Bai Three-Course Tea

The Bai three-course tea is the most honoured courtesy tea of the Dali Bai, served as three courses of strikingly different flavour: the first a bitter tea of leaves roasted in an earthenware pot and dashed with boiling water, fragrant and austere; the second a sweet tea enriched with brown sugar, crumbled rushan, walnut kernels and sesame; the third a reflective tea blended with honey, Sichuan peppercorn, ginger and cinnamon, sweet yet tingling, with a long lingering finish.

The three-course tea grows from the Bai philosophy of "bitterness before sweetness," said to have taken shape in the era of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, long the solemn courtesy of hosts, weddings and festivals; in 2014 it entered the fourth national ICH list as an extension under "tea custom (Bai three-course tea)," and in 2022 it was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage as part of "traditional tea processing and its social practices."

Served to the singing and dancing of Bai hosts, guests drink the three courses in turn, each savoured for its lesson of "bitter first, sweet next, then reflection," often accompanied by Bai song and dance and experienced on Erhai lake cruises or in the old courtyards of Xizhou.

The progression of "bitter, sweet, reflective" flavours and the life lesson it carries, together with the ceremonial singing and dancing that accompany the serving, are the distinctive cultural marks of the three-course tea.