I had read a topic about the origin of the words chai and tea in a certain book before and happened to find a similar article on the blog.
The word tea is generally divided into two genealogies: Cantonese “cha” and Fujian “te”. “Cha” was spread by land via the Silk Road. “Te” spread to Europe by sea from Xiamen, which I visited in 2016. It seems to have switched at the border with the Balkans and Turkey.
Words travel too, don’t they?