The history of tea cultivation and how it came to be adopted as an English habit is an interesting read. Roughly speaking, tea had to be promoted as a viable return cargo for the East India Company. The mass cultivation of tea in India and Ceylon occurred in the 1800s and was a means to break China's monopoly on tea trade, to force it to enter into a different trade relation - and it is worth noting that getting its people hooked on opium (cultivated and imported from South and Central Asia) was a part of this process.Kim O'Hara wrote: But it suggests the possibility that the normal English tea I grew up with was a degenerate (simplified) masala chai in the first place. Weird!
Kim
So in a manner of speaking, the drinking of tea migrated from China to South Asia to England. Compared with the long history of tea culture in China, Japan, and Korea, and the ways in which South Asians make their tea rich and strong, some might say that the English approach of having tea with a spot of milk (and biscuits) is an 'adulterated' and 'degenerate' form of tea drinking. I think that is an unhelpful, decontextualised, hubristic and inhospitable way of thinking; a way to shore up cultural capital for oneself, to establish cultural hierarchies, rather than to appreciate tea.
A parallel could be drawn with the recurring discussions we witness here about 'authentic' or 'original' vs. 'adulterated' or 'degenerate' approaches to the Buddha's teachings, I reckon.... Yet, I don't think we are going to see heated debates about who has gotten it 'wrong' about tea - and hence, in need to be told off or convinced of the 'errors' of their ways or to lose their unnecessary 'cultural baggage' - any time soon, are we?
EDIT: Am reminded of this?