During the height of China’s tea trade with Europe, the European tea buying representatives had the difficult task of trying to communicate with the Chinese tea merchants. During that time China only produced green and black teas, with green for their own consumption and black for export. |
Eventually, though, green tea was also exported and to identify the different vari- eties of tea, the Westerners used corrupt trans- literations of either the Chinese names for the tea or the places they were grown.An example is the term bohea which was used to describe the dark, big leaf teas from Wuyi Shan. Other examples are Singlo green tea, a corruption naming of teas eventually became more exact, |
referring to specific teas or replaced with names that identified a specific origin or classification.
In the mid 1600s there were two main areas that Chinese tea was The history of the words used for tea in different areas of the world The character for tea is pronounced and spelled similar to te in the Min Nan dialect (also referred The character is pronounced cha or ch’a in both the Cantonese dialect spoken China’s early tea trade with the West was established by the Dutch, Portu- The following are the two pronunciation branches and the variations used worldwide (the various te – Catalan, Danish, Hebrew, Italian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish Enjoy. |