Tibetan Mushroom Puerh Tea

People who live in the Tibet region of China cannot survive without the regular supply of puerh tea from the southern province of Yunnan. They have a very unusual way of brewing the puerh tea. They mix the tea with milk, butter and other dairy products and boil everything together into a thick drink. If you are not used to this type of tea brewing, the smell of it can surely put you off. But the Tibetans do need this tea drink as the region seriously lack vegetables and stuff that will provide them a balance a diet as they do eat a lot of meat. Just imagine, if your diet consists mainly of heavy stuff (like meat and cheese), you need fruits and vegetables to balance your diet. This is the reason why in the past, the Chinese used the tea from Yunnan to exchange for horses from Tibet. There is also the legend of the ancient tea horse road 茶马古道.

From around a thousand years ago, the Ancient Tea Route was a trade link from Yunnan, one of the first tea-producing regions: to Bengal and India via Burma; to Tibet; and to central China via Sichuan Province. In addition to tea, the mule caravans carried salt. Both people and horses carried heavy loads, the tea porters sometimes carrying over 60–90 kg, which was often more than their own body weight in tea.

It is believed that it was through this trading network that tea (typically tea bricks) first spread across China and Asia from its origins in Pu'er county, near Simao Prefecture in Yunnan.

The route earned the name Tea-Horse Road because of the common trade of Tibetan ponies for Chinese tea, a practice dating back at least to the Song dynasty, when the sturdy horses were important for China to fight warring nomads in the north. (Source:Wikidpedia)

In the 1980s, Menghai factory resumed production of the traditional puerh tea meant for the Tibetans in the shape of mushrooms. The famous brand is the 'Baoyen' brand which is shown here.

Tibetan puerh tea.