As the north bakes and the south swelters, China turns to tea
Hot weather is officially here with the summer sunshine. All over China now, the weather map is tinted various shades of red as the country swelters.
While the north is dry and hot, the southern regions are baking in humid heat they call sauna weather. That is why herbal teas are always an important part of this season.
These teas are infusions made with Chinese herbs or fruits and may taste slightly sweet or intensely bitter, depending on what they are prescribed for. But for as long as we can remember, herbal teas have been popular in these regions.
"Cooling herbal tea" or liangcha is so much a part of Chinese life that it has been listed a national intangible cultural heritage.
Southern Chinese, in particular, would not think of passing through summer without daily doses of cooling tea. And as the urban diaspora spreads, even major cities in the north are now enjoying the benefits of these teas-a result of improved marketing, packaging and logistics.
When the Sichuan hot pot migrated north, it took along the Cantonese cooling tea, and it became the rage to enjoy the numbing heat of the prickly ash peppercorns while imbibing huge quantities of liangcha by the side. It was an odd pairing.
However, this practice is actually frowned upon by herbal traditionalists.
Liangcha cannot be treated as a soft drink. Every glass or bowl has its designed dosage and benefits.
Carefully prepared infusions are sold in potbellied copper pots along the coastal stretch of southern China from Macao, Hong Kong to Guangzhou, Beihai, Zhanjiang right down to Hainan Island. These are specialist shops selling brews that have stood the test of time and generations.
For example, the country's most popular tinned herbal tea in a red can comes from a Cantonese recipe that is a couple of hundred years old. Each herbal shop in Guangdong or Guangxi has its own signature brew.
Among them was Baozhilin, the herbal shop owned by legendary martial arts master Huang Feihong.
These herbal tea shops are the result of both geographical and cultural serendipity.
They are all in an area known as Lingnan, a naturally humid valley that is a botanical treasure trove of rare plants and herbs-a fact long discovered by their homeopathy founders.
They collected and dried these natural ingredients and brewed a vast variety of cooling teas to combat the summer heat.
Most of these cooling infusions are made from dried flowers, leaves and roots all harvested from the region.
Some are more commonplace such as the flowers of chrysanthemum, honeysuckle and frangipani, wild licorice root, American ginseng, fritillary bulbs, lotus leaves, mulberry leaves, borage, mint, perilla, mugwort, elderberry, hawthorn, wolfberry and fruits such as snow pear, jujubes, luohanguo or arhat fruit and dried longans.
Some ingredients were rare, but were later cultivated, including ajuga, the bugleweed known in Chinese as xiakucao. Then there is also the fuzzy silver-leaved baizicao, or Antiotrema dunnianum.
These two herbs are common summer coolers and are easily prepared at home, sweetened with rock sugar or honey.
[Photo by ZHENG WENJIA/FOR CHINA DAILY]
In recent years, the herbal infusions have even been commercially distilled and are sold in packets of easily dissolved crystals, just like instant coffee.
Another famous infusion is wuhuacha, the five-flowers tea, made from honeysuckle, chrysanthemum, Chinese locust, red cotton tree flowers and the kudzu flower.
In my own childhood, I remember my village Cantonese grandmother feeding me all sorts of evil concoctions. A more pleasant tasting one was the baizicao tea which even smelt faintly floral and was supposed to chase away the summer vapors. Growing up in Singapore, that meant we drank it all year round.
The herbal brew that sent me hiding under the staircase was an intensely bitter brew made from the tiny dried flower buds of Cleistocalyx operculate. It had a beautiful Chinese name, shuiwenghua, which roughly translates to "flowers of the water scholar".
Its literary beauty was totally lost on me.
This was forcibly fed to me whenever I showed signs of fever and sunstroke, which was often, and I never failed to break into a sweat after drinking the brew. Perhaps it was sheer terror.
Similar stories are told by my friends.
One was made to drink a series of bitter concoctions after she was diagnosed with polio and western doctors told her mother there was nothing else they could do.
Her determined mother consulted a Chinese physician in Chinatown who prescribed a routine of herbal brews. They worked. We never knew she had polio until she told us.
Miraculous cures aside, most herbal teas are roughly divided into four categories, according to their effectiveness.
The first group is the antitoxin teas, which clears accumulated heat in the body and is suitable for those who are easily irritated. The main ingredients include honeysuckle, chrysanthemum, wild magnolia and so on.
The second group of teas is for those susceptible to summer colds and sniffles. The signature ingredient is banlangen, the indigo root, touted as the miracle herb during the SARS epidemic in 2003.
Another group of teas is more for autumn consumption when the weather becomes very dry and coughs and throat irritations are common. They make use of pear leaves, snow fungus and other soothing ingredients.
Finally, the last group of teas is those that clear "wet heat", a condition that arises from too much spicy and fried food, and high fructose fruits such as mangoes and lychees, resulting in halitosis. These teas use honeysuckle, chrysanthemum and dessert mushrooms to best effect.
There are some things modern science is still discovering about Chinese herbal teas. To the Chinese, however, the proof is already in the drink.
