Gained by deficit: How tea guided me to my research

By Yuli Ykitai – I have been drinking tea without sugar for as long as I can remember. According to family legend, it all began during the time we still lived in the USSR. During those years, everyday goods like salt, sugar, soap, coffee, and butter would occasionally disappear from the shelves, a so-called defitsit. One day, being short on sugar, my mom decided to not put it in my tea. And since I didn’t ask for any, and from that moment on it became a habit.

Most of Europe is coffee oriented, and so is the Middle East, where we have moved later with my family. But Russia, with its eastern borders touching China, has a long-standing relationship with tea. Unlike Western Europe, where tea arrived via maritime routes and colonial networks, Russia traded tea overland, through the ancient Silk Road, or more specifically, the so-called “Tea Horse Road.”  That’s why the Russian word for tea is chai, resembling the northern regions of China where they pronounce the word cha. In Fujian, where European traders bought tea by ship, the local dialect pronounced cha as te, which is why Western European languages use words like tea, thé, té, and thee. Tea’s etymology is just one thread in the larger fabric of its fascinating heritage and cultural journey across the globe.

Years later, I found myself living in China, where tea is drunk without sugar, milk, or lemon. By chance, I met the right people and eventually made my way to the famous Maliandao Tea Market in southwest Beijing. Ironically, it was there that I met a Taiwanese tea seller who had built a strong reputation among Russian-speaking tea lovers and shop owners. That meeting sparked something. As I was untangling false myths being spread in the tea community for entertainment and marketing purposes, things slowly started to make sense. Puer tea was not actually dug into the ground, milk oolong was not watered with milk, and the virgins that pick tea leaves in the sunrise turned out to look more like tanned skinny farmers, both male and female. As I tasted more I learned more and eventually cooperated with some other tea lovers and sellers and organised a few tea-themed events in Israel and Russia, and group tea trips to China. So, when I later settled in the Netherlands and decided, in my forties, to pursue a master’s degree in social and Cultural Anthropology, tea culture as a topic for research seemed like a natural choice.

Despite having lived and traveled around China for years, I have actually never been to Taiwan, but did encounter Taiwanese tea on several occasions, mainly introduced by my Taiwanese tea dealer in Beijing. After witnessing China’s severe COVID-19 lockdowns policy and hearing disturbing stories about food rations from friends still living there, Taiwan seemed like a safer, more open, and more accessible place to explore tea culture. And so, I decided to explore a new land through a familiar lens – tea.

This led me to discover the land of amazing friendly people, freedom of speech, art exhibitions engaged with themes of inclusion and gender equality, wide use of English, and people standing calmly and orderly in line – things here were quite different from mainland China. And the tea was amazing. The stone kettles boiled over the fire, the mountain tops covered in mist, plum trees blooming and locals sipped their oolong tea while chatting to each other in Taiwanese. The tensions of the outside world, geopolitical unrest, personal histories, strained cross-strait relations – seemed distant as we discussed tea aroma and oxidation levels and inhaled the warm scent from our cups.

Anthropologists have long argued that objects are not static. They travel. They gather meaning. They shape the people who carry them and the paths they follow. Tea, in my case, has been exactly that kind of object – a carrier of memory, habit, chance, and choice. What began as a moment of absence, grew into a lifelong practice, a passion, a field of study, and ultimately, a research project that took me across continents. Tea is not just a drink. It is a social relationship; a performance of identity and it is also a guide.

Yuli Yikitai recently finished the Master in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the VU.