Tea in the 'Verse

I've been spending a lot of time in the Firefly 'verse of late. I've watched through the complete series and feature film probably three times over in the last couple of months. And one thing I've noticed is how prevalent, yet subtle, tea is in the show. This is actually not too surprising, if you think about it.

For those not schooled in the world of Firefly, it's a sci-fi western set roughly 500 years in the future and in a distant galaxy populated by the descendants of "Earth that Was" and stretches across hundreds of worlds that were terraformed and populated after "Earth got used up." It's arguably one of the best series in history that never made it, and one of the biggest debacles in the history of the Fox network.

But I digress.

The backstory of the 'verse is that back before the human population left Earth, the two big superpowers remaining were the US and China, and they took it upon themselves to be the catalysts in making the move to space. It's not surprising then, that those two cultures would be the two that would survive 500 years down the line. So much so that in the show, the characters speak a mish-mash of English and Mandarin interspersed together in kind of a fun bit of dialog. And since China took itself into space, it's not surprising to see how the culture of tea might have made its way to space as well.

So the next time you watch the show (or if you choose to check it out for the first time), try to pick up on the subtle references to tea peppered throughout the show... mainly with the Companion Inara, who seems to be always drinking tea, and is in fact very ceremonial about it.