Tea Break: Let's visit a Cha Chaan Teng
In which I attempt to tease out the British influence on Hong Kong's tea culture
After my last post, I realised that I should have been looking at Hong Kong, given that it was also a British colony and it also has a very strong tea culture. But since I’m Singaporean, I wanted my focus to be on Singapore, so this post is what I’ve learnt and can hopefully serve as a reference if I were to do anything comparative.
Two notes before we start:
I’m not going to look at all of tea culture (i.e. the part with gongfucha). I’m more concerned with yumcha and chachaanteeng (literally “tea canteen” but more like a diner), since the original focus was afternoon tea, which is more like a meal
I relied on papers that I found for this post - unlike in the case of Singapore, people have actually studied how Hong Kong’s chachaanteng developed. When I searched for “Singapore afternoon tea” on Google scholar, I got mostly medical papers.
The first thing I realised: the practice of yumcha developed independently. It sounds obvious because of course, different cultures can have similar practices develop coincidentally, what more something as basic as pairing food and drink, but up till now, I’ve mostly seen the practice of afternoon tea referred to as a British habit.
A very brief history of yumcha
Most Hong Kong historians agree that yumcha practices in Hong Kong follow/came from those in Guangzhou. Guangzhou people used to have two meals daily, at 11am and 6pm and when business was slow, business owners would go to teahouses to drink tea instead of eating with their employees on the shop floor. This was both to enjoy tea and to conduct business meetings.
At these teahouses, dimsum were commonly served. Dimsum is a generic term for sweet or savoury small food items that are commonly eaten with tea. There’s a Cantonese phrase: “yat chung leung kim” which refers to one cup of tea and two cups of dimsum - the general ratio of tea to food at these teahouses. Dimsum is meant to complement the tea and isn’t there to fill your stomach.
Due to the original timings at which Guangzhou people at their food, yumcha is now generally taken in the morning, though Tam (1997) notes that her university does serve dimsum for afternoon tea (but it’s not clear if that is also considered yumcha). As of 1997, it seems like yumcha is seem as something that is done outside the home, and you cannot yumcha with dimsum by yourself at home. That’s a bit different from afternoon tea, which can be taken at home as well as outside.
A brief history of the Cha Chaan Teng
Now that I’ve talked a bit about yumcha and found it rather unconnected to the concept of afternoon tea, let me talk about Cha Chaan Teng (often translated as “tea cafes”).
The precursor to the cha chaan teng is the bing sat (“ice room”) in Cantonese. The bing sat was an attempt to copy the British colonial coffee shops and make western food (and by extension, a Western way of life) affordable to the ordinary Chinese in Hong Kong.
From the mid-1950s onwards, the bing sat started to offer meals and other types of food and drink for lunch and dinner and evolved to become the cha chaan teng, which in turn became a ubiquitous part of Hong Kong food culture.
Interestingly, I didn’t see anything about the cha chaan teng’s offering anything like a localised version of afternoon tea on a wide scale. The only reference I could find to a British-inspired afternoon tea was from an undated post from Hong Kong Guide indicating that a cha chaan teng called Mak Sun Kee has introduced a three-tiered afternoon tea set.
Instead, the dish that the cha chaan teng’s adopted was breakfast. Chan (2019) calls the breakfast set a classic that was “invented as a result of the interaction between the colonizers and the colonized”. It is a dish that marries Asian and Western dishes, as a drink (coffee, milk tea, or lemon tea) is served with toast/bread, eggs (fried/scrambled), ham/sausages, luncheon meat, as well as noodles. Chan only mentions bread or toast but I suspect sweet buns like boulo bao might be common as well (at least my hazy memories would suggest).
What then, of the British influence on tea?
I have written a pretty long post on Hong Kong with very little on tea or afternoon tea. But excitingly, I can now link you to a blogpost I did late last year on the history and types of milk tea (yay! my blog and substack interacting just as I hoped!). Unfortunately, it’s not exactly on the British influence on milk tea in Asia, but it’s a good primer on the types of milk tea available. Now that I’ve done this preliminary research, I’m planning to write a post on the colonial influence on milk tea.
The next post in this substack series on afternoon tea is likely to go back to research on afternoon tea in Singapore, and likely to be shorter than this one!
Sources
Tam, S. M. (1997). Eating metropolitaneity: Hong Kong identity in yumcha. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 8(1), 291-306.
Chan, S. C. (2019). Tea cafés and the Hong Kong identity: Food culture and hybridity. China Information, 33(3), 311-328.