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Pai Mu Tan, Bai Mu Dan, or White Peony? All 3 names refer to the same tea.
According to Wikipedia, a style guide “is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field.” While there are many such guides in circulation nowadays, some of the best known are probably The Chicago Manual of Style and The Associated Press Stylebook.
While these and other such manuals are certainly useful for general purposes, for those of us who write about tea and others in the industry as well it would be useful to have a style guide for tea. While there are a variety of issues that could be solved by such a document, two of the main ones would be standardization of some of the most basic tea terms and determining the correct spellings for the many varieties of tea.
As far as tea terms go it’s hard to find a definitive answer for even some of the most basic questions. Take “tea bag,” for example. Most of us would probably agree (as do Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster and Answers.com, to name a few) that it should be spelled as I just did, as two words. But it’s not at all uncommon to see it spelled “teabag,” and you’ll even see this usage at Wiktionary and a Facebook page for The Tetley Teabag Story, among many others. Google doesn’t seems to be completely decided on the issue, with a search for “teabag” bringing back results spelled both ways.
But even though the consensus is (arguably) that tea bag should be two words, things are not so cut and dried when it comes to other such compound tea terms, like tea house, tea room, or even the humble tea cup. While it seems that all of the foregoing are most often spelled as single words, a simple Internet search reveals this is hardly a hard and fast rule, and indeed it may not even be a rule so much as the status quo.
As if that didn’t muddy the waters enough, there’s the truly confusing (or maybe it’s just me) matter of the many and varied spellings for actual types of tea. Granted, much of the confusion in this area has to do with Chinese tea varieties and the translation of terms from Chinese languages to English, a topic I don’t even pretend to understand. But what it all boils down to is that there are typically several different names in common usage for any Chinese variety of tea, a situation that can be downright confusing even for people who have been around tea for a while, much less for newcomers.
For more background on the tricky issue of tea names, check out the article Tea Name Circus, which previously appeared in these very pages. Also worth a look is this chart listing The 10 Most Famous Chinese Teas, with their English and most commonly used Chinese names. While it goes into more detail than most casual tea drinkers require, here’s an informative article that tackles the somewhat daunting topic of the Romanization of Chinese Tea Names.
See also:
A Tea by Any Other Name
Some of the Strangest Tea Names
Some of the Coolest Tea Names
Women’s Names and Tea
Tea Name Circus
Men’s Names and Tea
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
teany
Is there anything more rock and roll than tea? Umm. Well, if the truth be told, tea is probably still suffering from something of an image problem. You know the one — elderly women in festive hats gathering in stuffy tea houses to drink so-so tea and eat those little sandwiches with the crusts removed.
Which still happens, now that you mention it, but tea has been undergoing something of an upgrade in its image of late, and it can’t hurt this makeover that several members of the rock and roll community have opened, or are planning to open, tea houses and tea shops.
Take Moby, for instance, who’s probably the member of this tiny group of tea sellers with the longest standing. In 2002, the popular electronic musician opened Teany, a café and restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A reflection of the musician’s vegan lifestyle, Teany began by offering a range of tea and vegan foods and later branched out with their own line of bottled tea.
Brian Ritchie is not exactly a household name, unless you live in a household that favors so-called alternative rock, including the type popularized by the likes of the Violent Femmes. The “Grandfathers of Folk-Punk” (one of the catchy monikers listed at their web site), the group was founded in 1980 and are apparently still going strong. However Ritchie, who eventually branched out and became a certified instructor of the Japanese flute, relocated to Hobart, Tasmania in the 2000s and opened a tea house called Chado The Way of Tea. More on that venture in this Fast Company article.
Arguably the most high-profile of these rock and roll tea merchants, Billy Corgan is a founding member and leader of Smashing Pumpkins, who formed in Chicago in 1987 and have been going strong — with a few minor lapses — ever since. As announced in Chicago Eater, in late 2011, tea fan Corgan and a partner announced that they were planning to open a “1930s Chinese-style tea house” in the Highland Park suburb of his native Chicago. As noted later in the Chicago Sun-Times “the tea menu will tout flavors and aromas from around the world, from greens to organics and exotics.”
