Did People in Indonesia Drink Tea in the Middle Ages?
THESE DAYS Indonesia produces a lot of tea — around 140,000 tonnes per year, in fact, making it the sixth or seventh largest tea producer in the world (Figure 1). Most of this tea is grown and harvested in Java, with a smaller amount grown in Sumatra, and most is processed as black tea for export. Tea isn’t native to the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, though, and the growing of tea in the region only seems to have begun in the colonial period (Figure 2). (1) Of course, tea isn’t native to England or Turkey either, and it’s been popular in both places for centuries. So the question for today is: Did people in island Southeast Asia drink tea in the Middle Ages, before their cultures and cuisines were radically altered by colonialism, the Columbian Exchange, and widespread conversion to Islam?
Tea is originally Southeast Asian: The tea plant (Camellia sinensis) comes from northern mainland Southeast Asia and southwestern China, and most of the world’s words for ‘tea’, including the Chinese ones, may ultimately come from an Austroasiatic language (although the precise origin is still debated). (2) It would therefore seem a little surprising if something as pleasant as tea coming from such a nearby region were absent from the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in the Middle Ages, particularly when one considers that oak galls from Persia, porcelain from China, and glass from the Adriatic were all making their way to the region before the end of the fifteenth century.
As far as I know, though, there are no references to tea in any medieval Indo-Malaysian texts. The word doesn’t appear in the Old Javanese corpus and it only occurs in more recent works in Classical Malay. I haven’t seen it in any Old Sundanese texts. The modern Malay/Indonesian word for ‘tea’ is teh, from Minnan tê (茶) — a loanword introduced by settlers from southern China (see below). (3) This word could have been introduced before the sixteenth century but there’s no direct evidence for that.
There aren’t any references to the drinking of tea in the archipelago in foreign accounts, either (as far as I know). In fact some say explicitly that tea wasn’t present. The Chinese translator Mǎ Huān (馬歡 — c.1380–1460), who travelled on several of the ‘treasure ship’ voyages under Zhèng Hé in the early fifteenth century, says, speaking of Java (c.1433):
“遇賓客往來無茶，止有檳榔待之”
‘They receive passing guests without tea; they have only betel with which to entertain them.’ (4)
This is the key point: Instead of tea, people in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago at this time chewed mildly narcotic quids made up of slices of areca nut (seeds of Areca catechu — Indonesian: pinang) wrapped in the leaves of the betel vine (Piper betle — Indonesian: sirih) and salted with lime (calcium oxide, not the fruit), with other ingredients like camphor, clove, and gambier added for flavouring. This tradition of betel chewing (as it’s usually called) has largely but not completely died out in western Indonesia and Malaysia, replaced by coffee and tobacco (and tea to a lesser extent). It’s still an essential part of the daily routine in much of eastern Indonesia, however, where it plays a vital role at all manner of social gatherings.
Betel chewing seems to have been incredibly important in medieval Java, just as it must have been elsewhere in the archipelago. In Bujangga Manik, the fifteenth-century Old Sundanese text I’m working on for my doctorate, over a hundred metrical lines (5) are devoted to describing betel quids and enumerating their ingredients (Figures 3 and 4):
Betel long preceded coffee and tea as the archipelago’s preferred stimulant. Betel wasn’t just a mild narcotic: it was also a social glue, and it seems to have held a lot of sentimental value, just like tea in England and India or coffee in Italy and Oman. The practice of chewing the quids seems to have been dislodged only late in the colonial period by the introduction of tobacco, a plant originally from Amazonia, and even then initially only among men.
Tea and betel chewing can co-exist — both are popular in modern Taiwan, and it’s notable that betel quids were also chewed in parts of China in the Middle Ages — but it seems that the ubiquity and cultural importance of betel may have obviated the need/desire for tea among the Sundanese and Javanese at this time.
Chinese Settlers
It’s entirely possible, though, that tea was consumed by the region’s Chinese communities. By the fifteenth century large numbers of people from southern China had settled in coastal towns throughout the archipelago’s western islands. These settlers appear to have brought certain traditions with them — like the playing of card games and the idea of building houses on flat ground (instead of constructing them on wooden or stone piles as the locals did). A reference in Bujangga Manik suggests that Chinese people were known for their archery skills, too (Figure 5):
The aforementioned Chinese translator Mǎ Huān says that three main groups of people lived in Java in the early fifteenth century:
- Muslims (回回人), probably referring to Arabs, Persians, Gujaratis, and other western Afro-Eurasians who followed Islam;
- native Javanese (土人, lit. ‘people of the soil’);
- and Chinese immigrants (唐人, lit. ‘Táng people’), all of whom were apparently people from Guangdong, Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou and other similar places who had fled their homes and settled on the island (“皆是廣東、漳、泉等處人竄居是地”).
Some of the Chinese were Muslims (like Mǎ himself) and their eating habits on the whole were said to be ‘excellent and pure’ (美潔) — unlike the cuisine of the local people, which Mǎ Huān disdained as ‘unclean and foul’ (穢惡). This may imply that Chinese communities in fifteenth-century Java retained Chinese tastes, although Mǎ could equally well have been saying nothing more than that they kept ḥalāl. If they did maintain Chinese habits of dress and food at this time, though, then it’s quite likely that they drank tea.
It would also be surprising if sailors on ships from China didn’t bring tea with them to drink. Overall, I would say that it’s entirely possible some people in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago drank tea towards the end of the Middle Ages, if not earlier. It’s just that, as far as I know, there’s no direct evidence for it. (6)
Did anyone in the region drink coffee? Almost certainly not: Coffee only seems to appear in the historical record in South Arabia in the fifteenth century and spread out from there in early modernity. We can be reasonably sure that it was introduced to the archipelago in early modernity.
NOTES
(1) Tea plantations in Indonesia seem to have been started by Dutch planters inspired by British efforts at tea production in India in the nineteenth century. Some of the plantation owners in colonial Java were British; in fact, one of the most important sources for the Sundanese language before the twentieth century is a dictionary compiled in 1862 by Jonathan Rigg, a British tea planter in West Java.
(2) Wiki has an entire article just on the ‘etymology of tea’. It’s not the best article in the world but it does have some helpful lists. Wiktionary also has some useful free information. The argument about Austroasiatic origins and loans into proto-Sino-Tibetan (or Old Chinese?) is slightly above my pay-grade but it doesn’t seem implausible to me prima facie. Malay, Javanese, and so on are not Austroasiatic languages but Austronesian ones, in case you were wondering; the Austroasiatic family includes Vietnamese, Khmer, the Aslian languages of Malaysia, and the Munda languages of India, as well as some others scattered across mainland Southeast Asia and into southern China.
(3) This Malay form is the likely direct source of English ‘tea’, Dutch thee, and so on, possibly ultimately from a proto-Austroasiatic word by way of Minnan/Hokkien.
(4) The text here is taken from the Chinese Text Project collaborative edition. The translation is adapted from Mills’ 1970 translation for the Hakluyt Society.
(5) There are only 1630 surviving lines in the entire text, most of them eight syllables in length (as usual with Old Sundanese poetry). A hundred lines is a significant chunk of the poem.
(6) I could be wrong about all of this, of course. If you know better then do let me know!
A. J. West — Leiden, April 2020.
REFERENCES
Ma Huan. 1433 [1970]. Ying-yai sheng-lan. Translated by J. V. G. Mills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rigg, Jonathan. 1862. A dictionary of the Sunda language of Java. Batavia: Lange & Co.
