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Tea-producing countries.
TEA In India:
Whether tea originated in India or China is still a
matter of debate. One thing that is certain is that tea
drinking was first initiated in China for medicinal purposes
and later gained popularity as a nourishing beverage.
Tea cultivation flourished in India under the British and
today India is the largest producer of tea in the world.
After Europe adopted tea as its main hot beverage and China
imposed restrictions on its export to the outside world, the
British established tea cultivation in the north eastern
parts of India. Organized cultivation spread to South India
during the first world war years and later to Sri Lanka.
Many features of tea cultivation and processing were
standardized during this period and mechanisation was
undertaken to handle ever increasing crop to meet global
supplies. Green tea, which was normally made in China, was
improved upon and Black tea manufacturing was set up which
enhanced shelf life of tea and allowed tea to be transported
for longer and longer periods to reach far flung areas.
Note: This article contains Multilingual text.
Without proper
rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes,
or other symbols instead of Multilingual characters.
Darjeeling tea is grown in the foothills of the Himalayas,
and is a prized Indian black tea. This tea was marketed with
vigorous campaigning by the Royal family and it is still
accepted among the best teas of the world.
Assam teas are known for their malty liquors and promoted as
the milk teas and a newer process called CTC (Crush, tear
and curl) was established to handle the huge bulk of the
crop harvested during rainy season.
Indian teas came to be known world wide as milk teas, in
many markets dominant over the lighter green teas coming out
of China till then. The Indian Tea Board took various programmes to protect the interests of the Indian Tea
industry and recently GI registration process was taken up
world wide, by first establishing Darjeeling CTM
(certification trade mark).
The East India Company also had interests along the routes
to India from Great Britain. The company cultivated the
production of tea in India. Its products were the basis of
the Boston Tea Party in Colonial America.
- How Do You Say "TEA" In Different Languages:
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The Chinese character for tea is 茶, but it is pronounced
differently in the various Chinese dialects. Two
pronunciations have made their way into other languages
around the world. One is tê, which comes from the Amoy Min
Nan dialect, spoken around the port of Xiamen (Amoy). This
pronunciation is believed to come from the old words for tea
梌 (tú) or 荼 (tú). The other is chá, used by the Cantonese
dialect spoken around the ports of Guangzhou (Canton), Hong
Kong, Macau, and in overseas Chinese communities, as well as
in the Mandarin dialect of northern China. This term was
used in ancient times to describe the first flush harvest of
tea. Yet another different pronunciation is zu, used in the
Wu dialect spoken around Shanghai.
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Languages that have tê derivatives include Afrikaans (tee),
Armenian, Catalan (te), Czech (té or thé, but these words
sound archaic; čaj is used nowadays, as explained in the
next paragraph), Danish (te), Dutch (thee), English (tea),
Esperanto (teo), Estonian (tee), Faroese (te), Finnish
(tee), French (thé), (West) Frisian (tee), Galician (té),
German (Tee), Hebrew (תה, te or tei), Hungarian (tea),
Icelandic (te), Indonesian (teh), Irish (tae), Italian (tè),
scientific Latin (thea), Latvian (tēja), Malay (teh),
Norwegian (te), Occitan (tè), Polish (herbata from Latin
herba thea),Lithuanian (arbata from Latin herba thea), Scots
Gaelic (tì, teatha), Singhalese (thé), Spanish (té), Swedish
(te), Tamil (theneer), Telugu (ṭī), Welsh (te), and Yiddish
(טיי, tei). Tea in Sesotho, the language spoken in Lesotho
is tea.
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Those that use cha or chai derivatives include Albanian (çaj),
Amharic(pronounced shy) Arabic (شاي shai), Assyrian
(pronounced chai), Azeri: (çay), Bengali (চা), Bosnian (čaj),
Bulgarian (чай chai), Capampangan (cha), Cebuano (tsa),
Croatian (čaj), Czech (čaj), English (char, slang), Georgian
(ჩაი, chai), Greek (τσάι tsái), Gujarati (cha), Hindi (चाय
chai), Japanese (茶, ちゃ, cha), Kannada
(ಚಾ "Cha"), Kazakh (шай
shai), Korean (茶,차 cha), Macedonian (čaj), Malayalam (ചായ "chaya"),
Marathi (चाहा "chahaa"), Mongolian (цай, tsai), Nepali (cheeya),
Oriya (cha), Persian (چای chaay), Punjabi (ਚਾਹ), Portuguese
(chá), Romanian (ceai), Russian (чай, chai), Serbian (чај
chaj), Slovak (čaj), Slovene (čaj), Somali (shaax), Swahili
(chai), Tagalog (tsaa), Thai (ชา, cha), Tibetan (ཇ་ja),
Tlingit (cháayu), Turkish (çay), Ukrainian (чай chai), Urdu
(چاى), Uzbek (choy) and Vietnamese (trà and chè are both
direct derivatives of the Chinese 茶; the latter term is used
mainly in the north and describes a tea made with
freshly-picked leaves).
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The Polish word for a tea-kettle is czajnik, which could be
derived directly from cha or from the cognate Russian word.
However, tea in Polish is herbata, which was derived from
the Latin herba thea, meaning "tea herb".
In Ireland, or at least in Dublin, the term cha is sometimes
used for "tea", with "tay" as a common pronunciation
throughout the land (derived from the Irish Gaelic tae), and
char was a common slang term for tea throughout British
Empire and Commonwealth military forces in the 19th and 20th
centuries, crossing over into civilian usage.
In North America, the word chai is used to refer almost
exclusively to the Indian masala chai beverage
Effects Of Tea On Health:
The possible beneficial health effects of tea consumption
have been suggested and supported by some studies, but
others have found no beneficial effects. The studies
contrast other claims, including antinutritional effects
such as preventing
absorption of
iron and
protein, usually attributed to
tannin. The vast majority of studies have been of
Green tea, however some studies have been made of the
other types of tea derived from Camellia sinensis
such as
White tea,
Oolong tea, and
Black tea. Green tea has been
claimed
to be helpful for
atherosclerosis,
LDL cholesterol,
cancer,
inflammatory bowel disease,
diabetes,
liver disease,
weight loss,
neurodegenerative diseases, and even
halitosis.
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