Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

I have never forgotten Mr. Danckaert's cheeky admonition early in the history of my blog that I blog theology and leave the tea for drinking. I think perhaps it's time I shared a little more about the importance of that beverage, lest some otherwise enlightened people should suppose me trivial.
Tea has a long history, which starts in China. The discovery of tea is attributed to a Chinese emperor who was boiling some drinking-water when several tea-leaves drifted into it. However the first cup of tea came about, it has been assiduously cultivated since then. Green or white teas were drunk in the Orient, and eventually a method of oxidizing tea so that it would not spoil on the long trip to Europe was developed, resulting in 'black tea'. Tea was so important to Chinese culture that at times it even served, in a pulverized-cake form, as international currency, since it was valued both by China and her neighbors. It was used as a mouth-wash and palate-cleanser, both first thing in the morning and after meals. Along with flowers and spirit-money, it was a common small offering to spirits. It even became a method of measuring time.
No, seriously! In a Chinese novel of the 1700s which I am currently reading, the author is constantly using tea as a measurement of time. Clocks are used to measure hours, or whatever equivalent our translator has rendered "hours," but small amounts of time are measured as "about as long as it would take to drink two cups of tea". In one passage I read recently, the principal character inquires as to the time and is informed that it is "half a cup of tea past...".
So you see, Mr. Danckaert, that I am not entirely trivial. To make a pun worthy of my husband, there is time for tea.