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