Teahouse
cafe-type business serving tea
A teahouse or tearoom (also tea room) is an establishment which primarily serves tea and other light refreshments. A tea room may be a room set aside in a hotel, especially for serving afternoon tea, or may be an establishment that only serves cream tea. Although the function of a tea room may vary according to the circumstance or country, tea houses often serve as centers of social interaction, like coffee houses.
Some cultures have a variety of distinct tea-centered establishments of different types, depending on the national tea culture. For example, British tea rooms often serve afternoon tea with a variety of small snacks.
East Asia
Throughout East Asia, a teahouse (Chinese: 茶館, cháguăn or 茶屋, cháwū; Japanese: chaya (茶屋); Standard Nepali: chiya ghar (चिया घर)) is traditionally a place which offers tea to its customers. People gather at teahouses to chat, socialize and drink tea, and young people often meet at teahouses for dates. The Guangdong (Cantonese) style teahouse is particularly famous outside of China, especially in Nepal's Himalayas. These teahouses, called chálou (茶樓) serve dim sum (點心), and these small plates of food are consumed alongside tea.
Before tea was used as a social drink, Buddhist monks drank it to aid their meditation.
“Teahouse” enters the record as cafe-type business serving tea. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Teahouse, cafe-type and business can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Teahouse” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Teahouse, cafe-type and business provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1072166. The Library of Congress control number is sh96001108. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Teahouse”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Teahouse primary sources, Teahouse archive and Teahouse research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Teahouse”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Teahouse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.