Explore the forgotten rural tea rooms of the early 1900s, built by women seeking financial independence and a public voice, serving as feminist hubs for suffrage and business
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• History
Trace the paths of tea across centuries and continents.
When Tea Became Chai
If you imagined that Chai was part of the traditional Indian kitchens and comes with a long history, you’ll be surprised to know that chai is very much a 20th-century creation. This week, India celebrates Independence Day, and seeing how many celebrations feature Chai as a cultural motif, I thought it was a good time to talk about chai and how tea became Chai.
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Drinking Tea History in Nara, Japan
The Butsuryu-ji Temple grounds are a treasure trove of historic tea memorabilia that includes statues of the famous Japanese Buddhist monk Kukai and his disciple Kenne and artifacts so significant to Japanese heritage that the national and local governments registered them as cultural properties.
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The Tea History Collection
The Tea History Collection fills a huge gap in the documentation of the history of the business of tea the world over. Very few individual tea companies possess archives that relate to their own history, and many other tea businesses simply disappeared when they closed or were bought out.
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Rediscovering 174 years of Tea
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew houses a remarkable cache of tea leaves and tea material culture collected over the past 174 years. Kew, a 326-acre botanical garden southwest of London opened in 1759 and today houses one of most diverse living and dried botanical and mycological collections in the world.
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A Remarkable Quest Reveals Untold Chapter in Tea History
From Hwuy-Chow Foo, a tea-growing district in Anhui, China to Pauri, India, the Nilgiris, Munnar, and Chennai … the Ajoo family story traverses an untold chapter in the history of Indian tea, a road James Ajoo is trying to retrace, “to say I landed my feet where my ancestor had walked.”
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Curios: First Tea Humidor
Encasing tea in these elegant jewelry cases of inlaid wood was deceptively challenging. This is because the world’s first tea humidor is exquisitely designed for modern travel — with all its variations in pressure, humidity, and temperature. It took artisans in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy four years to perfect […]
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Tea and Buddhism: Té if by Sea, Cha by Land
Tea and Buddhism: Much More than Just Contemplation It seems natural to associate Buddhism with tea. Tea expresses China’s history. It symbolizes the ethos and practices of yoga, Zen and meditation. Buddhism’s concerns for healthy daily living conjure up images evocative of tea. They highlight its calming, cleansing, contemplative, and […]
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Tearoom Revolution: The Weapon of Women’s Rights and Entrepreneurship
Tearooms are romantically portrayed as cozy and pleasant places to relax and enjoy teas with cakes, biscuits and sandwiches. Tearoom mythology is reinforced through evocations of scones and clotted cream. Hidden behind the Olde Worlde facade is a darker history. These unobtrusive locations became a force exploited by well-organized militants. […]
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Celebrating a Tea Party Artifact in Boston
Celebrate tea history and the American colonists’ protest against British rule at the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.
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Tea Cultivated 3,000 Years Before The Pyramids
Archaeologists digging in the Tianluo Mountains near Ningbo, in Zhejiang province, China, have traced the origin of tea to around 3,000 years before the first pyramids.
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