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Tea — The Way of TeaLesson 13 of 16

Key Terms: Tea

Goal: After this lesson you can define the core vocabulary from Episode 2 across all four lenses. Subject: Vocabulary | Run time: about 5 minutes

Your word bank for the Tea episode. Read it quick, out loud if you can. The full glossary lives in the course Resources.

Geography

Camellia sinensis (kah-MEE-lee-ah sih-NEN-sis). The single plant all true tea comes from. Green, black, oolong, and white differ only by processing (Mair & Hoh, 2009).

Theanine (THEE-ah-neen). An amino acid found almost only in tea and one species of mushroom (Mair & Hoh, 2009).

Climate zone. A region with a steady pattern of temperature, rainfall, and seasons. The zone shapes tea's flavor.

Flush. A seasonal burst of new growth, a harvest period. The spring first flush is often the most prized (Mair & Hoh, 2009).

Dormancy. A cold-season pause when the plant stops growing, which concentrates flavor in the leaf.

Terroir (teh-RWAHR). How geography, climate, and soil show up in flavor. For tea, the climate zone does much of this.

CTC process. Crush, Tear, Curl, an industrial method for commodity black tea, used heavily in Kenya.

Tea Horse Road. An overland route where Chinese tea was carried by caravan to Tibet and traded for horses (Mair & Hoh, 2009).

Maritime Silk Road. The sea route by which Dutch and British ships carried tea from China to Europe from the 1600s (Rappaport, 2017).

Social Studies

Chanoyu (chah-NOH-yoo). The Japanese tea ceremony, the Way of Tea, codified by Sen no Rikyu in the 1500s (Sen, 1998).

Wabi-sabi (WAH-bee SAH-bee). A sense of beauty in imperfection, the heart of the tea ceremony (Sen, 1998).

Mercantilism (MUR-kan-til-iz-um). An economic system in which colonies exist to benefit the imperial power.

Monopoly. Exclusive control of a commodity. The Tea Act of 1773 gave the East India Company a monopoly on colonial tea (Carp, 2010).

Intolerable Acts. The colonial name for Britain's punitive 1774 response, which closed Boston Harbor (Carp, 2010).

Indentured labor. Workers contracted under restrictive terms with little freedom to leave, used on British Assam tea plantations (Sharma, 2011).

Economics

Oxidation. The processing reaction that turns a green leaf into oolong or black tea. White tea is barely oxidized (International Tea Committee, 2023).

Value-added processing. Transforming a raw input to raise its worth. The same leaf is worth far more as white tea than as black (International Tea Committee, 2023).

Sequential extraction. Many cups from one measure of leaf. A good oolong steeps 6 to 8 times, pu-erh 10 to 20 or more (International Tea Committee, 2023).

Protected designation of origin. Legal geographic branding. Darjeeling, like Champagne, can carry its name only if it comes from that place (Rappaport, 2017).

English Language Arts

Cha. The family of tea words that spread overland on Central Asian routes, such as Hindi chai and Russian chai (Mair & Hoh, 2009).

Te. The family of tea words that spread by sea through the Fujian ports, such as English tea and French the (Mair & Hoh, 2009).

Cha Jing. Lu Yu's Classic of Tea (760 CE), the first comprehensive tea treatise in any language (Lu Yu, 760 CE).

Sources

  • Carp, B. L. (2010). Defiance of the patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the making of America. Yale University Press.
  • International Tea Committee. (2023). Annual bulletin of statistics 2023. https://www.inttea.com
  • Lu Yu. (760 CE). The classic of tea (trans. Carpenter, 1974). Ecco Press.
  • Mair, V. H., & Hoh, E. (2009). The true history of tea. Thames and Hudson.
  • Rappaport, E. (2017). A thirst for empire: How tea shaped the modern world. Princeton University Press.
  • Sen, S. (1998). The Japanese way of tea: From its origins in China to Sen Rikyu. University of Hawai'i Press.
  • Sharma, J. (2011). Empire's garden: Assam and the making of India. Duke University Press.
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