Friday, January 25, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 04:47 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related

Since the British East India company established the first tea plantations in Assam in the 19th century, Indian tea (Camellia assamica) has gradually supplanted Chinese tea (Camellia sinesis) as the preferred leaf of the English.  The taste of most Indian teas is unmistakably different from that of Chinese tea, being noticeably more tannic with a slightly sour tinge that is only just avoided by first flush Darjeelings.  Indian teas invariably lack the sweet, fruity fragrances of the best Chinese tea, although some very fine Indian teas do rarely achieve the floral fragrances of a Chinese oolong.  The English method of making tea also involves steeping the leaves for a few minutes, while Chinese tea is more usually steeped for around 20 to 30 seconds, and this ill treatment of the leaves is also partly to blame for the taste of most English tea.  It is therefore unsurprising that most English tea drinkers are accustomed to using milk or cream to remove the astringency present in their tea, a procedure that is unnecessary and abhorred when consuming Chinese tea;  indeed, recent research in Germany suggests that the addition of milk to tea negates any potential health benefits of tea ^Note.

Although milk and dairy products were commonly used in ancient China, their use began to die out in the Han dynasty. There is an ancient Chinese word for cream: sùlào 酥酪; but the word 酥 in modern Chinese has lost this meaning and now refers to a kind of crispy pastry.  Via Buddhism, Chinese also borrowed the Sanskrit word for cream, dugdhāgra (which entered the Chinese language as tíhú 醍醐) but again, because cream was no longer a familiar food item, this word has only retained its metaphorical meaning of a mythical drink that imparts to the drinker knowledge or righteousness (as in the phrase, tíhú guàndǐng 醍醐灌頂 “to be filled with knowledge”), perhaps akin to the Greek concept of nectar.  Ignorant of the word’s origins, in modern times, the term tíhú has even been used to describe fine wine.  This transformation had probably occurred by the time of Lù Yǔ, the great Tea Sage, who claimed that the benefits to be gained from drinking of four or five sips of tea were at least as great as those from drinking pure cream 「四五啜與醍醐甘露抗衡」.

Contact with the West has re-introduced cream to the Chinese palate, which has necessitated the invention of another word for cream: nǎiyóu 奶油.

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