I have reached a new level in my tea journey – people are asking me about tea books! Honestly, I’m really happy about this development because I love tea and reading so this is both my interests combined. And when my friend asked me if I had read The True History of Tea and what I thought of it in comparison with The Tale of Tea, obviously my answer couldn’t be “no”. Instead, I said “I’ll read it ASAP and let you know.”

The True History of Tea is a meticulously researched yet accessible book about the history of tea. There are eighteen chapters in this book, covering the history of tea in China, Japan, Russia, the Middle East, and the West. As you can imagine, it’s got a lot of content, yet the chapters are pretty short – I read this on my Kobo and the chapters were at most, twenty-odd pages. It is a very impressive book, especially since Mair and Hoh manage to pack a lot of information and give historical context to various developments in addition to the facts specifically about tea.

The section of the book that contained information new to me was the section on the history of tea in Russia. Something interesting that I learnt was that men drank tea in public houses known as “traktirs”, and ordered their tea spolotentsem, or “with a towel”, which they hung around their necks and that the tea was served glasses with metal holders called podstakannik. On the other hand, Russian ladies drank their tea in private in porcelain cups. According to Alexander Dumas in ‘Dictionary of Cuisine’, this is because the first teacups were made in Kronstadt and the bottom was decorated with a view of that city. When a teahouse proprietor stinted on the tea, the picture could be seen clearly and the customer would say “I can see Kronstadt.” and obviously the proprietor cannot deny. So since then, tea in teachouses were served in glasses where there was nothing to see in the bottom. 

In terms of the facts about the history of tea, most of what I read here matches what I’ve read in The Tale of Tea and other more academic books about tea. The only claim that gave me pause was the following claim about the Japanese tea ceremony:

“Some scholars believe that it may even have incorporated elements from Christian liturgy transmitted to Japan by Portuguese Jesuits.”

This is a new claim to me. I did some research but the only paper I could find so far is this one on the Jesuits and the way of tea and one more in Japanese on the same topic (still reading this second one, but a quick skim shows it’s similar to the English one). It’s a good starting point for research, and I’m convinced that the Jesuits were knowledgable about the tea ceremony and that several of the early tea practitioners were Christian, but I’m still not too sure about the influence of Christianity on the Japanese tea ceremony.

And that leads me to my main complaint about the book – the lack of footnotes. I don’t know if it’s because this is the ebook version, but I could not find footnotes for claims made in the text (like the one on Christianity and the Japanese tea ceremony), which makes it hard to verify claims. But, I plan to buy this book so I will check back and let you know if the physical copy comes with footnotes.

Overall, The True History of Tea reads like a more concise version of The Tale of Tea by George van Driem, which is both good and bad. The good part about this is that it’s easier to get a grasp of the overall history of tea and the context in which it develops, and I even learnt a bit more about tea in Russia (to be fair, this may have been in The Tale of Tea but there is so much information in there that it’s easy to miss things). On the other hand, the downside of being a more concise version is that some information has to be left out – for example, The Tale of Tea has a much more thorough write up on tea in countries like Georgia, Madagascar, Brazil, etc.

I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for an intermediate level book about the history of tea.