Yak butter is sold everywhere and has many uses. It is stored in the dried ruminant belly from a sheep. This is thought to preserve it. Possibly it is preserved for a time, but it is usually used when it is about a year old, and by then it is rancid.
Entering a Tibetan Buddhist temple is, by design, mesmerizing. The temples are built high on hilltops, and unless you are used to high altitudes, you are light-headed and short of breath when you walk through the ornate front door. It is a world of saffron, gold, and red ornament, accompanied by the ringing of bells, the blowing of hoarse single notes on horns, and the rhythmic chanting of men in prayer. There is a smell—familiar, but stronger than usual. It is rancid butter. There are rows of bronze cups, each filled with yak butter with a juniper wick wrapped in cotton in the middle. Some of the cups are lit. All have a strong smell. The butter has been there for a year or more.
The altar is filled with elaborate sculptures that are three, four, or five feet tall. Their bases are usually coral-colored, with red ornamentation. Above, globes and various geometric shapes are carved in blue, green, and gold with black-and-white trim. Sometimes the sculptures display colorful floral patterns or mythical characters. All are made of solid yak butter, shaped with the same type of tools that sculptors use on clay.
The sculptures are created only by Buddhist nuns who are special butter artists living in an adjacent convent. They mix powdered dyes with the butter. It takes a nun one day to make a sculpture. They make them only three times a year, and they display each for a year before burning it.
Butter is a sacred food to the Buddhists because it is nourishment taken from animals without the use of violence. All the nuns and monks who live in the monasteries and convents are vegetarians, and they say that this is the Buddhist way. When it was recently pointed out to them that religious Buddhist herders in the high country eat mostly yak and sheep meat, a twenty-six-year-old nun answered, “We don’t know anything about the outside.”
The nomads also eat tsamba, which is the Tibetan national dish. It was created by nomads for nomads. To make it requires chura, the fresh curds produced in the first stage of cheesemaking. But since the Tibetans wanted curds that they could travel with, they dried them first in the sun, producing brown, crunchy little chura kernels. It has often been said that the swift-mounted Mongolian army ate cheese. But they did not eat a Western-style cheese; they ate dried curds similar to chura, packing them in their saddlebags for a quick energy snack.
Tsamba is made by pouring tea in a bowl and adding chura, barley flour, yak butter, and sugar. The ingredients are kneaded together by hand until the mass reaches the consistency of cookie dough, a bit shocking to Western sensibilities when it is made by a waiter at the table in a restaurant. To build very large temple butter carvings, they are stuffed with tsamba for solidity.
Tsamba is not only made by hand, it is eaten with hands. Hiking up the mountains and needing a protein boost, the nomad reaches into the bag on his yak and scoops out a blob of tsamba. Between the barley flour, the butter, and the sugar, it tastes almost like cookie dough, though it is not very sweet. Tibetans do not have a taste for sweets, or perhaps just haven’t developed one because they don’t have much sugar. Even their traditional sweets, called juema, are only moderately sweet. Juema are small brown cubes made from yak butter, chura, a grated local root, and only a very small amount of sugar.
It is also a Tibetan tradition to melt yak butter in a cup of tea, which would taste better if the butter weren’t rancid. The more urbane Tibetans living in towns use fresh milk in their tea instead. It is believed that the Indian custom of drinking tea with milk, which was introduced by the Brits, originated in Tibet.
Tibetan yak cheese label. This yak cheese is made by Tibetan Buddhist monks, but it is not traditional and has not been a commercial success.
The best thing produced with yak milk is yak yogurt—the milk’s high fat content makes for a very rich and flavorful food, with a thin skin of leftover milk fat sitting on top. The nomads always eat their yogurt plain because they have no fruit to add. After eating the rich yak yogurt, cow yogurt can seem like a letdown—a fact businesspeople have noted. Yak yogurt is now becoming a successful commercial product in China.
The Chinese want to dismantle the Tibetan culture and make its people Chinese. In northern Tibet, this means getting the nomads to abandon their wandering life in the mountains and settle in towns. The Chinese have built numerous red-roofed, yellow-walled villages in which to settle the nomads, but they are completely empty. More successful has been the Chinese effort to stop the nomads from wandering by fencing off their ranging lands so that now they have only government-designated winter and summer camps instead of constant wandering.
