As a material and literary world, the Silk Road ‘reorients’ our maps of both global capitalism and world literature. The commodities that circulated along the Silk Road included not only objects such as silks, leather, pottery, spices, silver and paper, but also artisans and courtesans, foods and cuisines, languages and knowledges, ideas, ideologies, texts and cultural institutions. This chapter explores the connections between world literature and Silk Road commodities, focusing on the global cultures of tea and specifically the literary culture of the teahouse, which it reads as a precursor to the coffeehouse of early modern literary culture. The history of tea’s origins and proliferation, and of its production and consumption as well as attendant technologies, material cultures, rituals and spaces, allows us to track its movement from the Silk Road to Europe, specifically through the rise and development of teahouses and the intercultural dialogues facilitated by the practice of tea consumption. Bringing together examples of tea poetry in Chinese, Japanese, Moroccan-Arabic and Sufi literatures this chapter shows how tea is a staple feature of fictional worlds across connected literary cultures. In doing so, it explores the broader potential for using the commodity cultures of the Silk Road as a framework for literary study in a global context.