Cultural Replication: The Spread of Customs and Products

Replicating a culture

Replication offers a way to understand how products and customs spread across cultures. Adoption often involves adaptation: people take up a practice and change it to fit local tastes, resources, and social life. Tea illustrates this process. The plant spread through trade and cultivation, while different communities developed their own ways of preparing and drinking it.

Tea-drinking cultures are all over the world. From China, Japan and Russia, to Iran, the United Kingdom, and Kenya, tea has spread everywhere. In most places, the development of a tea culture—simply understood as a place where a lot of people like drinking tea—followed a typical pattern. First, a place was exposed to tea, whether from explorers, voyagers, or invaders. Once people got a taste for it, the country began trading for it. Then, after its uptake into the culture, countries would try to grow it themselves, climate permitting. This was a pattern that played out in many areas around the globe.

Tea first started in China, as the tea plant is only native to a small region encompassing southwestern China and parts of India and Myanmar. Cultivation of the tea plant started there at least 3,000 years ago and as early as 400 CE was being described as a drink that “lightens the body and changes the bones.” Tea can taste wonderful, but now we also know that it has caffeine, which is no doubt a huge part of the reason for its initial and ongoing popularity.

Tea has played a lot of roles in China. For many centuries it was one of the country’s greatest exports and has played a significant part in the country’s international relations with everyone from the Mongols to the British. Tastes changed and evolved over time in China, regarding the right way to brew a cup or the right tools required for serving. However, when it comes to tea, China is the original consumer of the plant, and it was ultimately from there that everyone else replicated their tea culture.

Traveling Buddhist monks brought tea to Japan, where tea and its associated ceremonies became related to both political power and cultural expression. Tea came over from China a few times, but as Victor Mair and Erling Hoh explain in The True History of Tea, “It was not until 1191, when the Buddhist monk Myoan Eisai, having returned from studies in China, began to propagate Zen as a teaching that could save Japan, and tea as a medicine that could restore the Japanese people to health, that Japanese tea culture began to develop in earnest.” Once the culture had started, the Japanese began to cultivate the tea plant themselves. Tea consumption became part of a much more elaborate cultural expression. The tea ceremony, or chanoyu, was long and complicated, and each participant was required to know their roles going in. But far from being a turn-off, this complicated way of consuming tea “was perfected as an art form that fuses nature, the crafts, philosophy, and religion, lending poignant expression to the Japanese spirit.” Tea had undergone its first total replication, leading to new cultural expression in Japan.

In the 17th century, trading routes developed linking China and Russia. Tea was one of the most important commodities that made its way from China to Moscow, over 4,000 kilometers away. The Russians took to tea almost immediately. “From the gilded halls of the Kremlin, to the tarred cabins of the country’s peasants, tea became Russia’s national temperate drink, and the samovar, a metal urn used to boil water, the embodiment of the warm, hospitable Russian hearth.” The Russian temperance movement actively promoted tea as a means of reducing vodka consumption. Initially, Russia sustained its tea habit through trade with China. However, as time passed, Russia wanted to change its dependence on Chinese tea. So, “in 1893, the Popoff tea firm established the empire’s first tea garden in the Caucasus near the Georgian town of Batumi.” Thus, Russia began to cultivate its own tea, creating another cultural and industrial replication.

The last place we will look at is the development of tea culture in Persia, the region now known as Iran. Tea came to this area not directly from China, but via the groups in central Asia who had already become addicted to tea, and who carted it into Persia for trading purposes. There, “by the first half of the 17th century it had become part of daily life.” Tea was well suited to Islamic culture given its prohibition of alcohol. It provided a religiously acceptable little boost. Tea taverns developed “where persons of good repute went to drink tea, smoke tobacco, and play chess.” Persian pilgrims took tea to the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, much like the Buddhist monks had taken tea all over China and to Japan. As tea culture firmly took hold, Persians too desired to reduce their dependency on outside sources for the plant. So “tea production was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Persian consul to India succeeded in smuggling some 3,000 Assam tea seedlings back to his country and had them planted in the Lahijan region on the southwestern side of the Caspian Sea.” And thus did the replication of tea as both industry and culture continue.

What is it about tea that allowed it to be replicated all over the globe? For starters, tea has an inherent flexibility. There are multiple ways to make and consume tea, which can be modified based on cultural norms and social desires. Different degrees of oxidization of tea leaves will produce green, oolong, or black tea. Each of these can be flavored with different spices or milk, or whatever else is locally available. It lends itself to different brewing techniques based on local equipment and resources. But all outputs of steeping tea leaves in boiling water are uniformly called tea. So there is also a core structure that cannot be changed. Tea, in this botanical sense, comes from the tea plant.

Tea’s spread illustrates how a product can retain a recognizable core while its preparation and social uses vary across cultures.