Cooling Down With Herbal Drinks

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Hot weather is officially right here with the summer season sunshine. All over China now, the weather map is tinted varied 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's the reason natural teas are all the time an vital part of this season.


These teas are infusions made with Chinese herbs or fruits and will style barely sweet or intensely bitter, relying on what they are prescribed for. But for as long as we are able to remember, natural teas have been popular in these regions.


"Cooling herbal tea" or liangcha is a lot part of Chinese life that it has been listed a national intangible cultural heritage.


Southern Chinese, in particular, wouldn't think of passing by means of summer time without every day doses of cooling tea. And as the city diaspora spreads, even main cities within the north at the moment are having fun with the advantages of those teas-a result of improved marketing, packaging and logistics.


When the Sichuan sizzling pot migrated north, it took alongside the Cantonese cooling tea, and it became the fad to enjoy the numbing heat of the prickly ash peppercorns while imbibing large quantities of liangcha by the facet. It was an odd pairing.

However, this practice is actually frowned upon by herbal traditionalists.

Liangcha can't be handled as a gentle drink. Every glass or bowl has its designed dosage and benefits.


Carefully ready infusions are offered 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 promoting brews which have stood the check of time and generations.


For instance, the nation's most popular tinned herbal tea in a purple can comes from a Cantonese recipe that's a few hundred years previous. Each herbal store in Guangdong or Guangxi has its personal signature brew.

Among them was Baozhilin, the intra herbal drink store owned by legendary martial arts grasp Huang Feihong.

These natural tea retailers are the result of each geographical and cultural serendipity.


They're all in an space often known as Lingnan, a naturally humid valley that may be a botanical treasure trove of rare plants and herbs-a reality long discovered by their homeopathy founders.


They collected and dried these pure ingredients and brewed an enormous number of cooling teas to fight the summer season heat.


Most of those cooling infusions are made from dried flowers, leaves and roots all harvested from the area.


Some are more commonplace such because 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 equivalent to snow pear, jujubes, luohanguo or arhat fruit and dried longans.


Some substances had been uncommon, but had been later cultivated, together with ajuga, the bugleweed known in Chinese as xiakucao. Then there is also the fuzzy silver-leaved baizicao, or Antiotrema dunnianum.