Comment on Tea Time
Censored@lemmy.world 4 months agoIt’s not weird at all. China invented tea (Camellia sinensis). The cultivation techniques, the drying and fermenting, and the brewing techniques for various types of black, white, green, and oolong tea. They named it, too. Both “tea” and “chai” are derived from the Chinese word for tea.
Tea wasn’t cultivated in India until the nineteenth century, when it was introduced by colonial British who literally stole tea plants and seeds from China in an act of corporate espionage. At that point in time, China had been cultivating tea for multiple millennia, and exporting it around the globe for several hundred years. India initially produced CTC (cut, tear, crush) tea on colonial plantations for export, only later (in the 1900s) selling tea to the domestic Indian market, when the practice of adding CTC black tea to masala chai took off in India.
What’s weird is that you’ve bought into some kind of alternate history where India invented tea.
SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
I’m not the one who’s trying to change history here. We know that the Chinese have the oldest recorded tea consumption. Doesn’t make that the only valid way of doing it. It’s like saying that there’s only one authentic way to cook a potato, which is whatever the first person did with it.
And to add to whatever you said about tea being a new thing in India, it’s not accurate. It was first mass produced after the British came. But it actually goes back quite a bit. Camellia sinensis var. assamica is actually indigenous to the Assam region of India, and not “stolen from the Chinese”. Some think that some tribes in India (Singpho, Khamti) have been consuming tea from at least the 12th Century, though they had a different name for it. Some (A Revision of the Genus Camellia by Robert Sealy) think it goes back further, but idk about that.
But honestly, that’s not even the point. Why did you even feel the need to type this comment? Even if it was a 200 old tradition, that’s a pretty long time. And it should be accepted as a valid way of brewing. I’m not even disputing anything. I simply pointed out that there are alternative traditions. That the world isn’t fucking black and white. Seriously dude, when did I say anything that claimed that Indians invented tea? This isn’t twitter, no need to be an insufferable idiot here.