as loose leaf in chests, and is the reason for the rise of Tea Clippers, which were fragile, speedy ships designed expressly to get the tea to the London Tea Auctions (where they were graded by leaf-size and quality) from Canton as quickly as possible, before it went stale (brick tea did not go stale as quickly as loose leaf tea). America apparently didn’t have an appetite for brick tea at all.

The tea brought to Boston was in chests, and thought to be Bohea, Congou, Souchong, Singlo and Hyson. There’s some evidence of Bohea teas being compressed for transport in the immediate area, but not for export-by-sea. The rest were not, plus Singlo and Hyson were both green teas.

On top of this, eye-witness reports document the loose tea being piled up like hay, where it was dispersed using rakes.

This is what the tea that was dumped into the Boston Harbor would have looked like. In the 1700s, tea was compressed into planks; a plank this size could last a person roughly a year. They would be bought in sections, and small slivers would be shaved off into the kettle every time somebody wanted to make a cup of tea.

They dumped forty-six tons of the stuff into Boston Harbor; that’s worth $1.7 million USD adjusted for inflation.

Here's one:

https://www.teasource.com/products/2013-yicha-shou-puer-tea-brick

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.