Chinese

The Chinese are the people of China; UNESCO, describing the Spring Festival, calls its bearers "the Chinese people" and notes that tea customs are shared by many of the country's ethnic groups. Their traditions on this site are tea and gongfu tea, the lunar New Year, the grain spirit baijiu, hand-pulled noodles, soy milk and, in the south among the Cantonese, double-skin milk.

Tea. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed traditional tea processing techniques and associated social practices in China on its Representative List: six categories of tea, green, yellow, dark, white, oolong and black, and more than two thousand kinds. Tea is drunk at home, at work, in tea houses and temples, offered to guests and used to strengthen ties between families. In Chaoshan, Guangdong province, gongfu tea took shape: oolong in a tiny pot, olive-pit charcoal and steps with vivid names; it joined China's national heritage list in 2008.

Spring Festival. The New Year of the Chinese calendar starts on the first day of the first month, and on the eve families gather for dinner and stay up late. Before the festival homes are cleaned, food and provisions are prepared in advance, new clothes are worn, and elders and neighbours are greeted. UNESCO inscribed these customs on its Representative List in 2024. According to Hong Kong Observatory tables, the Spring Festival falls on 6 February 2027 and 26 January 2028.

Drinks and noodles. Baijiu is a Chinese grain spirit, most often from sorghum, made with qu starter; Chinese standards recognise more than twelve aroma types, and the most common, strong aroma, makes up about 70% of output. Soy milk also comes from China: its oldest record is on a stone slab from the Eastern Han dynasty. Hand-pulled noodles, lamian, are not cut with a knife but stretched by hand into strands; in the south fresh rice noodles are an everyday staple.

Milk. Milk was long not a staple of Chinese cooking, yet FAO estimates that more than 90% of the world's yaks live in China, and in Guangdong the Cantonese make double-skin milk, a dessert of buffalo milk.

Why this matters to you: once you know that gongfu tea means oolong in tiny cups and that baijiu is a family of aromas rather than one spirit, it is easier to choose tea or a bottle in a shop without mixing them up.