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The Way of Tea: Reflections on a Life with Tea
In the course of several years spent writing about tea at this site, at my own site, and various others, I’ve read and reviewed quite a few tea books and have encountered a lot of other titles in passing. On the whole they seem to fall into a few main categories. There are the broad overviews about tea, which attempt to summarize the whole story of the beverage and culture in one handy volume. It’s a feat that some authors have managed to pull off quite nicely. There are also those books that are more geared to delivering recipes, whether for tea-based drinks or dishes made with tea as an ingredient.
Another main category consists of those less numerous volumes that deal with the spiritual (for lack of a better term) aspects of tea drinking and tea culture. One of the earliest of these, dating from more than a century ago, is Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea. Another volume with a decidedly Asian bent is The Chinese Art of Tea, which was published in 1985, by the prominent Asian scholar John Blofeld.
More recently, in 2011, we’ve seen the release of an interesting work by Asian scholar Daniel Reid, who wrote The Art and Alchemy of Chinese Tea. It follows hot on the heels of The Way of Tea, by Aaron Fisher, which was published the year before. While the title of the latter volume does not indicate any particular slant toward Asian tea culture, it does approach its subject matter from that direction, as do the other books mentioned here.
Like Blofeld and Reid, who were both noted for their writings on the Asian tradition of Taoism, Fisher also takes a look at the links between this particular way of life and tea. In his opening chapter, The Tao of Tea, he notes, “drinking tea with Tao is about letting go all our ‘stuff’ and just being ourselves as we really are, in our true nature.”
You’re not going to find a whole lot of information here on tea history and the more nuts and bolts type of information that other authors of tea books focus on. Which is not surprising, given that the sub-title of Fisher’s work is “Reflections on a Life With Tea.” It’s a relatively brief book overall, combining an introduction with twelve short chapters of the author’s thoughts on the more esoteric aspects of tea. The other chapters in Fisher’s book, Calm Joy, Quietude, Presence, Clarity, and Completion, are indicative of the approach he takes toward tea and tea culture.
If you’re looking for a tea-related thought worth remembering, then try this one, which the author offers near the end of this volume, “there is so much that just cannot be said, though it can be shared in a cup of tea.”
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
“To educate, or not to educate? That is the question!” Ah, if Shakespeare were alive today! He would tell tea shop owners a thing or two. Selling anything is tough. Selling something like tea can be even tougher, especially to a customer base raised on instant tea, weak tea in a string-and-tag bag, and the other stuff available these days in most larger grocery stores. How do you sell a fine Tie Guan Yin to them? How do you even get them to understand the difference between those herbal things and real tea from the tea bush Camellia Sinensis? Hey, a tea shop is there to sell, not educate, right?
Help your customers understand what wonders hide in those bins
A discussion came up on Twitter a short while ago about tea shops catering to their uneducated tea customers or taking time and effort to help their customers learn about the finer points of tea. I say “discussion,” but actually, someone was responding to my fairly annoyed tweet about a tea vendor with a chain of tea shops who promotes flavored tea concoctions over premium teas.
First, let me thank the person I had the exchange with for her patient attitude and for not getting mad at or disgusted with me. Quite commendable.
Anyway, this person made some very salient, if disturbing, points:
- Tea shops are focused on making a profit, not on educating consumers (very sensible).
- Tea shops don’t have as high a profit margin (a.k.a. “mark-up”) on premium teas as they do on those flavored concoctions they sell. (I haven’t researched this to confirm it, but if it’s true, it’s rather disheartening, since it motivates the promotion and selling of these low-end teas.)
- Strong aromas bring in customers and inspire them to buy. (I have been one of those lured in by an aroma only to walk out with a purchase that later proved to be not worth the price, so I can accept this point as factual.)
- Some tea shops actually take the time and effort to educate their staff about tea. (A tough job since many customers don’t know the difference between the tea from one Darjeeling garden versus another, or even that there are tea gardens in Darjeeling, or even that there is a place called Darjeeling and such things as tea gardens.)
Now, wanting to make a profit is not upsetting in the least to me. Businesses have to make a profit sooner or later to stay in business. However, selling something that most of the public knows little or nothing about can be a bit of a dilemma. Do you promote the low-quality stuff that sells easily and has a higher mark-up? Or do you try to educate your customers at least enough to know that even your flavored teas are not low-quality and that you flavor them with only the best ingredients carefully selected? The latter will also help the tea shop owner sell more of those premium teas.
