The collision between Oriental Tea Culture and Western Coffee Culture

The spread of tea to Europe and the introduction of coffee into China are regarded as a major event of spreading civilization. although coffee has not yet become a popular drink in China, tea has become a part of the quality of life and enjoyment of Europeans. People with gentleman cultivation or noble taste pay much attention to drinking tea, and the leisurely afternoon tea every day is reminiscent of the philosophy and literary atmosphere in the salon. However, in the early days, tea and coffee gradually entered aristocratic life from folk popularity, thus with a hierarchical color. When I wrote an article on the Spirit of Coffee three years ago, I compared tea with coffee. It is said that tea guests "mostly like to borrow the taste of tea under the melon shed and beans. What they want is elegance and elegance, but what they lack is the bitterness and warmth of coffee." From this standpoint, coffee and tea represent Chinese and Western cultures. By comparison, tea and wine narrates artistic conception, while coffee depicts spirit. " Therefore, coffee and cafes are often associated with revolution, so "Coffee is a loyal partner of revolution in Europe and a single symbol of leisure in the East." I originally wanted to find the custom of the teahouse in the Ming Dynasty from Wanli's engraved edition of Jinpingmei ci, and see the interest of the teahouse. This inspiration is still inspired by the book "Coffee Spirit": "the slogan 'upper-class society represents privilege, while coffee shop represents equality' has long been circulated in Paris cafes, and coffee was regarded by Parisians as a 'drink of democracy' at that time." However, our teahouse has the skill of storytellers to "romance" historical stories, which can be regarded as a feature of our national culture, resulting in many vernacular books and chapter novels.

When Mr. Chen Zishan came to Beijing last autumn, one day he went to his hotel room to have coffee and gossip. he suddenly told him, "Coffee with a little black tea is tasteless." I returned to give it a try, and sure enough, I had a different taste, but I had a strong taste of vegetarian diet. No matter black tea or green tea, it was best to fill the first hot tea and mix it with coffee and milkshake. the bitter taste of the imported tea is mixed with the rich aroma of coffee, the breath is in the tongue, the strong feeling is in the throat, the freshness of the tea is independent of the melancholy of the coffee, the two flavors are moisturized and spread in the mouth at the same time, the aftertaste is full of fragrance. It is appropriate to call it "tasteless". It seems that coffee and tea have a lot to talk about. In addition to the aforementioned "Coffee Spirit", the new book Tea: hobbies, Entrepreneurship and Empire, written by Roy Moxsem of England, describes the cultivation and trade of tea and its relationship with Britain. The author has been to Africa to manage British tea plantations, so he has done a lot of research on tea. "the process of British acceptance of tea is very slow. Before the 1750s, we had no record of using tea. The earliest dated record of tea was an advertisement in London's political KuaiBao (Mercurius Politicus) on September 23, 1658, which was similar to the time when coffee was introduced into China. Interestingly, we all believed that coffee was the exclusive property of foreigners, while the Victorian government believed that every Chinese was a tea expert, and both drinks changed each other's lives. Teahouses and cafes gather people from all walks of life to become the epitome of society or the times. However, every kind of foreign food will be influenced by the customs of local residents. "the British have formed the habit of adding sugar to their tea from the very beginning. Chinese people never add sugar to their tea, while Xizang people add salt to their tea. " In our opinion, this may be the same as adding sugar to coffee, which is not as complicated as the British think. There is a folk custom in Hunan to drink sesame bean tea, brewing sesame, Sichuan bean, raw sauce, salt, sugar and green tea together, drinking it sweet and slightly spicy, and then eating sesame bean sauce and tea after drinking it up. It is possible that there are different ways to drink and eat tea in China. If, as the book says, "for many Britons, tea is just a tool for them to indulge in their obsession with sugar", the way Shanghainese add sugar to cooking may not be known from the British colonial period.

According to this book, when tea was introduced into England in the middle of the 17th century, most of the imports were green tea. By the end of the 18th century, although green tea was still popular, black tea sold slightly more than green tea because of adulteration, especially the use of toxic copper compound stains, which led to a shift in tea consumption from green tea to black tea. Today, British people like to drink black tea, not because black tea is not adulterated, but because of the toxicity of adulterated colorants, but tea adulterated staining still exists today, so as to show the benefits of coffee. With the increasing popularity of black tea, people began to get into the habit of adding milk to their tea, which began in the 17th century. The Marquise of Seville was the first Frenchman to adopt this method. But it was not until the 18th century that milk was added to tea. " The story of what happened when the tea arrived in the other country was extraordinary.

Oddly enough, tea has a history of 5,000 years in China, but the largest tea-producing country in the world used to be Britain. The meaning of empire referred to in the book "Tea: hobbies, Entrepreneurship and Empire" is like this: "at the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was the largest tea-producing country in the world. British companies control the world's tea trade. The wealth generated by these Victorian industries continues to flow back to this small island. " It can be seen that most of the tea was planted in the colony in Britain at that time, and relying on the development of the colony made it a "sunset" empire, in which tea seemed to fit the title of the book. "in 1851, when almost all tea was imported from China, the per capita consumption of tea in Britain was less than two pounds. In 1901, under the influence of cheap tea imported from the colonies of the British Empire, the per capita consumption of tea in Britain exceeded 6 pounds. "this passage shows that it took Britain only 50 years to become the largest tea country. If you think about it deeply, when you know that the tea produced in Britain only depends on quantity, it is far less exquisite than the Chinese, that is, the meaning is very different. From this point of view, what the British call the tea empire is inevitably one-sided.

About tea, our classic is Lu Yu's Classic of Tea, although there are many books about tea, most of which are clich é s such as how to drink tea. No one has written that this kind of tea has gone deep into the field of "hobby, exploration and empire".