Not for all the tea in China

I was thinking about this expression the other day while I was enjoying a nice cup of tea. If you look at this example, the meaning of the expression is fairly obvious:

Your new boss sounds terrible, I wouldn’t work for him for all the tea in China!

‘Not for all the tea in China’ means that we wouldn’t do something even if we were offered a fortune. It comes from the late 19th century, when China produced most of the world’s tea, and so ‘a(chǎn)ll the tea in China’ really was worth a huge amount of money. Nowadays it’s such a commonly known expression that there are books galore called ‘All the Tea in China’ (usually either about travelling around China, or about making money) and even a band on myspace called ‘All the Tea in China’!

There are actually lots of tea related phrases, and being a big fan of tea, I thought I’d share a couple more with you. ‘As useful as a chocolate teapot’ is pretty obvious, I don’t think a chocolate teapot would actually be very useful! ‘A storm in a tea cup’ is used to describe a situation in which a big fuss was made over something small. It was originally ‘a(chǎn) tempest in a teapot’, and can be traced all the way back to 1857. And finally, ‘not my cup of tea’ means that something is not to your taste, and is a polite way of saying no to something. For example, ‘Would you like to go to karaoke tonight?’, ‘Thanks, but it’s not really my cup of tea’.

To finish my tea-related blog, here’s a couple of tea facts for you. Did you know that tea is the second most consumed beverage on the planet, second only to water? There are four types of tea – black, green, white and red, but all of them come from the same plant, the Camellia sinensis, and the differences in colour and flavour come from how the tea is processed after it is picked!

(Source: www.englishonline.org.cn)

Johnny Grammar is English Online's resident grammar teacher. Johnny loves to tackle your worst grammar nightmares and provide you with simple explanations.

Johnny's blog: Johnny talks about interesting words and expressions in English that he comes across in his daily life.