Tea if by Sea, Cha if by Land: Why the World Only Has Two Words for Tea

The physicist David Bohm (one of the main contributors to the theory of dialogue) points out that the Western word “measure” and the Sanskrit “maya” appear to derive from the same origins. Yet, in the West, the concept of measure has come to mean “comparison to some fixed external unit,” while maya means “illusion.”

By far the most popular target of Chinese word phrenology is the word for crisis, 危机. There is an entire Wikipedia entry on the Chinese word for crisis, in fact, because dating back to at least John F. Kennedy, Westerners have loved to awe at the fact that the two constituent characters are “danger” plus “opportunity.” This is technically true in t

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.

But the commodities that circulated in this new global exchange were not staples but luxuries; their volume was tiny. In the sixteenth century, an average of fifty to seventy ships departed annually for the East from Lisbon;123 and the traffic in manufactures like porcelain or textiles flowed mainly westward towards Europe and not the other way rou