But many of the nomads stubbornly remain on their high-altitude slopes. Many of their tents are now made of white canvas instead of black yak wool, though a few of the old wool tents are still in use. The new white tents often have solar panels that provide electricity for their inhabitants.
The nomads herd yak on horseback. Twice a day, the men gather the animals together on the steep slopes, while in the sun or pelting rain—often rain in the summer season when the grass is best—the women in their brightly colored dresses climb the grassy inclines carrying buckets. Laughing and in good humor, joking as they work, the women go from dri to dri, kneeling on their haunches, milking into buckets, sometimes wooden buckets, without using stools. The men stand idly by; milking is not their job. It is even said that a dri will not permit a man to milk her. But when a dri will not give milk, it is the man’s job to bring over a calf to suckle for a minute to start the lactation. Then the poor unhappy youth is dragged away so the woman can milk the rest into her bucket. This practice was also common in Europe in earlier centuries.
The nomads immediately boil all their fresh milk. This has always been their practice, and despite the region’s lack of refrigeration, there is no record of a great deal of illness or death resulting from consuming milk. There could be several reasons for that: Their children are generally breastfed, the cool high-altitude climate is less friendly to germs, and the milk is rarely consumed fresh. Most of the yak milk is turned into yogurt, and its fermentation would kill any dangerous bacteria.
Yogurt may be a greater force than the Chinese government in assimilating the nomads, because there is a growing and popular market for Tibetan yak yogurt. It is greatly appreciated by the Chinese and by Tibetans who have settled down and no longer make it themselves.
Some nomads have settled into a few hardscrabble towns that vaguely smell of mutton and rancid butter. Since they were built by the Chinese, they look Chinese, and like Beijing, they have extremely wide boulevards with overpasses for pedestrians. But unlike Beijing, there is almost no traffic and so people just stroll across the wide highways and rarely use the overpasses. The Chinese put up fences along the medians to discourage this practice, but the Tibetans find intersections or breaks in the fencing and cross anyway. It is the two cultures at an impasse.
The Chinese did make some attempt to imitate Tibetan architecture, and the walls of some blocks of houses have patterns painted on them. Occasionally, too, there is a Chinese ornament, such as an elaborate Chinese gate. But the principal attempt at aesthetic beauty is a habit of decorating buildings with garish neon, making the towns at night look like abandoned amusement parks.
In 2014, nomads Lha Zhongje and her husband settled in the town of Gabasongduozhen in the high mountain province of Tongde to open a yogurt shop. Here, they have a steady supply of yak milk, because their families are still nomadic herders in the high grasslands. They live in back of their small shop with their young son and daughter and sell products made by their families, including butter, dried yak meat, and fresh milk. But most of the fresh milk that they get they make into yogurt.
It is a simple process. On a hot plate in their home, Lha, dressed in a richly colored traditional dress, heats a large pot of milk. Then she adds a starter and stirs,
covers the pot with a cloth, and lets it cool for three hours. Two kilos of milk makes 1.5 kilos of yogurt, which is their bestselling size. They have a refrigeration unit in which the yogurt will last for three or four days. Most Tibetans do not have refrigeration, and then the yogurt will keep for only two days. Lha and her husband sell about twenty tubs of yogurt a day and about 50 kilos, 110 pounds, of fresh milk.
“Yogurt is becoming more and more popular,” she says. But there is a limit to their market, because most of their customers are ex-nomads who have moved to the towns, are struggling to find work, and have little spending money.
Sometimes the ex-nomads can find work on Chinese construction projects, but this is not regular employment. A lucky few find work with people like Droma Tserang and her husband, Ba Yo. The couple worked for twenty-two years in a Chinese state company that made yogurt, dried yak meat, and other regional products. Then in the 1990s, when the Chinese government started pressuring state corporations to be profitable, their dairy factory closed, as did many other state companies, and they and hundreds of thousands of others had no work. But the Tserangs knew how to make dairy products, and in 2006 they started making and selling yogurt and butter in their hometown. In 2013 they founded the Butterball Company, named after an odd habit that her mother had of keeping butter rolled in globes the size of melon balls. The Tserangs sold their trademark butterballs in see-through containers and also started making yogurt. Soon they got their first supermarket contract. By 2016 their company employed fifteen people.
