Did you know that Tea is actually a Chinese word？
Tea is perhaps the world’s oldest also the most popular drink, and tea plantation used to be only indigenous to China.
Chinese legend goes that the Yandi Emperor (炎帝，28th century B.C.) was once accidentally cured by drinking the magic water cooked with the tea leaves fallen into the pot. Enlightened by this incident, Yandi Emperor started to teach the Chinese people drinking tea.
Until mid 19th century, China was the only place where you can buy tea, but after 1838, when the British discovered a tea tree in northern India, this monopoly by the Chinese soon ended. Now there are a few major tea production areas in the world:
1. Northern Yunnan, western Sichuan, mainly outskirts of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.
2. South of Fujian, including part of Guangdong.
3. South India and Sri Lanka
4. East Africa (near Kenya).
Due to its special taste and its magic medical function to restore health, tea became one of the most important items of export for China since the 4th or the 5th century. By then, the Chinese international trade was mainly with the Asian countries like Korea, Japan and the Southeast Asian countries.
Europe had its first sip of tea in early 17th century, after a Portuguese missionary wrote about it in his book about his experience in Guangzhou. U.K. started the trade of tea with China in 1637, and soon established a tea trade office near Xiamen (Amoy) in 1644. About two decades later, when the East Indian Company came to the Wuyi Mountain (Fujian Province) to purchase the best tea, the local people told them, in their dialect, the name of this kind of plant is called “Tay or Tey”. Since then, this Chinese word, Tea, has winged its way to British English, the rest of the world, and entered almost every language spoken on earth, and that is one or another version of the Chinese word for tea.
The Chinese character for tea is 茶 , but it is pronounced differently in the various Chinese dialects. The British trade with Chinese mainly from Xiamen via the ocean Silk Road, but there are other countries, including Russia, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, who did trade with China in the northern border, where the pronunciation is “Cha”. So the word in these languages are pronounced closer to this dialect. In Russian, it is called “Chai”, in Turkish, it is called “Chay”, and in Arabian, it is called “Shai”.
Nowadays, tea has become one of the three popular drinks in the world, together with coffee and Coca Cola, and very few people has never tried a cup of tea, but how many people know the origin of this word?
