Leicha: How a Bowl of Sweet Tea Transformed Post-War Immigrant Cuisine into Beipu’s Signature

30-Second Overview: The sweet leicha you drink in Beipu is not equivalent to the ancient original form of all Hakka leicha. Research materials indicate that immigrants from the Heipo area of Guangdong Province brought pestles, pestle sticks, and savory dietary habits to Taiwan after the war; after local tourism policies were launched in 1998, Beipu further transformed it into a local industry that can be experienced, packaged, and taken away. ^{1 2} The most interesting thing about this bowl of tea is precisely that it preserves memory while simultaneously acknowledging that it has already changed.

Image: Beipu Leicha, photographer Nomad112, from Wikimedia Commons file page, under CC BY 2.0; image embedded via hotlink, not downloaded or rehosted.

📝 Curator’s Note: This photo places "Beipu Sweet Leicha" back into a specific location, rather than letting it float as an abstract Hakka symbol; the photo shows a bowl of tea, and the article continues to ask: who brought it to Beipu, and who changed it?

In March 1999, a specialty shop themed around leicha appeared in the temple square of Beipu Old Street. This timing is crucial: leicha was not invented on that day, but rather, it began to be treated as a local culture that could step out of the home and allow strangers to pay for an experience. Research summaries collected by the Hakka Council describe it as the first shop in Taiwan to operate in the form of a leicha specialty store, attributing its later success to the simultaneous presence of cultural stories, operational experiences, policy support, and industrial management. ¹

Here lies the first counter-intuitive point: Beipu’s most famous leicha is not an ancient custom that has never changed, but a food practice that was reseen and repackaged after the war.

Don’t Rush to Think of Leicha as a Sweet Drink

The verb "leicha" is very specific: putting tea leaves, grains, legumes, nuts, or herbs into a mortar, grinding them into a paste with a pestle stick, and then mixing them with hot water. The version of Beipu described in the National Cultural Memory Bank uses green tea or high-mountain tea, peanuts, sesame, and five grains as the base, adding green tea powder and brown rice when brewing. This is the sweet, thick, nutty-aroma form familiar to most tourists today. ²

But the same name might refer to a bowl of savory soup in other places. Cultural lecture materials from the Overseas Affairs Council list traditional savory leicha ingredients, which may include ginger, holy basil, cilantro, stir-fried greens, shrimp, dried radish, and brown rice, finally served with rice. The sweet version common in Beipu and Miaoli adds sugar, almonds, or five-grain powder, resembling more of a snack. ³

Hakka Cloud’s local craft materials also describe leicha as a food that can be adjusted according to seasonal ingredients: peanuts, sesame, sunflower seeds, coix seed, and buckwheat can go into the mortar, as can ginger, shallots, and cilantro. Tea leaves are an indispensable core. This material flexibility is closer to the liveliness of leicha than a fixed recipe. ⁴

📝 Curator’s Note: Calling Beipu sweet leicha the "only orthodox" version is convenient, but it erases the savory, spicy, rice-soaking, and local differences within the same Hakka food tradition. Leicha is not a standard answer, but a method that allows you to put whatever ingredients you have on hand into it.

A Mortar, Crossing the Sea with People

The timing of leicha’s introduction to Taiwan provides clues that are relatively specific but still require retaining a scope. Research compiled in the National Chung Cheng University Hakka College E-Newsletter indicates that around the 37th year of the Republic of China, i.e., 1948, Hakka immigrants from the Heipo area of Guangdong Province brought pestles, pestle sticks, and dietary culture to Taiwan. This article also reminds us that at that time, leicha was primarily a household food, not yet a cultural experience that everyone could sign up for on the old street. ⁵

The key point of this introduction story is not "which year counts as the true beginning," but how leicha entered a new living environment with a group of people. Food originally prepared for family and guests at home had to face new tea leaf supplies, local tastes, work rhythms, and the memories of the next generation. Ingredients could change, savory and sweet could change, but the social relationship of "grinding together, eating together" was still preserved.

There are many origin stories for leicha. Hakka TV has compiled stories about Zhang Fei leading troops, migration and refuge, and ancient tea cakes, but it also clearly points out that these commonly heard stories cannot be directly taken as verified history. A more prudent approach is to place leicha within the long-term context of southern tea foods, Hakka migration, and local dietary crafts, rather than assigning it a dramatic single starting point. ⁶

This is why articles should not say "leicha originated in a certain year with a certain general." A legend can explain how people want to remember food, but it cannot replace archives, fieldwork, and cross-regional comparisons.

