The heritagization of milk tea: cultural governance and placemaking in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article uses the heritigization of milk tea making technique as a lens to explore post-colonial cultural governance, placemaking and identity building in post-colonial Hong Kong. Based on the data and information collected through ethnographic study, personal interviews, and media researches on milk tea production and consumption, this study investigates how the Hong Kong government, the entrepreneurs and consumers interactively commodify tradition and culinary skills in tea-making for city branding, economic development and identity politics. This paper reveals that the meaning of milk tea in the official narrative supports the government vision of a harmonious society with docile labor. In contrast, the younger generation considers milk tea an icon representing an alternate Hong Kong spirit of rebelliousness, indicating a widening gap in the interpretation of cultural values and political orientation between the Hong Kong government and the younger generation under the background of Hong Kong’s rapid political change.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial Hong Kong
• cultural governance
• heritage management
• identity politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Veronica Sau-Wa Mak is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Shue Yan University and was lecturer of Marketing at Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has contributed to numerous scholarly journals on food, such as Ecology of Food and Nutrition and Food and Foodways, and contributed chapters to Globalised Eating Cultures, Mediatization and Mediation, edited by Jörg Dürrschmidt and York Kautt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond, edited by Tan Chee-Beng (NUS Press, 2011). She has worked as Associate Account Director in major marketing agencies for food companies.

Notes

1 This paper exams the heritagization of milk tea from the representations in popular culture and entrepreneurs, and will not cover the consumer behavior of milk tea drinking.

2 Cha chaan teng are Hong Kong-style tea cafés serving a great variety of Chinese, fusion and Western-style foods and drinks.

3 Bing sutt (literally, “ice rooms”) are small restaurants which have been serving simple western-style food and icy drinks since the 1920. In Hong Kong, bing sutt used to be affiliated with some renowned western restaurants (Zheng 2016, 86). For example, American Restaurant, which was established in Hong Kong in 1919, opened a bing sutt in Central, selling the famous British Blue Bird confectionary sweets and biscuits. On Lok Yun, another popular western restaurant, opened a number of air-conditioned bing sutt near the cinemas in the 1920s, offering ice-cream and icy drinks. At the peak of their popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s, there were bing sutt throughout Hong Kong, serving cold drinks like Hong Kong-style iced red bean alongside affordable Cantonese takes on Western food, such as pineapple buns (Hutton 2020). I use the term bing sutt instead of bing sat (the standard Cantonese Romanization) because bing sutt is the more common term used by international media, such as CNN, and local media, such as SCMP.

4 During the early colonial period (1841–1886), Europeans obtained a limited supply of milk by either importing dairy cows or buying milk from local farmers (Cameron 1986).

5 For more information on the normalization of mistresses among Chinese males in Hong Kong, see Tam (1996).

6 The Chinese words in the outdoor promotion light-box read “料理農務.” The Cantonese pronunciation of the first term “料理” sounds similar to the Cantonese term denoting “fucking you(r),” whereas the term “農務” sounds like “old mother.”

7 OpenRice is the most popular dining guide in Hong Kong, with 5.4 million members and 3.5 million restaurant reviews (Openrice 2020a, 2020b).