Gongfu Girl» Terminology

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat

Cinnabar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:13:52 +0000

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 seen one in use. Plus I like the idea of them being “mascots” which sounds to me like a more active, animated role in the process of preparing and drinking tea. So far I haven’t been able to find out what the Chinese term for them is, or even if they have a group name in addition to a name that identifies each of them as the character or form of creature they are, which is a wide range.

Chan Chu (蟾蜍, chánchú) is the most common form that tea mascots can be found in. This is the omnipresent three-legged toad with the money on his back, symbol of prosperity and an annoying reminder of a lot of really silly blather about feng shui.

Tea mascots are almost always connected to good fortune that involves wealth. They often have coins or other forms of money built into their design and are said to encourage good fortune.

Personally, I have no illusions about the use of these creatures bringing me any enhanced wealth, in fact they’re pretty good at insuring that I have less of it periodically, but I find some of them very compelling and attractive, especially as they’re getting doused with tea. My new favorite of these tea mascot is this bat (biānfú, 蝙蝠) that I bought recently. He is made from a dark, slightly rough clay, like most of the others. He also has a coin in his mouth that turns and very attractive tiny black beads for eyes.

I don’t normally name inanimate objects (other than four-decade-old cars), but I think this charming fellow needs a name. Any suggestions?

Lost in Translation

Cinnabar — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:13:40 +0000

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 a word in Pinyin (the written form of Mandarin that uses the Roman alphabet, with diacriticals indicating the tones) or Romaji (the system for writing Japanese using the Roman alphabet), it is fairly easy to determine the meaning in English. It is not such an easy matter to translate a Hanzi (Chinese) or Kanji (Japanese) character into English, unless the character is available in electronic form and can be copied and pasted into a dictionary. If the text exists only on a physical object it can be quite a challenge.

The saucer in the accompanying photograph above is terribly vexing for this reason. I immediately recognized the tea character (cha = 茶), and I was able to identify the character in the lower right (器) as qì which means tool or utensil, but the other two I can’t find. In addition to visually scanning through lists of tea-related characters with definitions, I even tried guessing what sort of other words might be used on this item with “tea” and “tool,” but my detective skills have failed entirely so far. It doesn’t help that the burned in character isn’t all that sharply defined. I have four of these bamboo tea saucers and this one is the clearest to read.

My other example, which is inscribed into the clay on a tea mascot shaped like a foot, I have not been able to translate at all. Given the nature of the object, which is incorporated into gongfu cha with the intent of influencing luck and/or prosperity, I would expect the text to be something related to those ideas. I’m quite curious about this one in particular because I’ve seen this foot/insect or spider theme on various Chinese items and I don’t know anything about the origin of it. I’m curious whether the little sculpted arthropods are insects or spiders. These particular two have six legs and antenae and not very spider-like bodies, but they’re somewhat stylized.

I have a very strong aversion to abstracting language into decorative elements as I am not willing or able to divorce writing from meaning. My lack of ability to read Chinese doesn’t render it meaningless, just puzzling. As a rule I try to avoid having anything in my possession that bears language of any kind unless I know what it means, so I find these bits of unidentified language a little frustrating. In the case of tea items this is hard to avoid, and hard to resolve, but at least I can safely assume that they do say have something relevant about tea. They’re not likely to be lyric essays on the beauty of broiled salmon or something pornographic.

Would any of you Chinese-speaking tea people like to help me out with a translation?

Oolong? Wulong? Wu Long? Wu-Long? 烏龍?

Cinnabar — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:48:15 +0000

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 “wulong” is the more common choice in deceptive marketing materials and by sensationalist talk show hosts, ironically it is the correct word in Pinyin (the official Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese). The source of “oolong” is the Wade Giles system, which has largely been supplanted by the Pinyin in recent years. The Mandarin characters for wulong tea are: 烏龍茶, the first two characters representing the syllables “wu” or “oo” and “long” respectively. The third character represents “cha” the Mandarin word for tea. Getting a consistent answer as to the one true Pinyin word is even a challenge. It appears frequently as “wulong,” wu-long,” and “wu long” and in more precise usage includes diacritical markings, making it “wūlóng.”

If you see Chinese words that are spelled differently from the Pinyin standard, they were probably imported into the English speaking world via Taiwan, or else they have been in use since before Pinyin was common. It is also possible that they came from another another language, such as Cantonese or Japanese.

- from this article on the topic on the
Tea From Taiwan site

Of course we get into a little bit of a tangle about which word to choose when it is commonly understood that the word in English is “oolong.” So then you have to decide if the English word “oolong” or the Pinyin Chinese word “wulong” better suits your purpose. There is a very fine line between using the antiquated form of Wade Giles “oolong” and the English word “oolong.” This whole discussion may be dismissed as self-indulgent sophistry, but regardless of which words you choose yourself to refer to those fabulous semi-oxidized teas, the history behind the jumble of choices is pretty interesting.

the Words for Tea

Cinnabar — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:47:36 +0000

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 word?

examples:
Chinese (Mandarin): cha
Japan: cha
Persia: cha
Arabic: chai
Turkish: chay
Russian: chai
Indian: cha
Sri Lankan: cha
Pakistani: cha
Bangladesh: cha

English: tea
German: tee
French: thé

As is the case with many linguistic riddles, the answer lies along trade routes. The British established trade posts in Xiamen, in the Fujian Province of China, during the Ming Dynasty, mid-seventeenth century. In Xiamen, the word approximately pronounced “tay” is used rather than the Mandarin “cha.” The British spelled it “tea,” which splintered off into the words “thé” in France and “tee” in Germany.

In contrast, the word “char” is a common slang term for tea in Britain, which most likely emerged out of 19th and 20th century British Imperialism.

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