Beipu Turns a Household Flavor into an Action

Around 1998, Beipu localities began to align with the "one township, one characteristic" tourism concept, incorporating the leicha that was previously circulated only in some households into local leisure activities. Field interviews recorded in the National Chung Cheng University E-Newsletter indicate that when initially attempting to offer savory leicha, the taste was not easily accepted by general tourists, and it was later adjusted towards sweet and health-preserving drinks. ⁵

Hakka TV’s program introduction also adopts a similar narrative: Beipu transformed the originally thick, filling savory soup into a sweet tea that was easier for the market to accept, and under the promotion of local tourism, it became a "leicha stronghold." The program simultaneously retains a necessary question: some consider this commercial packaging, but without this layer of packaging, leicha might not have been seen by more people. ⁶

The policy context of 1998 and the opening of the specialty store in March 1999 are not the same date. The former is the background of local development; the latter is the industrial node recorded in research summaries. Forcing them together into "leicha invented in 1998" makes the story smooth, but makes the facts wrong.

📝 Curator’s Note: Cultural industries are most easily written as a linear story of "government preservation, resident benefit." Beipu leicha is more like a negotiation: the locality needs a signboard that can be understood, tourists need an experience that can be completed within an hour, shop owners need a taste that can sustain operations, and tradition must find its position among these conditions.

Why "Grinding It Yourself" Is More Important Than Drinking a Cup

If leicha were just putting powder into a bag and completing it with hot water, the difference between it and general instant drinks would shrink. But the experience on Beipu Old Street puts the mortar, pestle stick, ingredients, and the rotation of arms back into the scene. Tourists are not just given a cup of drink; they are arranged into a sequence of labor: first grinding hard peanuts and sesame, then letting tea leaves and grains mix into a paste base, finally adding water, seasoning, and sprinkling brown rice.

Hakka Cloud’s craft materials record that traditional methods did not strictly limit all ingredients; the freshly brewed tea soup is very hot, and the host sprinkles brown rice on the surface to remind guests to eat slowly. This detail shows that leicha is not something that can be replaced by the four words "health drink." It is simultaneously utensils, gestures, waiting time, and hospitality. ⁴

In Singapore, BBC Travel also recorded another life scene for Hakka leicha rice: next to the rice are vegetables, peanuts, dried fish, and other ingredients, with green tea soup ground from herbs, sesame, and peanuts. Family members divide the work of processing ingredients, making cooking itself a shared time. This is not direct proof of the Beipu recipe, but it helps us see that in Hakka communities, leicha is often not just "what to drink," but "how to do it together." ⁷

Image: Hakka Leicha in Zhiba Village, Zhongli District, Taoyuan City, author Shishi, from Wikimedia Commons file page, under CC BY-SA 4.0; image embedded via hotlink, not downloaded or rehosted.

These two photos cannot prove "all leicha looks like this" for the article. The first puts Beipu’s location and sweet commodification into view; the second takes leicha to a Hakka life scene in Taoyuan. When placed side by side, they rather support the article’s claim: leicha has a common craft skeleton, but there is no single appearance that must be obeyed.

📝 Curator’s Note: Free license does not mean erasing authors. The image’s attribution, original file page, and license terms must stay with the hotlink; this is also the editorial ethics the article should follow when discussing "how tradition is re-taken."

Savory, Sweet, Spicy: Not Who Replaces Whom

The popularity of Beipu sweet leicha has made many people recognize leicha for the first time, and has made "leicha is sweet" an intuition. But local cultural materials still leave different directions: preservationist Qiu Wenshan in Sanyi brought ginger, cilantro, shallots, and stock back into the mortar, making spicy and savory versions. Materials also record that these products were to differentiate the market in areas with dense existing leicha shops. ⁴

This example is very Taiwanese: tradition is not just a binary choice—either unchanged or destroyed by commercialization. It can also grow another local version through new shop owners, new ingredients, and new consumption contexts. Of course, new versions should not pretend to be the only ancient method. They need to clarify their changes.

Industry articles often describe leicha as moving from Hakka village daily life to DIY, instant powder, pastries, smoothies, and overseas promotion. These changes indeed show that leicha can step out of its original household scenes, but claims about health effects, cultural asset status, or overseas market scale should still be verified item by item against government data or research; they cannot be taken as evidence just because "health-preserving" sounds reasonable. ⁸

📝 Curator’s Note: A tradition surviving does not mean it was never changed; a more honest statement is that it left traceable old marks in every change. Beipu’s sweetness is one new path, not a judgment that excludes other savory, spicy, and rice-soaking versions.

