“Ya Sei Mei” and us (By Sean Sit)

     Contemporary Hong Kong, we have fast pace of life. We usually have fast food for lunch and sleep late. Besides, the summer of Hong Kong is quite a hot city relatively. It is a good try to have a bowl of “Ya Sei Mei” (廿四味) in front of a cool tea shop to reduce our summer heat, you may find it is work, when you are having a firing throat. I loved to drink it, as many of us afraid of the bitter taste of “Ya Sei Mei”.         

     Cool tea is a broad sense is a kind of Chinese herbal medicine, which separated into four divisions “寒”, “涼”, “溫” and “熱”, (I am sorry that I could not give any English explanation about these words as they are some common word use in Chinese medicinal) which made for medical usage in old days. As time goes by, it becomes a popular and common drink of people in hot summer. Because of the geographic of Guang Tong area, which moist and rains all the time, people invented cool tea to reduce summer heat and cure the sickness caused by weather. In fact it has been commonly spread in Hong Kong, Southern of China and Taiwan of several hundred of years. However it’s old fashioned, we must have drunk once or twice in our life and there are still numbers of cool tea shop in Hong Kong.

     “Ya Sei Mei” is a type of cool tea we usually see and drink. We may have heard about it most but we just have little knowledge about it. We always wonder it really has twenty four kinds of ingredients inside. It is when it was just found, but now it may only has ten to sixteen types of ingredients nowadays, and the ingredients used are different between shops. For me, I think I can’t separate it from my life; I started drinking it when I was four years old. It has been cured many sickness of me in my life. Now I still drink it when my throat feels uncomfortable, and I will not stop drinking until there are no more cool tea in the world.

     Moreover, I think it is a symbol of Chinese history. We must treasure it as it is an invention lasted for several hundreds of years. Personally, we must keep those previous generations left; “Ya Sei Mei” is one of them. No matter it is no more popular now and substituted by newest invention like “Ching Yit Ho” (清熱酷). I still go drink cool tea in shops with my friends, and this act has become the joint between our friendship. It acts as a family guard in my mind, as it has been giving services to us for uncountable summers. If you don’t agree with my words just try it, you will find it a good stuff when you have a fire in your throat.  

Reference: 

http://hk.knowledge.yahoo.com/question/?qid=7006062500994