Tea Cultures of the World: From the Japanese Tea Ceremony and Chinese Gongfu to Indian Chai and the Russian Samovar

Each culture took the leaf that reached it and made it local. Peter Keen, writing for us in 2016, pointed out that the very same types of tea, green and black, are adopted and adapted in such different ways that they become distinct styles of drink. Moroccan green tea is a base for mint, Turkish black tea a base for sugar, and Iranian black tea is drunk for its plain, full body.

How tea arrived shaped what it became. In the Netherlands, Portugal, France and Britain it began the same way, as a luxury drunk in ceremonial style by the upper class. Only in Britain did it become the national drink across all classes; in France it stayed a dining-out occasion, which is why French tea is still about rare, flavored blends.

The biggest drinkers are not always the biggest growers. By the figures our blog cited in 2016, 15 of the top 30 tea-drinking countries were in the Middle East and North Africa, a region that drank a quarter of the world’s tea, while none of the four big producers, China, India, Kenya and Sri Lanka, was among the top 20 drinkers per person.

Some traditions are even invented. The Welsh settlers of Patagonia built a tea-house culture that Peter Keen called “charming though largely fake,” since Wales never had a tea tradition of its own, and yet “still a very real heritage.”

All three grew from China, where tea was first drunk. Its earliest written trace is a contract of 59 BC, in which the poet Wang Bao ordered a servant in Chengdu to boil tea for guests and to walk to the market town of Wuyang to buy it. Buddhist monks later carried tea to Korea and Japan.

Our writers have sat through two of them. One drank more than ten tiny cups of baozhong at a tea shop in Pinglin, Taiwan, as the owner brewed each round for only a few seconds. Another watched a darye ceremony at the 2015 Australian International Tea Expo.

India’s tea habit is older than its tea industry. The Singpho people of Upper Assam were brewing tea from wild bushes before 1823, when they showed it to the Scottish trader Robert Bruce. On a 2016 visit, our team tasted Assam tea with the slightly smoky flavor native to the Singpho. More on the region in Assam tea.

That visit took our writer Richa Gupta to the Singpho Eco Village in Margherita with Ravi Kothari, our procurement manager. Their first cup of coin tea came with a piece of jaggery on the side. In Rajesh Singpho’s backyard the family plucked from tea plants at least 8 to 10 feet tall, and Ravi, after many years in the trade, admitted he had never seen tea bushes that tall. Rajesh told them, with quiet pride, that the Singpho were the first Indians to find and drink tea as we know it. The full story of Singpho coin tea is on our blog.

Chai for everyone came later. After World War I, Indian and Eurasian vendors with stoves and kettles began selling tea at the railway stations of Bengal, Punjab and the Frontier provinces, and old posters in regional languages can still be found at Ballygunge, Naihati and Dum Dum stations in Bengal. The full story of how India learned to drink its own tea is in The history of tea in India.

Every city has its own way:

• Mumbai’s cutting chai: “cutting” means a half-cup, gulped at a street stall or dipped with bun maska at an Irani café.
• Kolkata’s addas: endless conversation over chai in kulhads, unglazed clay cups the city calls matir bhaar.
• Kashmir: on a Srinagar houseboat, the chaiwallah asks which one you want, “noon or kahwa?” Noon chai is the salty pink tea; kahwa is green tea with saffron and spices, traditionally kept hot in a samovar, which in Kashmir was made of brass or copper.
• Punjab’s dhabas: highway stops pouring spicy, strong chai for travelers.
• Kerala’s chai kadas: small chai stalls on every corner of the state, where chai comes with pazham pori and bonda, the local snacks.

Bombay’s Irani cafés are a tea culture of their own, with marble tables, Czech bentwood chairs and treacle-colored chai served in white cups and saucers. Legend has it that the color comes from boiling milk, tea and sugar with eggshells, a story that has never been proved. When B Merwan on Grant Road faced closure in 2016, the city wrote letters to keep it open.

Chai is almost never drunk alone. Pakoras, nimki and crisp rusks are the classic companions. The samosa came to India through the Persians as “sanbosag,” and ginger chai with samosas on a rainy day is a pairing “which can never fail.” In the hill stations, tea time could be very British: a writer who grew up in the Nilgiris remembered retired Parsi officers who took their tea “strong, with a dribble of cold milk, a spoon of sugar,” with hot buttered toast or Marie biscuits. She learned that cup from Major Fally Vakharia in Coonoor, and kept a standing date with Erach Avari for tea at 4 pm on Thursday afternoons.

To go deeper, start with What is chai?, then Types of chai in India, Kashmiri pink chai and Kashmiri kahwa. Or taste the cities in our chai collection.

Peter Keen, a Briton who wrote for us for years, had to admit that “the best tea shops in the world and places to enjoy afternoon tea are French.” In East Frisia, by his account, half a million people drink a quarter of all the tea in Germany. The British habit also traveled, to Boston Harbor, to the first tea shop in Brisbane in 1883 and to the Welsh tea houses of Patagonia.

Our former intern Olga, from Russia, gave us her family’s smetannik, a sour cream cake for the tea table, and we tasted it with Assam black tea and raspberry jam. In Thimphu, our writer’s butter tea arrived looking like “frothy hot chocolate” with a light purple hue, and tasted “more like a gentle broth.” Olga’s recipe and a Middle Eastern spiced tea are both on the next page.

Eight more from our stories

Our writers’ travels and essays add these to the list, from a hill village in Taiwan to the coast of Patagonia.