Чай
Tea
B1 · Intermediate · non-fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
A light intermediate history of why a country with no tropics and no tea plantations drinks more tea than almost anywhere. The short answer is geography: everybody else's tea came by sea from China around half the world, and Russia's came overland across Siberia, through one small town on the Mongolian border, on a round trip of sixteen months. That road made the tea expensive, which made the customs — sugar held in the mouth, jam instead of sugar — and it made the samovar, which is not, whatever you have been told, a thing for brewing tea in. Ends where the subject always ends: a kettle going on for a guest before anybody asks what he came about.
Characters
- Vasily Starkov (Василий Старков) — Envoy, 1638
- The Kyakhta merchants (Кяхтинские купцы) — 1727–1869
- The Tula samovar makers (Тульские самоварщики) — From the 1770s
- The tea drinker (Чаевник) — Everywhere, still
Vocabulary from this story
- чай — tea
- самовар — samovar
- заварка — tea concentrate
- чайник — teapot, kettle
- кипяток — boiling water
- стакан — glass
- чашка — cup
- сахар — sugar
- варенье — jam, preserve
- лимон — lemon
- труба — pipe, flue
- уголь — charcoal