At the airport in Xining, shops sell dairy products. The Chinese are convinced, not without reason, that these Tibetan products, even the ones from lower altitudes made with cow’s milk, are far superior to anything people can buy in Beijing. The Tibetan milk, yogurt, and butter are sold in large cartons with convenient carrying handles, and on flights to Beijing, the overhead luggage racks are jammed with dairy products. This sight is a remarkable reversal of history.
16
CHINA’S GROWING TOLERANCE
China has an extraordinarily diverse cuisine and an ancient and revered gourmet tradition. However, throughout history, the Han, as the ethnic Chinese call themselves, as opposed to the Mongolians, Tibetans, and other ethnic groups living in the area, have rarely eaten dairy food. In fact, the consumption of dairy has been so rare that historically, many have assumed that the Chinese as a race were lactose-intolerant. What other explanation could there be for a milk reluctance not characteristic of other Asians?
Even the Japanese have a milk tradition. In the nineteenth century, a period of great modernization in Japan, the government greatly encouraged the drinking of milk, believing that it would create larger, stronger Western-type bodies. The military promoted this. The emperor Meiji insisted that he drank two glasses of milk daily. In 1876 the government established a large Holstein dairy on the northern island of Hokkaido, and even today, Hokkaido milk is famous in Japan as a high-quality product.
Mongols famously drank milk—mare’s milk—and also traveled with their dried cheese curds and made naisu, little one-inch logs of dried milk that are chewy and slightly sweet. In 1123, in Feng Cheng, now known as Hu-He Hao-Te, the capital of Inner Mongolia, which, as opposed to independent Outer Mongolia, is now part of China, there was a street for cheesemaking named Lao Xiang, which means Cheese Road. It is still a street for making dairy products.
But China was different. The first mention of milk in China was during the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E. to 220 A.D.). This was the period when much of Chinese culture, including the Chinese language, was defined, which is why the Chinese call themselves the Han. The Chinese like to point out that the first mention of almost everything occurred during the Han period, because they were the first to document almost everything in writing. It was then that cow’s milk was first recorded as being drunk in the imperial palace, and then that the first use of the Chinese word for milk, niu lu, appeared.
A few centuries later, in the fifth century, tea, which had been only a medicine, emerged as a popular beverage. The tea leaves were pressed into cakes, much like the pu-erh tuocha cakes made in Yunnan today, and boiled. Among the ingredients added to the tea were onions, ginger, salt, orange peel, pine nuts, and milk. But like most of the ancient Chinese milk traditions, this custom did not last.
According to Kwang-chih Chang, a Harvard anthropologist, there was a “continuous” introduction of dairy products into early Chinese culture, especially among the upper classes during the Tang period. Flourishing from 618 to 907, a dark time in Europe, the Tang Dynasty was a golden age in Chinese history, and among its gastronomic offerings was a milk-based frozen dish. Though not exactly ice cream, it was made from fermented buffalo’s milk and seasoned with camphor, with flour added to give it solidity. It would have had a rather astringent flavor, and astringent flavors are still popular in Asian sweets today.
Writings from the Tang period praise the health-giving qualities of goat’s milk. I Tsung, a ninth-century ruler, used to give his advisers “silver cake,” a treat of which milk was a major ingredient. In South China, a starch called sago, made from the arenga palm and still popular in Southeast Asia, was mixed with buffalo’s milk. In Szechuan, shih mi, “stone honey,” was made from sugar and buffalo’s milk.
