Welcome to the BAME&I Social and Wellbeing Event that aim to provide a space for staff members and students to meet and network, share knowledge and enrich intercultural experiences.
This event presents a taster session of Chinese tea culture with an appreciation of guzheng performance.
Organised by BAME&I Staff Network Facilitated by Dr Liang Wang, The Language Centre Contributed by Wei DENG and Fengting LIAO
Date: Thursday 23rd June 2022 Time: 15:30 – 17:30 Venue: The Auditorium, McClay Library
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.
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.
Image@YuantingQiao
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.
Cha or Tea? This is not a question in the Chinese context – it’s 茶 (chá) officially, while te (tea) is a dialect from southeast coastal areas like Fujian and Taiwan. So 茶 (chá) exported alongside the ancient silk road (by land) has been called as cha or any of the variants in those areas whereas 茶 (chá) exportation by sea has been pronounced as tea.
Tea is the world’s most consumed drink, after water. It is believed that tea originated in northeast India, north Myanmar and southwest China, but the exact place where the plant first grew is not known. Tea has been with us for a long time. There is evidence that tea was consumed in China 5,000 years ago.
Did you still remember that we had organised a culture talk on Chinese tea in the year of Mouse at Queen’s?
Speaker Beidi Wang (second from right) with some of the audience celebrating CNY after the talk at the McClay Library, QUBThe introduction of tea history by Beidi Wang, QUB MBA graduate
The art of serving tea
Q1. What are the four essential elements in tea serving?
Q2. When you are served tea in front of you, what are you supposed to do to express your courtesy?
a) Say ‘谢谢 (xièxie, thank-you)’. b) Drink it as soon as it is served. c) Leave it untouched until cooled down. d) Use your fingers to ‘koutou’ on the table as if bowing to someone.
Practising serving tea at a tea house in Suzhou. Image @LiangWANG
A survey
Nǐ xǐhuan hē chá ma 1) 你喜欢喝茶吗？(Do you like drinking tea?)
Nǐ xǐhuan hē shénme chá 2) 你喜欢喝什么茶？(What type of tea do you like drinking?)
