Today I’m putting together notes for a talk I’m giving this week. I’m giving it from my desk, but most of the people at the other end of my computer will be in China. A talk on tea to China.
This is when I feel like a fraud, but it’s not that at all. I’m talking about tea history and how to prepare for time travel through understanding how tea was brought into Europe and North America. I have Russian silver and a reproduction Dutch cup and a bunch of other things to show and tell.
I used to teach these things and now I’m nervous because I’m giving a talk. Tea to China, I tell myself, is not chutzpah. Tea history includes what Linnaeus knew about the plant, and why there are no teapots prior to a certain date and where beef tea fits in. I intend to detour via portable soup when I talk about beef tea, because they’re related and I have some portable soup right now. I won’t make beef tea, I’m afraid because I have no love for it.
What else shall I talk about? Medieval herbals (briefly) and popular tea literature in the 17th century. What Marco Polo said (or didn’t say) about tea and my guess as to why. Tea substitutes, including during the US Revolutionary War and in the early Australian colonies.
Lots of things.
My aim is to finish most of it today, along with most of my Patreon material. I have 2 other talks to prepare this week, too. This is on top of my regular research, but it’s fun stuff on top of my regular research. As long as I get it done and all ready for the world SF convention, things are good. October is busy, but delightfully so.
I think that this post calls for a cup of tea. I have a rather nice oolong to drink this afternoon. Which reminds me, I haven’t included even a mention of British Malaya and its relationship with oolong into my talk yet. Nor how coffee and tea identity-switched in British at a certain moment. Nor… I should write.
It occurs to me that what you are talking about is what non-Chinese people did with tea and how it affected the rest of the world, which is quite possibly something most Chinese people aren’t as familiar with. I mean, I’m sure many of them know a lot about tea, including the history of things done in China by the British in particular because of tea, but they are less likely to know about what tea did in North America or Europe.
Sounds interesting and I’m not even much of a tea drinker.
Yes and know. I will only talk about tea in China as it affected tea elsewhere (and it did, of course). I don’t think I’ll be talking about the rise of colonial tea plantations, because that’s a different story entirely, but Ill touch on it in passing. I’m an ethnohistorian, so I’ll be talking about how tea was seen and used and where some critical bits of tea equipment came from.
it’s the sort of thing we (as writers) need, that many writers don’t know to ask. I used to get a lot of people wanting stuff from me, but these days they mostly don’t want to learn how to find out. Most writers I’ve talked to since COVID think of history as something they’re already familiar with that will snap into place neatly. I started offering these types of talks when it became clear that only some writers know what they’re missing and that so much is possible if a story has historical roots. I won’t be talking about that directly, but it’s why the outline for the talk has a joke about time travel. “This is amazing stuff for writers that many readers love to discover” is the unstated theme.