Records show that Xuanzong, the first and, according to many, greatest Tang emperor, gave what was then considered an extravagant gift to General An Lushan. That gift was ma lo, also known as koumiss—the same koumiss that William of Rubruck and Marco Polo found the Mongols drinking centuries later. Like the Mongolian drink, Tang koumiss was also made from mare’s milk, so it may have originated with the Mongols. They would skim the fat off the top of the fermented drink, and this they called su. A thick cream, it was used in extravagant dishes for the wealthy. But the greatest luxury of all was cooking with t-i-hu. This was made by heating the su, cooling it until it solidified, and then skimming the oil off the top. It was in effect butter, and very similar to the ghee of India. But while ghee was, and still is, a basic ingredient of Indian cooking, both t-i-hu and su were rarefied specialties, for only the very privileged. The great Chinese classical poet Pi Rixiu, writing of a lavish banquet, described the exquisite taste of a dish of swallow meat as being comparable to that of su.
From the Tang period on, the Chinese, like the Westerners, continually debated the relative merits of cow, goat, sheep, mare, and buffalo milk. In 1368, at the age of 100, Chia Ming was summoned before the new emperor. Asked what his secret of longevity was, he said it was eating and drinking carefully, and he gave to the emperor a copy of his book, Yinshih hsu-chih, “Essential Knowledge for Eating and Drinking.” This is what he wrote about milk:
Its flavor is sweet and acid. Its character is cold. Persons suffering from diarrhea must not consume it. Sheep milk taken along with preserved fish [the fermented sauce] will cause intestinal blockage. It does not go with vinegar. It should never be consumed along with perch.
This suggests that the Chinese struggled with milk upsetting their digestive system. And as Professor Chang has pointed out, none of the occasional uses of dairy in China ever caught on or became a feature of the cuisine. Was this because milk did not agree with people? Were they lactose-intolerant? Or was it simply because the privileged class kept dairy food to themselves?
The real beginning of the Chinese dairy industry occurred during the opium wars of the 1840s, which involved disputes about Chinese sovereignty and Britain’s rights to trade in China. Jerseys and Ayrshires, then as now considered among the best British breeds, were brought into China to produce milk for the upper classes. They were called city cows because they were always farmed near cities, where the upper-class Chinese lived.
In the mid-1860s, though, the Chinese brought in cows to supply milk to the foreigners in Shanghai. Farmers who owned cows, either the Chinese yellow cow or the buffalo, brought them to town and milked them in the street to sell to foreigners. In 1870 the price of milk in Shanghai was fixed at one silve
r dollar for ten large cups. Only foreigners and a few wealthy Chinese could afford this price. In 1879 a Canadian missionary brought Canadian Holsteins to Nanjing, and the following year a British businessman brought Holsteins to Shanghai. The Chinese started to crossbreed their small herds with Holsteins. By the beginning of the twentieth century, small farms of five or six cows were established around the harbors and in all the major cities. In Shanghai, the first farm within the city was Yuan Sheng, which had ten cows. There was also a small farm just north of the Forbidden City, a neighborhood that is now part of central Beijing. By 1945, the eve of the revolution, the biggest dairy in Beijing had forty-five cows.
Chinese yellow cow
In 1922, the College of Agriculture at the Canton Christian College in Canton offered a program in dairying and established an experimental dairy. The University of Beijing also created a teaching dairy. The Chinese were learning how to be dairy farmers. Textbooks were written, and one expert, Xu Fuqi, wrote prolifically on the subject.
In the contemporary Chinese food world there is little awareness of China’s hidden dairy history. Qu Hao, a popular personality on Chinese television food programs and the founder of a leading Beijing cooking school, told me, “There really are very few dairy dishes in China.” He pointed out that even butter and yogurt are not used in Chinese cooking. But then he started thinking about exceptions.
“The best-known traditional milk dish is Cantonese, daliang chao xiannai,” he said. This translates literally as “fresh milk from Daliang” but in English is usually called “fried milk.” A starch made from beans, corn, or sweet potato is added to fresh milk, put in a pan with a little oil, and stirred over heat until it becomes a custard. It is traditionally eaten in a cup, though today shrimp or crab and a few vegetables are added to it. The original recipe probably goes back only to the late nineteenth century, so in terms of Chinese history, it is a modern dish. It is thought to have come from the Portuguese colony of Macao, where there is a similar dish.
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