Victoria wrote: ↑Sun Feb 28, 2021 2:54 pm
Curious, where you hope to take all this research you are doing ? - since your focus seems to be primarily the history of company adds, advertising, and branding.
It is for fun, really. Maybe the hope is that someone visiting a relative's house sees an old Hall China teapot and thinks, "I know what that is!" and digs out their Ceylon tea to brew up a pot of it served with clove-studded lemon slices and some sandwich cremes.
Or if they are out shopping at their local Asian market and happen to see a tin of State-style-packaged Chinese tea, they will think, "I've seen that before!" Then when they want to figure out if they were right, they can look at the guibao or shengchan codes on the back and have some sort of idea what it is.
Or even just shopping at an old American grocery store and getting amusement knowing that in the distant past it was a tea store, walking down the teabag aisle and spotting something like Numi's "Emperor's Pu-erh" and knowing that it is probably organic Golden Sail pu'er.
Just I guess ways to make day-to-day tea life more interesting for people, and to fill in the gaps.
One reason I focus so much on ads, I think, is that they are sort of the elephant in the room with tea discourse. Online tea-culture is riddled with guerilla marketing for tea vendors, but nobody ever seems to outright just talk about the history and influence of advertising on tea. Sometimes just being aware helps put things into context.
It also helps moderate what I guess is another big trend which is national romanticism in tea. People strongly seem to desire a non-globalized tea past, but tea is the original globalized product, whether Brits and Americans trading Mexican reals for mystery teas in Canton during the 19th century or Japanese corporations developing new Taiwanese oolong styles to take on the Brits in a battle over the American market in the early 20th, or Nestle promoting Nestea in Hong Kong using commercials and the nationalized CNNP producing its own instant "lemon tea" to compete with it in the 1980s, and then lemon tea becoming a thing in Hong Kong sitting right next to the ancient pu'er and the high-fire oolongs. Not to spoil anyone's fun, but rather so that they do not become blindsided by the gaps in their understanding. (This isn't just a Chinese tea thing -- mention a Teasmade to a tea-and-crumpets Anglophile and they likely either will not know about it or be offended that it exists, even though quite a lot of British tea was made using just such devices.)
I used to know someone who participated in a Renaissance Fair group called "The Society for Creative Anachronism". The reason for the odd name was apparently because they wanted to make a distinction between the rather difficult reality the average person faced in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the "knights and ladies court festival" atmosphere of a Renaissance Fair, and that they knew about the one but wanted to pretend in the other.
So I don't really see focusing on these things as adversarial to the gongfu-tea-hut or Ye-Olde-British-Tea type experience, but as something that will help people appreciate tea more in their daily lives without detracting from their ceremonial enjoyment during other times.
...for Russian Caravan tea, well, it's a fun tea with an interesting history, and maybe this will encourage people to post their favorite blends, I hope.