The smart tea shop owner knows that helping his customer learn more about tea will garner repeat business, where the more the customer learns, the more he wants to try beyond those wild flavored teas. It’s one reason this blog exists, I know for sure, having written for it since September of 2009. Meeting customers’ needs is important, but helping them learn more will in the long run be highly appreciated.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
With the move toward shopping online, especially for such things as tea, having a good online presence can be the only thing between you and a customer. Making a really good site that reflects truly who you are and why those customers should buy your products instead of clicking away to another site is absolutely essential, yet so easy to spoil.
Gorgeous photos like this one do not a good tea web site make.
Here are some no-no’s for the truly professional tea store site, things that can get people to click away faster than you can say “tea bag”:
- Misspellings — Yes, I said misspellings. No, we’re not talking spelling bees here, but if your site is peppered with things like “infooser” or “Darjelling” it can give customers the impression that their orders will get the same lack of attention to detail.
- Scant info about you — No “About Us” page or one that gives no useful info about you and your company can make some customers reluctant to deal with you. While we all know that we have to be careful about personal information we put online, having little or none makes it seem that your company is not legitimate, or that it is really a front for some larger company trying to look like a small vendor. A “Contact Us” page or section is also essential. Who wants to order from a company that is shrouded in mystery and has no way, not even an email address, to contact them for more information on their products and/or their company before ordering? Not me.
- Design overkill — Flashy design that’s hard to navigate through (Arizona Tea is a good example here) with things animating and/or popping up when you mouse over them.
- Broken links — Almost impossible to avoid and the bane of any web site owner’s existence, links that go to the wrong place or that pop up one of those “page not found” messages definitely say that this site isn’t all that important to you.
- Under construction or blank pages — Your site should never never never have these. They are so old school as in the early days of web site design, and they were a really bad idea then.
- Too much focus on the photos — Beautiful photography that ends up overwhelming the customer does not increase sales. Remember that the photos are there first and foremost to present your products truthfully to the customer.
- Overly sensitive click areas — Large linked areas so that the user ends up clicking and going somewhere they don’t want to directs your customers away from where they want to be and can lose a sale.
- Inconsistent menu display — “Now you see it, now you don’t” is fun for games but frustrating to customers trying to navigate through your site. Menu bars and “breadcrumb trails” will help here.
- Functionality that doesn’t function — This is especially true of your shopping cart feature. You may think this is a no-brainer with all of the shopping site setup applications out there, but it happens more than I care to think about. Test, test, and test again before launching the site, and keep checking it to be sure it’s still working.
- Insufficient/inaccurate product information —Unsubstantiated health claims are the worst, but the next one is a description that says “black tea” or “green tea” or something like “flavored with a mix of spices.” Food allergies abound, so you could be turning away potential sales. No one is asking you to give away your secret formula, but saying that your tea is Ceylon black with cinnamon and a dash of vanilla won’t be a real recipe revealer.
In addition to these no-no’s is the big issue of poor customer service. I try to assess how customers will be treated by the companies who send me their samples to try. For example, if a company emails me to ask if I want samples and I respond with yes and my mailing address and then they don’t send anything or contact me in any way whatsoever after that, it tells me that ordering from them will probably not be the best experience either. If they do send samples and they are the wrong ones, it can indicate that order filling accuracy is a low priority.
Hope these tips help you assure that your web site is a plus for you!
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Photo by David Johnson
The last article I wrote for this site (though publication schedules won’t necessarily reflect it) was a profile of Thomas Twining, the man responsible for creating the company that became Twinings of London. It’s company that’s survived and thrived for more than three hundred years now, a considerable feat given the whopping number of businesses that have failed over the course of those same centuries.
Jump to the present day and examine the case of one Steven Smith, a tea merchant who has been behind not one and no, not two, but a total of three successful tea companies, at least for now. At the Web site for his current venture, Steven Smith Teamaker, Smith claims that his mother referred to him as “a born teamaker” and it could well be that Mrs. Smith was on to something.
Smith’s tea making and tea selling activities got underway in 1972, when he was the manager of a natural foods store in Portland, Oregon and he and two partners founded a company known as Stash Tea. The company thrived (and still does to this day) but in 1993 it was acquired by a Japanese tea company and Smith moved on to his next tea venture.
That was Tazo Tea, a brand which got underway in the kitchen of Smith’s home and grew to the point where, in 1999, it was acquired by another company based in the Pacific Northwest, a little coffee chain known as Starbucks. Smith hung around for a while after the acquisition to run the show at Tazo, finally leaving the company in 2006 and spending a couple years in France.
