When I order a cup of tea in Korea, where I live, I ask for cha (차); when trav­el­ing in Japan, I ask for the hon­orif­ic-affixed ocha (お茶). In Span­ish-speak­ing places I order té, which I try to pro­nounce as dis­tinct­ly as pos­si­ble from the thé I order in French-speak­ing ones. And on my trips back to Unit­ed States, where I’m from, I just ask for tea. Not that tea, despite its awe-inspir­ing ven­er­a­bil­i­ty, has ever quite matched the pop­u­lar­i­ty of cof­fee in Amer­i­ca, but you can still find it most every­where you go. And for decades now, no less an Amer­i­can cor­po­rate cof­fee jug­ger­naut than Star­bucks has labeled cer­tain of its teas chai, which has pop­u­lar­ized that alter­na­tive term but also cre­at­ed a degree of pub­lic con­fu­sion: what’s the dif­fer­ence, if any, between chai and tea?

Both words refer, ulti­mate­ly, to the same bev­er­age invent­ed in Chi­na more than three mil­len­nia ago. Tea may now be drunk all over the world, but peo­ple in dif­fer­ent places pre­fer dif­fer­ent kinds: fla­vors vary from region to region with­in Chi­na, and Chi­nese teas taste dif­fer­ent from, say, Indi­an teas. Star­bucks pre­sum­ably brands its Indi­an-style tea with the word chai because it sounds like the words used to refer to tea in India.

It also sounds like the words used to refer to tea in Far­si, Turk­ish, and even Russ­ian, all of them sim­i­lar to chay. But oth­er coun­tries’ words for tea sound dif­fer­ent: the May­lay teh, the Finnish tee, the Dutch thee. “The words that sound like ‘cha’ spread across land, along the Silk Road,” writes Quartz’s Nikhil Son­nad. “The ‘tea’-like phras­ings spread over water, by Dutch traders bring­ing the nov­el leaves back to Europe.”

“The term cha (茶) is ‘Sinitic,’ mean­ing it is com­mon to many vari­eties of Chi­nese,” writes Son­nad. “It began in Chi­na and made its way through cen­tral Asia, even­tu­al­ly becom­ing ‘chay’ (چای) in Per­sian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, accord­ing to a recent dis­cov­ery, tea was trad­ed over 2,000 years ago.” The te form “used in coastal-Chi­nese lan­guages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the pri­ma­ry traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th cen­tu­ry, as explained in the World Atlas of Lan­guage Struc­tures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Tai­wan, both places where peo­ple used the te pro­nun­ci­a­tion. The Dutch East India Company’s expan­sive tea impor­ta­tion into Europe gave us the French thé, the Ger­man Tee, and the Eng­lish tea.”

And we must­n’t leave out the Por­tuguese, who in the 1500s “trav­elled to the Far East hop­ing to gain a monop­oly on the spice trade,” as Cul­ture Trip’s Rachel Dea­son writes, but “decid­ed to focus on export­ing tea instead. The Por­tuguese called the drink cha, just like the peo­ple of south­ern Chi­na did,” and under that name shipped its leaves “down through Indone­sia, under the south­ern tip of Africa, and back up to west­ern Europe.” You can see the glob­al spread of tea, tee, thé, chai, chay, cha, or what­ev­er you call it in the map above, recent­ly tweet­ed out by East Asia his­to­ri­an Nick Kapur. (You may remem­ber the fan­tas­ti­cal Japan­ese his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca he sent into cir­cu­la­tion last year.) Study it care­ful­ly, and you’ll be able to order tea in the lands of both te and cha. But should you find your­self in Bur­ma, it won’t help you: just remem­ber that the word there is lakphak.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Tea

1934 Map Resizes the World to Show Which Coun­try Drinks the Most Tea

10 Gold­en Rules for Mak­ing the Per­fect Cup of Tea (1941)

George Orwell’s Rules for Mak­ing the Per­fect Cup of Tea: A Short Ani­ma­tion

Epic Tea Time with Alan Rick­man

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

When I think of the medieval tav­ern, I see grim footage from Bergman’s The Sev­enth Seal and grimy drink­ing scenes from Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. While only the first of these uses an osten­si­bly his­tor­i­cal set­ting, the imagery of them all is what we think of when we think of tav­erns. Huge casks in the cor­ners, great, inde­struc­tible wood­en tables and wood­en mugs, signs with pic­tures instead of words; drunk­en singing and the occa­sion­al axe fight.

The crude­ly ani­mat­ed Sim­ple His­to­ry video above con­firms these impres­sions, describ­ing the tav­erns, inns, and ale hous­es that were ances­tors of the mod­ern pub as “places of drink­ing, gam­bling, vio­lence, and crim­i­nal activ­i­ty.” Art his­to­ry and schol­ar­ship fur­ther con­firm our impres­sion of tav­erns as rough-hewn, row­dy hous­es where brawls fre­quent­ly broke out and all sorts of shady busi­ness trans­act­ed.

Ale hous­es had an “ale stake or ale pole” that could be raised to show they had a brew ready to serve. Tav­erns had a pole with leaves, called a “bush,” for the same pur­pose. Wine might be pricey, but beer was cheap, as “tax­ing it would not have been well-received.” Bar­maids poured drinks from pitch­ers of leather into mugs of wood. Food was… well, not so good…. Maybe we can visu­al­ize tav­ern life by extrap­o­lat­ing back­wards from our local dive bars.

How­ev­er, we might find it hard to imag­ine liv­ing in a time before beer. Milan Pajic, junior research fel­low at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, found that beer made a rel­a­tive­ly late entry in the his­to­ry of Eng­lish drink, arriv­ing only in the lat­ter half of the 14th cen­tu­ry when intro­duced by Dutch immi­grants and demand­ed by sol­diers return­ing from the 100 Years War.

Between around 1350 and around 1400, Pajic claims, all of the beer drunk in Eng­lish tav­erns was import­ed from the Nether­lands. “The first evi­dence of some­one brew­ing beer” in Eng­land, Pajic writes in an arti­cle pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Medieval His­to­ry, “comes from 1398–9.” The brew­er, a “Duche­man,” was “fined for buy­ing ‘wheat in the mar­ket in order to pro­duce beer, to the great dam­age of the same mar­ket.”

Such per­se­cu­tion could not last. In a hun­dred year’s time, a few hun­dred brew­ers could be found around the coun­try, most of them immi­grants from the Low Coun­tries. But in part because the Eng­lish dis­trust­ed the Dutch, “it took almost a cen­tu­ry from the moment it was intro­duced as an import­ed com­mod­i­ty and con­sumed large­ly by immi­grants before it came to be pro­duced on Eng­lish soil and accept­ed by the natives.”

Tav­ern, inn, and ale house designs would have con­formed to local join­ery trends, but the medieval Eng­lish tavern’s chief draw—cheap, fresh­ly-brewed beer, and lots of it—was a sus­pi­cious con­ti­nen­tal import before it became a nation­al trea­sure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beer Archae­ol­o­gy: Yes, It’s a Thing

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness