Hong Kong Milk Tea and Yuenyeung

Hong Kong milk tea belongs to the cha chaan teng, the Hong Kong tea café, where the British habit of taking black tea with milk was absorbed into Cantonese daily eating during the colonial period and made into a drink of its own. It is carried by the tea-café trade, whose cooks blend several black teas, brew them strongly and pour them through a cloth filter. Yuenyeung (鴛鴦), the name of the mandarin duck pair, a Chinese emblem of two things joined, is the Hong Kong drink that couples this milk tea with coffee. It belongs to the same café tradition and stands apart from the leaf-tea practice of Guangdong teahouses.

Hong Kong milk tea is a strong infusion of blended black tea leaves, usually Camellia sinensis var. assamica and Ceylon-type teas, mixed with evaporated milk rather than fresh milk, and sweetened to taste with sugar. The tea is boiled or steeped hard, then poured repeatedly through a long cloth bag, which gives a smooth, dense body and a deep amber-brown colour. Yuenyeung combines this tea with coffee, commonly in roughly equal parts, and is served hot or iced. Both drinks are made by the cup or the pot in the café and are drunk with breakfast sets and light baked or toasted dishes.

Milk tea is drunk at breakfast and mid-afternoon with toast spread with condensed milk or butter, egg sandwiches, macaroni in soup and egg tarts. The structural reason is balance: the tannic, bitter strength of the tea and the richness of the evaporated milk cut through the fat and starch of the food and refresh the palate between bites. Yuenyeung is taken in the same settings, the coffee adding roast bitterness to the tea's smoothness.