When the many charms of Europe began to pale Smith moved back to his old stomping grounds in Portland and started his third and current tea company. Steven Smith Teamaker is something of a departure from his previous ventures, which, though they started out in a modest way, eventually grew to become fairly sizable players in the mass merchandising of tea. As noted in a press release announcing the creation of the company, in 2009, “Steven Smith Teamaker is a family-owned business focused on producing small batch, whole leaf tea crafted at the hands (literally) of passionate tea pioneer Steve Smith.”
For more on Smith, take a look at this recent profile in the Wall Street Journal.
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Lu Yu, author of Cha Jing, or The Classic of Tea, is often referred to as the patron saint of tea. He was a colourful character with expertise in many areas – not only tea.
Lu Yu, the patron saint of tea
Born in 733 CE in Jingling, Fuzhou (now Tianmen City, Hubei Province) about 125 miles southwest of Shanghai, Lu Yu was abandoned at the age of three. A Zen master at Longai Monastery found and adopted him. The monks consulted the I-Ching (The Book of Change) for a name for the boy. Lu Yu can be translated as “an earthy holy person”; there appears to be no record of his birth name.
It was at the monastery that Lu Yu began learning about the art of tea from the monks, who drank tea while they practiced meditation. Many of the monks were quite knowledgeable about tea.
Having no interest in Buddhism, Lu Yu left the monastery at the age of twelve. He subsequently spent several years in a performing troupe, earning fame as a comedian. During this time he wrote three books about comedy.
His popularity as a performer, and his considerable skill in preparing tea, brought him to the attention of high-ranking officials. One of these officials, a well-respected scholar, agreed to take him as a student. For six years Lu Yu studied what we would now call the liberal arts. He often prepared tea for his teacher and his fellow students.
One day, while gathering tea leaves and herbs in the countryside, Lu Yu discovered a spring with very clear water. The tea he made with this water was exceptional, and Lu Yu then understood the importance of water quality to tea.
Against a backdrop of civil war, Lu Yu set off at the age of 21 on a mission of research. Over the next two years, he collected samples of various types of teas. He then returned to Jingling to compile and study the samples.
Lu Yu worked for a time on tea farms to study cultivation and processing, but still felt that his education was lacking. When he was appointed an editor of a new imperial library, he came across a number of historical records on all aspects of tea – information that he never would have been able to research on his own in one lifetime. His tea education was now complete.
Cha Jing, the culmination of over 25 years of study and research, was the first comprehensive book written about tea. Lu Yu also developed new methods of preparing tea, as well as equipment to accommodate these methods, including a three-legged stove. These are documented in Cha Jing.
Lu Yu went on to write many other books on a number of topics – history, biographies, geography – as well as other books about tea. He was also a poet, a playwright, and a calligrapher. Sadly, most of his writings have been lost to history. Fortunately Cha Jing has survived. As the first “encyclopedia” of tea, it should be on every tea student’s reading list.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Once upon a time, you could safely say that the art of tea and the Chinese art of tea were the same thing, given that the Chinese are credited with being the first people to drink our beloved beverage. But even though tea drinking eventually spread to other countries it’s worth noting that the Chinese culture of tea drinking is still a strong one. There’s also the fact that the Chinese are the world’s top producers of the stuff, including a number of varieties that are considered by many to be among the best available.
The Chinese Art of Tea
Over the course of the last decade or so the Western world has seen a considerable rise in interest in tea and tea culture, be it Chinese or otherwise. But this was not the case in 1985, when lackluster tea bags still ruled the roost in many parts of the West and the notion of drinking tea that was actually recognizably Chinese would have been considered very exotic.
It was in this landscape that John Blofeld published his pioneering book, The Chinese Art of Tea. A scholar who lived in and traveled extensively throughout Asia, Blofeld published a number of books on Buddhism, Taoism and other aspects of Asian religion and culture, with this particular volume the last of his works to be published in his lifetime.
It’s a work that would have been considered impressive even today, when tea scholarship is arguably a more common thing, but in Blofeld’s day it was quite a striking accomplishment. He starts off with a chapter on Tea in History and Legend and then explores such classic works as The Emperor Hui Tsung’s Treatise on Tea and A Ming Dynasty Tea Manual. There are chapters devoted to tea gardens and teahouses and also the relationship between tea and ceramics.
