brick-tea

brick-tea (uncountable)

1. Tea leaves formed into the shape of a brick, used to make beverages like tea, eaten as food or, as in the past, used as a form of currency.
   • 1888, Rudyard Kipling, ‘On the City Wall’, In Black and White, Folio Society 2005, p. 438:

     "Some of them were men from Ladakh," said Lalun, when the last had gone. "They brought me brick-tea such as the Russians sell, and a tea-urn from Peshawar."

• tea brick