Tea for Tourists: Cultural Capital, Representation, and Borrowing in the Tea Culture of Mainland China and Taiwan

Abstract

Tea is arguably one of themost widely consumed beverages in the world. It has been imbued with diverse medicinal, cultural, and symbolic characteristics. Tea plays a significant role in the construction of  contemporary national and regional identities that are, in turn, presented and represented for tourists in the form of tea houses, museums, tea trails, guided tours, and tea tastings. Based on ethnographic participant observation in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Taipei, and Pinglin, this paper tackles a comparative analysis of tea culture as used and represented in cultural tourism, focusing on the identity narratives of specialised teamuseums, tea houses, and teamarkets to trace cultural representations and flows of contemporary cultural borrowing in the art of tea. Keywords : tea culture, tourism, China, Taiwan, cultural capital