The Word "Tea"

Tea is a loaded word. It goes back to the early days of Chinese history. Across the world, there are two main variations of the term: Tea, or ti, te, the, etc. and Cha, or Chai. Ti and Cha are different pronunciations of the same Chinese character, one, cha, is the standard Mandarin Chinese pronunciation. The other, ti, is from a southern dialect. Countries that pronounce the word Ti, or Tea first got the stuff from the southern port towns. Countries that pronounce Cha got tea earlier through land trade routes or inland trading. Notable examples of this are Japan and India.

Us "tea" drinking countries were introduced to the beverage through merchants as a commodity good. Those "cha" drinking countries were introduced to the beverage through Buddhist monks as a part of religious ceremony. Perhaps this is one reason that Japan, India, and China drink far more tea than other beverages, while Europe and America split the caffeinated market share with coffee.

Even the word "Cha" is a pretty new concept. At first, tea did not have a name of its own. It was simply known as one more medicinal herb. It's first real name was "ming." Later, when people realized that there could be different levels of quality to the drink, they named the high quality budset tea "cha." The more common leaf tea was known as "ming." Of course, every tea shop was claiming that all of their teas were "cha." Anyone honest enough to sell "ming" was going out of business. It soon became industry standard to refer to all tea, leaf or bud, as "cha." Now, nobody in China thinks of "cha" as a higher quality product. To give the connotation of quality, companies are bringing back ming by making a two character word: "ming-cha." In old times, this would be seen as a lower grade product, but China has forgotten the origins of its words, and now "ming" just sounds old and lofty. It is similar to putting thee and thou into English to sound fancy even though "you" was the more formal term and "thou" was the familiar term.

Because simpler terms like "ming" have become overused and lost their power, Chinese tea merchants have had to introduce more and more elaborate descriptions to denote quality. Thus you might see something awkward and preposterous like: Premium imperial palace tribute grade dragon phoenix jasmine pearl supreme. I have really seen this in my travels. It is always a letdown drinking such a loftily named tea and having it taste average.

The Chinese character for tea is actually quite simple. It is closely related to the character for bitter herb. The top part is a picture grass growing out of the ground. This is the part of the character that gives meaning to the word. The bottom is phoenetic. It is just a character that is pronounced like "cha" to help readers. The character "ming" is the same picture of grass with a different phonetic. Despite their differences and connotations, they both go back to humble roots, the idea of plants growing out of the earth.