Some people call the human figures, animals and mythical creatures that hang out on the tea table receiving a bath of water and tea during a Gongfu Cha session “tea toys.” I prefer to call them “tea mascots” myself because that term seems to be pretty easy for anyone to figure out if they’ve ever [...]
I have been trying to learn more Chinese and Japanese vocabulary, which obviously includes learning to recognize characters. As I’ve been approaching this more attentively I’ve become even more aware than usual of the number of objects in my environment that have written language on them that I do not know the meaning of. With [...]
Having never formally studied any Chinese languages I surmised that the word “oolong” was the proper English transliteration of the Mandarin Chinese name for a family of teas and that “wulong” was a word that had come into vogue for use in preposterous and unfounded weight-loss claims in order to promote Chinese oolong teas. While [...]
Have you ever wondered why, when most of the major tea-growing regions of the world, including China, where the tea plant was originally cultivated, all use some variant of the word “cha” to indicate tea and the plant that it comes from, almost all of the Western countries call it “tea” or variants of that [...]
