In our previous post we introduced milk tea or bubble tea (奶茶 nǎichá) which has gained its popularity among young people nowadays.

Today, we continue with this ‘milk tea’ topic by inviting Yuanting Qiao (乔苑婷), a QUB PhD candidate from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, to share some of her experience of drinking milk tea in Inner Mongolia, where her home place is.

With sunflowers, Image@YuantingQiao

Inner Mongolia, in full Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, … is a vast territory that stretches in a great crescent for some 1,490 miles (2,400 km) across northern China.

Britannica

‘The Real Milk Tea from Inner Mongolia‘

In Inner Mongolia (内蒙古 Nèi Ménggǔ) in China, people drink milk tea every morning. This Mongolia-style milk tea is a kind of traditional hot drink mixed with black tea and fresh milk in a pot for boiling. Some people add salt or sugar in milk tea while most of us prefer to drink it with the original taste. Some others put in butter-fried rice and dairy products. Thus, it is served in big bowls rather than in cups.

Image@YuantingQiao

Also, people in Inner Mongolia like eating beef and lamb, and they cook them with very little condiment, only using salt and green onion. Each time they prepare large quantity of beef or lamb so that every morning they put the cooked beef or lamb into the milk tea directly. Thus the milk tea can cool down very soon with great taste while the beef and lamb are heated. Quite often, people will add a traditional type of cheese when drinking milk tea.

What other tea drinking cultures in China would you like to recommend? Write us your personal experiences and stories in the comment box below or you are welcome to contact us if you want to write a short introduction of your local tea culture.