A cup of hot water in Russia - literally, or poor translation

I think it's probably just hot water. Our guys occasionally work on rigs in outlying parts of Russia and Kazakhstan and even today it's common for workers to just get a cup of hot water from the urn and sip it. Reasonably common in China too, from what travellers report.

Hot water sounds right.

Dave

You gotta remember that there's almost always an urn/samovar on the go in Russian workplaces or common indoor areas.

Reasonably common in China too, from what travellers report.

When I traveled in China in the early 1980s, there was always a thermos of hot water in hotel rooms, usually along with tea, but sometimes just hot water. One reason was that bottled water was not common, so water was boiled for drinking. Providing it hot proved (more or less) that it had been boiled.

Another was that people apparently did like to have a cup of hot water. I got in the habit of drinking it on a cool evening or morning.

We were told that hot water was known as "white tea" because it was what you drank when you were too poor to even afford tea.

You gotta remember that there's almost always an urn/samovar on the go in Russian workplaces or common indoor areas.

And maybe that's partly how to custom arose--that hot water would be safe to drink, as opposed to water taken from a stream or pumped out of a well.

An interesting blog post from the New York Times Why Do Russians Hate Ice?. It's about how Russian immigrants in the NY area prefer tepid beverages.

Can't speak to the translation, as I've only read the original, Жизнь и судьба, but it's a wonderful novel, one of my favorites.

The entire novel is available online in Russian and a word search reveals several instances in which one or another character is described as drinking кипяток = hot water (or, more literally, "boiling water"--though, of course, you wouldn't be drinking it when it was actually boiling, only recently boiled).

As the others have noted, this isn't at all unusual in Russia, both for the sake of avoiding water-borne diseases in a country that even in 2012 doesn't have safe municipal water in many places, and due to a long-standing cultural preference for warm drinks / drinks that haven't been chilled. (Superstitious Russian grannies have a horror of cold drinks as being likely to give you the grippe or some other dread disease.)

Common Chinese for plain hot water is 白开水 bai kai shui,+ literally "white hot water" but +white+ here means "plain" not the colour white. Perhaps 白茶 +bai cha “white tea" is used somewhere, but I haven't heard it.

It's not at all unusual to order bai kai shui in a restaurant.

And while those Thermos bottles have pretty much disappeared from Chinese hotel rooms, they've been replaced by electric do-it-yourself kettles, though the occasional hotel room will instead have a large bottle of spring water with a dispenser providing hot or cold water.

Doesn't the legend of how tea was invented centre around someone sitting under a tea bush with a cup of hot water when some leaves fall in?

Perhaps 白茶 bai cha “white tea" is used somewhere, but I haven't heard it.

I wish I could tell you where I was when I was told that, but, alas it was 30 years ago. Could have been anywhere from Beijing to Xian to Suzhou to Hohhot. (Side note--in Hohhot, you could buy this great deep-fried bread, a sort of non-sweet cruller. I forget the Chinese or Mongolian name; we just called them Hoh Hots.)

You mean 油条 you tiao(r)? They're everywhere in northern China, Beijing especially.

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