Bai Three-Course Tea

In the Bai language three-course tea is called shaodao zhao. Fan Chuo's ninth-century Man Shu, an account of the southern frontier, records the ancestors of the Bai brewing a drink with pepper, ginger and cassia — an early shadow of this method. When Xu Xiake reached Dali in the Ming, the monks of Mount Jizu received him with three courses, which he set down in his travel diary as 'tea taken as a pastime: first clear tea, then salted tea, then honey tea'.

The custom is said to descend from the Nanzhao period, first poured at elders' birthday celebrations and later used for weddings, house-raisings and the induction of apprentices. In November 2014 the tea custom of the Bai three-course tea was approved by the State Council for the fourth national list of intangible cultural heritage, No. Ⅹ-107, as an expansion in the folk-custom category, nominated by Dali City, Yunnan, with the Dali municipal intangible cultural heritage office as the protecting body.

The first course is bitter. An empty clay pot is warmed over charcoal, tea goes in, and the pot is shaken as it toasts until the leaf is faintly gold and fragrant; a splash of boiling water makes it rumble, which is why it is called thunder tea. Because the toasting takes a hundred shakes or more it is also called the hundred-shake tea. The liquor is amber; it is poured into a cup, diluted with a little hot water and handed over, bitter and cooling on the tongue.

The second course is sweet. Walnut kernels are sliced thin and simmered with brown sugar until the tea aroma fills the room; some households add honey, and it drinks sweet and fragrant. The third is the aftertaste course: honey with a little Sichuan pepper and cassia, brewed with tea and rocked as it is drunk, sweet with a hint of numbness and a bitter note at the finish. The whole sequence is governed by three courses, six rules and eighteen steps, with three small cups brought out in turn for slow, careful drinking.

The Bai set out three-course tea at festivals, birthdays, weddings and apprenticeships. From the 1980s it was combined with Bai song and dance into a stage form and promoted for visitors in Dali: the bawangbian stick dance and the octagonal drum take the stage in turn while the audience works through the three cups.

Three-course tea sets bitter, sweet and lingering in front of the guest. Bai families use it to receive visitors and to talk about life. On 29 November 2022, the Bai three-course tea, as one component of China's traditional tea-processing techniques and associated social practices, was inscribed with that element on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Dali sits where the southern Silk Road meets the Tea Horse Road: tea came up from the mountains and went out again through here. Arrive in Dali today and three-course tea is still the first courtesy many hosts offer — brazier, tripod and clay pot laid out as before, and when the water boils the pot roars again.