Beijingers enrich lives with flowers

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, September 26, 2003

Beijingers enrich lives with flowers

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Usually, a man presents a rose or a bouquet to show his love for his girlfriend. But, Mr. Liu, 28, who works at a Beijing-based joint venture, used a glass of green tea floated with a bright red rose, a pure white iris and golden chrysanthemum flowers to welcome his girlfriend on their first date.

"Making flower tea requires careful choices of flowers and tea so as to make the drink perfect," said Liu, who was satisfied with his "masterpiece," that had surprised his date and pleased his date.

Liu said drinking flower tea gives people a sense of emotional appeal refreshment.

Liu's love for edible flowers is a spreading trend in Beijing.

Currently, drinking flower tea has become a new fashion among Beijingers, especially young people, who usually drink the tea during get-togethers or at birthday parties hosted by friends. Normally beer, spirits, soft drinks and fruit juice are drunk on such occasions.

Annie, a woman in her twenties, often buys dry edible flowers from the supermarket to make tea.

She said she first saw the flower-tea drink at a friend's birthday party and has been drinking it ever since.

"It's so beautiful and tasty and it (drinking flower tea) makes you feel so different and brings you a kind of new energy," Annie said.

Sun Xiumei sells 25 kinds of dry edible flowers, such as nasturtium, honeysuckle, lily, chrysanthemum, roses and globe amaranth at the Sogo supermarket. She said the prices of the dry flowers range from 50 yuan to 140 yuan per 500 grams, depending ontheir quality, functions in health care, nutritious elements and where they are produced.

Many of the flowers are produced on high pollution-free mountains across China.

Despite the high prices, consumers, mostly females aged between 20 and 40, and males aged between 20 and 30, have flocked to her flower stand at Sogo, Sun said.

Records of edible flowers date back more than 2,000 years in China. Qu Yuan, a famous ancient Chinese poet of the Chu Kingdom of the Warring States Period (475 B.C.-221 B.C) made the earliest record of edible chrysanthemum in one of his poems.

The rich nutritious elements and health care functions of edible flowers attracted people, said Zhang Dongsheng, deputy secretary general of the China Food Science and Technology Society.

Drinking tea mixed with edible chrysanthemum or nasturtium is getting popular among the Chinese people today.

Zhang said some flowers were rich in protein, fat, starch, amino acid, Vitamin A, B, C and E and micro amount of minerals that are needed by human body.

According to the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, chrysanthemum can kill staphylococcus, roses help improve looks, orchid clears away internal fever and has the function of detoxification, peony is anti-virus, lily helps remove phlegm.

Driven by the high profits and catering for fashionable consumers, even the teahouses in Beijing have begun to offer flower-tea drinks.

Daqushe, a teahouse on the Yuetan Nan Road in Beijing's Xicheng District, offers a kind of special flower-tea drink, a mixture of lotus and high-quality green tea produced in central China's Hubei Province, which is said to help make skin look more youthful.

Han Xiaogang, the teahouse manager, said that a glass of such drink sells for 58 yuan (about 7 US dollars) and his teahouse makes a rough profit of over 10,000 yuan (1,209 US dollars) monthly.

Apart from drinking flower tea, the Chinese people also have a long history of cooking porridge with edible flowers for health care purpose.

Written materials of the Song (960-1279), Ming (1638-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties recorded the ways on how to cook porridge with more than 30 kinds of edible flowers such as lotus, chrysanthemum, peony, orchids and magnolia.

The tradition is being continued and is expected to continue inthe future, experts said.

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