Keemun, not Keemum
So it’s keemun tea, not keemum tea.
Thank you to Dan for pointing this out to me. After Dan’s comment, I checked a couple of my books about tea and discovered that yes, I was completely wrong. And I felt a bit silly, until I ran a Google search for keemum tea and found 411,000 results ? a figure that outnumbers the 378,000 currently being returned for keemun tea.
Seems I’m not the only one who’s a little confused.
So to all you who have stumbled across this on a quest to rectify your ignorance, I assure you: It’s keemun, not keemum.
By the way, one reason I’m posting this is to try to fix a problem with my RSS feed, which isn’t updating as it should. Let me know if any of you are noticing some funny stuff.
dan wrote:
Glad to be of assistance!
I think your search metrics might be a bit off, though…sometimes Google will automatically assume what it thinks you meant, and display results for that instead of what you actually searched for. If you examine the results for keemum tea, you’ll see that many of them actually say keemun (at least it’s that way for me.)
If you put your query in quotation marks, Google will only return exact phrase matches. I got 9,220 hits for “keemum tea” (with quotes), compared to 46,000 for “keemun tea”.
That said, results might also vary by country (I’m in the US), and it’s still a pretty widespread [mis]spelling, so you shouldn’t feel too silly
Also, the RSS feed seems to be working OK for me (assuming this is the most recent posting.)
Kevin Hui wrote:
Kee-mun is old anglisation of ??, “qi men” (pronounced CHI-MEN) in proper mandarin pinyin. It literally means the door of Kee (surname). In Chinese context it actually means from the House of Kee.
Bit of trivia for you.
Kee or Qi in that particular character is a rare surname and my mum’s maiden name happen to be that.