Hainan Baba's Tea Culture

Eating tea is not a unique traditional custom of Hainan people, but dad's tea culture in Hainan culture is incomparable to that in any area. Tea drinking culture in Hainan is a kind of leisure and life sentiment, and tea drinking is often accompanied by Hainan's unique leisure culture. Let's feel the leisure of Hainan together.

Dad tea is a special tea culture in Haikou, Hainan, where parents and children get together to drink tea. It is a landscape of Haikou, a pot of tea, a dish of peanuts, or one or two loaves of bread, an old table and an old stool, surrounded by three or two tea drinkers dressed in plain clothes, quietly "eating" tea. However, due to Hainan's unique customs and culture, the pace of life in Hainan is very leisurely. Dad tea is available in many places, but the scale is not particularly large. Wenchang people also love to drink tea, and will have a simple "Daddy Tea" party in the leisurely afternoon to evening.

The tea here is ordinary green tea, black tea powder, or homemade chrysanthemum and jasmine tea. If you want to taste tea, go to the teahouse. Here, people who drink tea often eat snacks while drinking tea. There are many kinds of snacks, which is the best place to eat snacks. Snacks include sweet potato soup, green soybean milk, Qingbuliang, quail egg boiled tremella, cassava fried rice fruit, "fried pile", pig blood mix and so on. Sweet and salty, each has its own taste.

Haikou Baba milk tea shop is often located in the small streets and lanes of the old city, and there is no decoration. The street is paved with ten tables and stools. Tea drinkers are often middle-aged and elderly people who live nearby and occasionally pass by. Most of them know each other, so you don't need to make an appointment in advance. They met in the streets. "Let's have tea." In a word, he went to the tea shop. Tea shops are often crowded, smoky and full of people.

Waiters go back and forth in the hall, busy, giving tea to this one and snacks to that one, but always warm and thoughtful. Even if the tea drinker orders a pot of coffee table for ten cents, he will still serve you well and truly from early morning to after dusk in the afternoon, and no one will order you to leave.

On page 127 of Hainan Island Annals compiled during the Republic of China, there is such a description: "There is no shortage of tea-producing places in Hainan, but many people are not addicted to it and drink more." At the same time, there is a similar description on page 63 of Wenchang County Records of the Republic of China: "The natives are addicted to alcohol but not tea." In these local chronicles of the Republic of China, there is no record of tea production, which shows that the local consumption of tea in Hainan at that time basically relied on imports. The number of tea imports from the Republic of China 14 to the Republic of China 17 (1925- 1928) provided by Hainan Island Records was 687, 482, 7 17 and 480 respectively, which basically confirmed that at least ".

At the same time, the page 135 of Hainan Island Records also provides such a message: "Hainan people are used to sailing, so many people live abroad. ..... Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong are the most popular ports, followed by Haiphong, Java and Malay Peninsula, and hotels, restaurants, tea rooms, shoemaking and sewing industries are special partners ... "This shows that Dad's tea is imported from the west.

Milk tea originated in the west. Westerners like to drink black tea with sugar or light milk, accompanied by western cakes. Later, these habits spread to countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, where eastern and western cultures merged. In these places, many Hainanese who went out from Hainan to make a living gathered at that time and brought these habits back to Hainan after returning home.

Hainanese call "drinking" tea "eating" tea, which is not only influenced by the local dialect, but also because when entering a tea shop, tea is a supporting role after all, and the protagonists are all kinds of delicious snacks, noodles, desserts and local snacks.

Breakfast in the tea shop is rich and varied, including Wanning Houan powder and Wenchang Paul powder, which can make you eat water and warm soup, as well as Hainan powder and Wenchang pickled pepper powder, which are mixed with delicious taste. There are coffee, milk tea, all kinds of bread cakes, and even Qingbuliang, sweet potato soup, Wanning Zongzi, fried dumplings and so on, which can be eaten in Dad's milk tea shop every day. Dad's tea shop is like a large-scale workshop. Although the space is simple, it can make all kinds of things to meet the needs of people with different tastes.

It can be said that a tea shop with a wide variety of snacks is as rich as a snack street, so it is no wonder that tea customers linger on the tea shop.

In the morning and afternoon, there are many guests in Dad's milk tea shop. Three or four yuan for a breakfast, low price and rich styles make many people willing to take this place as their breakfast place. Uncle Zhang and his wife, who live in Wenchang, said that they seldom have breakfast at home. They often order one or two things at dad's tea shop. Two people can spend four or five yuan to solve a hearty breakfast, but there are really so many styles of breakfast at home.

In summer, Hainan people like to eat something after a lazy and comfortable nap. In Hainan dialect, this is called "Eating Heaven", which is about three or four o'clock. In rural families, this habit of "eating the sun" is often simply to eat leftovers at noon, while in some towns or cities with dad's tea shop, the place of "eating the sun" is often changed to tea.

Westerners like to drink a cup of black tea with western cakes during lunch and afternoon work breaks; Or in a leisurely afternoon, a few relatives and friends sit at the outdoor wrought iron table, order a cup of tea and drink it all afternoon. In Hainan, people began to like this kind of leisurely lifestyle with a bit of "parking" nature. People who come to Dad's tea shop in the afternoon seem to spend more time sitting in the tea shop than in the morning.

Because I often meet several acquaintances and friends together, during tea time, my parents have short stories, trivial matters of life, social anecdotes and even some lottery information they "analyzed", each holding a long "winning paper" (paper with lottery numbers written on it). You and I talked for a long time. In the afternoon, it is almost difficult to find seats in some popular tea shops.