Quote:
Originally Posted by annelie82
I'm not sure where this topic belongs, but anyway.
I've just learned that tea is "o-cha" in Japanese. Perhaps not so incidentally, tea in Portuguese is "chá" - I read somewhere that Portuguese merchants and missionaries carried out expeditions to Japan around the 17th-18th(?) Centuries.
I guess what I'm trying to ask is: to what extent is Japan's tea tradition imported (from Portugal) and to what extent has it been cultivated by the Japanese themselves?
Any information on this topic is much appreciated.
~annelie
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In this case, it`s the other way around. Tea was *exported* to Portugal.
Tea in Japan came to be via China, and tea drinking (and eating of tea leaves) has been practiced in Asia since ancient times. In Japan, there are records of tea being consumed prior to the 9th century.
Tea drinking in Europe is actually a fairly recent thing - it was brought to Europe in the mid 16th century, most likely by the Portuguese.
As for the word for tea - there are two different forms which have spread around the world, both derived from Chinese dialects. One being "tea" and the other being "cha". Most modern languages used a word derived from one of those two bases.