Food, Drink and Feasting Talk: Tea Drinking Along the Silk Road

Tea Drinking Along The Silk Road

Camellia sinensisAn Indian 19th century watercolour

Camellia sinensis growing near the Black Sea in Turkey

A map of the Silk Road showing mountain areas and desert

A camel caravan on the move, packed with cases of tea, in a 1909 photograph

A tea brick from the Horniman Study Collections Centre

A glazed stoneware teapot from the Song Dynasty (AD 960 – 1279)

(From the Horniman Museum Study Collection)

A tea bowl from the same period, again from the Horniman Collection. It is small and made of brown

stoneware.

An Yixing teapot based on one of the Ming designs(From the Horniman Collection)

Also from the Ming period, a delicate porcelain handless cup which tea was sipped from(From the Horniman Collection)

A tea brick similar to one shown earlier except that is has a Chinese coin pressed into one corner and has been coated with resin for preservation.

Another tea brick which has four joined sections with circular and rectangular designs impressed on it.

(From the Horniman Collecion)

Tea brick impressed with the Chinese character ‘tian’, meaning heaven

(From the Horniman Collection)

A circular tea brick with a relief decoration.(From the Horniman Collection)

Men laden with tea bricks for Tibet

A Tibetan brass tea strainer(From the Horniman Collection)

Here is another more elaborate tea strainer.(From the Horniman Collection)

Churning Tibetan tea. (Drawing by Rinjing Dorje from his book Food in Tibetan

Life)

A decorative and elaborate teapot probably from Tibet.(From the Horniman Collection)

Wooden tea bowl from Ladakh or possibly Kashmir (From the Horniman Collection)

An ornate brass and silver teapot from either Ladakh or Nepal

(From the Horniman Collection)

A Kashmiri samovar with khos cups

A silver teapot from Gujarat, India

A little Uighur boy helping his father serve tea

Men enjoying a tea break in Xinjiang

A Kirghiz caravan criss-crossing a frozen river in the Pamirs(From Caravans to Tartary by Roland and Sabrina Michaud)

An Afghan woman making qymaq chai(Drawing by Abdullah Breshna in Afghan Food and

Cookery)

Turkomen women relaxing with bowls of tea before returning to their weaving.

(Photo from Caravans to Tartary)

A chai wallah in Kabul, AfghanistanPhoto taken c. 2006

A chaikhana in Afghanistan

Another chaikhana

A tea vendor in the bazaar in the 1970s

Men in Samarkand enjoying tea at a chaikhana

An ornament of men drinking tea bought in Fergana Uzbekistan

(From the Horniman Collection)

A tea set from Tashkent in Uzbekistan(From the Horniman Collection)

The teapot from Tashkent in Uzbekistan(Horniman Collection)

A Russian samovar from the 1900s.

Persian ladies around a samovar

Giant Turkish ‘tea bags’

Turkish tea served in tulip tea glasses

Horniman tea tin (From the Horniman Collection, no date given)

A Hornimans tin of Pure Boudoir Tea