Tea Etiquette: Reading the Leaves

"Floating tea leaves mean 'watch for strangers coming.' To tell the gender and the day of arrival, put them on the back of one hand and tap with the back of the other until they adhere - each tap is one day - and if they are soft leaves it is a woman; if hard, a man." 

The story of tea is as strange and as fascinating as any that one can read. A prehistoric event dating back some five thousand years is bound to be shrouded in many mysteries, but the exceptional qualities of tea are such that many legends developed concerning its beginnings. A highly civilized people like the Chinese considered it a special gift from heaven. In India, too, it was much the same. In Japan a special ceremony grew around it. This habit of drinking tea is the only purely Asian custom which commands universal interest. Through it the East and West have met - in a teacup! 

Its introduction had a charming influence on our Western culture, even though a great deal of smuggling and piracy helped to bring it about. Discriminating Chinese taste insisted that tea should be drunk from porcelain; and this subsequently had a tremendous effect on world trade and the voyages of clipper ships. Art, politics, and religion were all involved.

All this mystery and adventure stirred up many superstitions. Even today some tea companies attach a little saying to each teabag, such as:

"To stir tea in the pot is to stir up strife."

"Floating tea leaves mean 'watch for strangers coming.' To tell the gender and the day of arrival, put them on the back of one hand and tap with the back of the other until they adhere - each tap is one day - and if they are soft leaves it is a woman; if hard, a man." 

Fortune-telling from tea leaves is not solely a gypsy custom. Many people have read meanings into the shapes and groups of leaves that form in the bottom of the cup - how accurately is, of course, another matter. — By Patricia Easterbrook Roberts, 1967

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

The Fashionable 400’s Fortune Tellers

“She has taught all fashionable New York that to dream you see a poet is a sign you will lose money. It is supposed that this will widen the gap between Bohemia and McAllisterville. A girl who was going abroad for the London season, dreamed a Duke was in love with her and very much cast down on learning; that she would be apt to marry a needy and shiftless fellow.” — “Thanks to the meteoric increase in millionaires in New York due to the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, many of whose fortunes rivaled or even surpassed the oldest of families, Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister had a whole new challenge in deciding who of the nouveau riche was acceptable. This led to the creation of the famous List of 400 — the Four Hundred people who were New York’s high society.” —from MCNY.org

— Photo of old postcard from the Etiquipedia photo library

Fortunes in Tea Cups

A “Fortune Teller to the 400”

It wouldn’t be a bad sign, and really there is a woman who might also lay claim to the distinction, for in the revolutions of fads and fashions in their orbits, that which is oldest comes round again.  Of course, not a one of them would own to being superstitious but to put on one's “swagger” spring suit and pay a swagger price for a visit to a dark-eyed woman with a red turban marked with Egyptian characters about her head lends a wild flavor of interest to an afternoon. The woman is clever, for she really keeps an owl. It's a great mistake for a sorceress to grudge little additions like that to her paraphernalia. She wears broad heavy bracelets on her wrists and wraps something red about her shoulders. Otherwise her environment is prosaic, and, she being for a moment in luck, quite un-mysteriously and inartistically comfortable. 

She has taught all fashionable New York that to dream you see a poet is a sign you will lose money. It is supposed that this will widen the gap between Bohemia and Mc Allisterville. A girl who was going abroad for the London season, dreamed a Duke was in love with her and very much cast down on learning; that she would be apt to marry a needy and shiftless fellow. We all dread nowadays to dream of stockings, unless the are cotton ones, or of broken parasols. The dream we long for is of pots of jelly, or long life and good fortune, or of picking violets, for happiness in love.— San Francisco Call, 1890

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia © Etiquette Encyclopedia