On the more spiritual side of things are chapters devoted to Poems and Songs of Tea, A Manual for Practising the Artless Art, and Tea and the Tao. Blofeld winds up things with a chapter devoted to tea’s potential health benefits, a chapter that predates much of the flood of interest in tea and health that we’ve been deluged with over the last decade or so.
Blofeld’s book was an important pioneering work on tea and tea culture in China, but it’s interesting to note that it was hardly the last such work. In 1990, authors Kit Chow and Ione Kramer released the appropriately titled All the Tea in China. More recently, in 2011, Daniel Reid, another noted scholar of all things Asian, released a volume titled The Art and Alchemy of Chinese Tea. For more on that work, look here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Typhoo tea
If you head out to the Internet looking for tea books from yesteryear, you’ll find enough to keep you occupied for a very long time. I’ve written about quite a few such works in these very pages, but to the best of my recall I can’t think of one that was written by an author who later went on to found a well-known tea company.
Until I recently ran across a book called A Popular Treatise on Tea: Its Qualities and Effects, that is. This particular tome first saw the light of day in 1863 and its author was John Sumner. Along with his father William, Sumner later founded a grocery business that went on to become Typhoo Tea, though it was apparently John Sumner, Jr., who took the firm into the territory of tea selling. Trivia fans, take note: the name Typhoo is apparently derived from a Chinese word for doctor.
Sumner opens the book with the bold statement that “the great Anglo-Saxon race are essentially a tea-drinking people.” Which is a matter that could probably be disputed, given that Europeans had only been drinking tea for about two centuries. But there’s no disputing his further assertion that among said people tea was now considered “one of the necessaries of life.”
From there the book is broken down into a structure that’s fairly typical for these kinds of works, starting with a chapter on the history of tea and moving on to one that looks at various botanical aspects of the plant. From there it’s a chapter on the assorted and sundry varieties of black and green tea that were popular at the time, many of which (Twankay, Hyson Skin, Imperial) will be unfamiliar to tea drinkers nowadays.
Chapter four tackles an unusual topic, looking at various tea substitutes used in other parts of the world. Among them are coffee; Paraguay Tea, or what we know today as yerba mate, and enough other items to fill a large chart. Other chapters look at the chemistry of tea, in which Sumner remarks on the beneficial compound theine, or what we know today as theanine.
Sumner also looks at the medicinal properties of tea and summarizes the various pros and cons regarding its consumption. He winds things up with a chapter on the social influence of tea, where he quotes an earlier writer who goes so far as to make the grand statement “tea and the discontinuance of barbarism are connected in the way of cause and effect.”
Here, here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Thomas Twining
The British were not the first people to drink tea and they were not even the first Europeans to do so. They have never grown tea on their own soil, except in very modest amounts at one or two plantations, nor do they drink the most tea on a per capita basis. And yet when we think of great tea-drinking nations Great Britain is probably one of the first ones that will spring to mind. It would be beyond the scope of an article like this one to list all of the great British tea pioneers responsible for this state of affairs, but here are a few noteworthy ones.
Catherine of Braganza
It’s not completely certain when tea first appeared in England. It may have been a decade or more before the marriage of Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza to Englishman Charles II, in 1662, but it’s Catherine who’s typically credited with popularizing the drink among English royalty and upper classes.
Charles Bruce/Robert Bruce/Robert Fortune
While the British could supply their need for tea by dealing with the Chinese as time passed it became more and more to their advantage not to do so. In the early nineteenth century, the British decided to grow their own supplies in India and it was largely thanks to the efforts of Fortune and Scottish brothers Robert and Charles Bruce that it all came to pass. Read more about Fortune’s exploits in China, here.
Anna Maria Russell, Duchess of Bedford
It may be one of the many myths and legends of tea or it might just be true, but it’s the Duchess of Bedford who’s credited with coming up with the distinctively British custom known as afternoon tea.
Thomas Twining
While there were undoubtedly British tea merchants doing business before Thomas Twining started a tea shop in 1706, it’s probably a good bet that none of the companies they started have survived and thrived to this day, as is the case with Twinings of London. (See products.)
Thomas Lipton
Arguably one of the most recognizable names in the tea business, the man who lent his name to Lipton tea was a relative latecomer to tea selling. Read a brief overview of his exploits here and get more on the whole thrilling saga in his most recent biography, A Full Cup: Sir Thomas Lipton’s Extraordinary Life and His Quest for the America’s Cup.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
