Why does Jia Fu like to use "a cup of tea" instead of "a meal" to describe the time | Xu Jingzhou

In the dream of the Red Chamber, it is often timed to drink tea. For example, the forty-seventh time, saying that the next person went without a cup of tea, Baoyu came. On the fifty-eighth time, Qingwen looked at the table and said, "Just wait a little longer for half a cup of tea." ”

But what we often seem to be more accustomed to using meals to time. For example, in ordinary novels, you can often read such sentences: Less than one meal of kung fu, only half a meal of kung fu. Why do the characters in Jia Fu like to use tea to calculate time?

Simply put, the people in Jia Fu not only love to drink tea, but also use the time to drink tea to keep time. The deeper layer says that it is to use tea to describe the time as more elegant, in line with the daily life habits of the upper class people in Jia Province. The use of eating to describe time is more vulgar, so it is often used in popular novels. If you let Grandma Liu say, it must be a meal kung fu, if you let Jia Mu say, it must be a tea kung fu.

The People of Jia Fu are indeed good tea: tea appears as an important drink a lot of times, and there are many varieties of that tea, including Qianhong Yi Cave, Maple Dew Tea, Lu'an Tea, Almond Tea, Lao Junmei, Jasmine Tea, Daughter Tea, Longjing, Pu'er Tea, Luogong Tea, Mortal Tea, Immortal Tea, and so on. Nowadays, many teas have been lost, or they are Cao Xueqin's fiction.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the people in Jia Fuzhong use tea to describe time.

By the way, a cup of tea refers to about 10-15 minutes, which is the time it takes for a cup of tea to be brewed to be ingested, and it also refers to the time when a cup of tea is served to the end. A meal does not mean eating a meal, but 1-2 hours to cook a meal.