From Hospitality to Tourism Experience

Leicha was originally very suitable for entertaining guests because it did not require the host to prepare a set of expensive and fixed menus. The mortar can hold grains, legumes, nuts, and herbs available at home; guests are not passive recipients waiting for a cup of tea to be served, but enter a process where they can see ingredients, smell aromas, and wait for grinding. The National Cultural Memory Bank describes Beipu leicha as a food brought by immigrants, convenient to obtain ingredients, and suitable for hospitality; this "convenience" does not mean cheap, but rather the reason it could survive in different households and places. ²

On the old street, hospitality relationships are rearranged. Shop owners must break down a household chore that might originally take a long time and is not necessarily suitable for strangers to participate in, into steps understandable to tourists. The weight of the pestle stick, the order of ingredients, the sweetness intensity—all become cultural lessons that can be completed in a short time. This is commodification, and also translation: translating a community’s internal life craft to those without Hakka family experience.

This translation certainly loses things. The tacit understanding between family members, familiarity with savory tastes, who is responsible for washing the mortar, which material is left from the previous season—are not easily fitted into a DIY process on an explanation card. But without this new scene, outsiders would also hardly know that leicha is not just sweet powder mixed with hot water.

The Hakka Council’s research summary breaks down the success factors of Beipu’s industry into cultural stories, cultural experiences, cultural policies, and management methods. This breakdown is worth noting because it does not treat culture only as packaging, nor business only as pollution, but acknowledges that both occur simultaneously in local industries. ¹

When reading these materials, one must also pay attention to their respective positions. The Cultural Memory Bank is more like an explanation card for local objects; the research summary cares about how industries form; the Academy E-Newsletter puts field interviews and literature together; Hakka TV uses program narratives to tell controversies to the public. They are not mutually substituting testimonies. Putting different sources together avoids using one shop’s experience to represent all Hakka villages.

For example, Beipu sweet leicha’s ingredients and methods cannot be directly used to define leicha in Hualien-Taitung, Guangdong, or Singapore. The tea soup with vegetable rice written by BBC is another Hakka community’s version preserved and transformed in the city. The spicy leicha recorded by Hakka Cloud is another recreation by local Taiwanese shops. What they jointly prove is "leicha can change," not "all leicha are the same." ^{4 7}

This difference also gives weight to the four words "Hakka Representative." Representation is not pushing one taste to be the only standard, but letting more people know how many local routes exist under one name. True preservation includes preserving difference itself.

For Beipu, leicha’s locality is still hidden in places: the old street, temple square, shops, and agricultural association plans give a household food a fixed viewing position. After leaving Beipu, it is taken to other Hakka villages, overseas classrooms, and city tables, becoming new local versions. This is not a one-way street from "tradition" to "modernity," but different communities constantly re-taking it.

Therefore, leicha’s future lies not only in whether more packages can be sold, but also in whether shop owners and teachers are willing to explain differences: Is this sweet or savory? Is it a Beipu formula or a shop owner’s creation? Is it a family memory or a tourism process? The clearer the explanation, the more consumers can place a cup of tea back into its true history.

What Does a Bowl of Tea Leave Behind?

Today, when going to Beipu to drink leicha, the easiest things to take away are a bag of powder, a DIY photo, or a "Hakka characteristic" label. Harder to take away is that time gap: a household food that entered Taiwan with immigrants around the post-war period, through 1990s local tourism policies and the 1999 specialty store’s industrialization, only became a Hakka symbol recognizable throughout Taiwan. ^{1 5}

This history does not weaken leicha’s cultural value; rather, it makes it more worthy of understanding. It reminds us that so-called tradition is often not an item handed down intact from ancestors to today, but a practice repeatedly adjusted by a group of people to live in a new place, be understood by others, and make the next generation willing to approach.

Therefore, leicha does not need to rely on a myth to appear ancient, nor on the two words "health-preserving" to appear useful. Its truly precious place lies in a set of life crafts that can still be learned, repurposed, and explained.

When a novice holds the pestle stick for the first time, their wrist not knowing how to turn, the person beside them usually first tells them not to rush. This small teaching action is closer to leicha’s cultural core than a grand origin legend: someone hands the method to the next person.

So, the next time the pestle stick rotates in the mortar, one can first not rush to ask "Is this the most orthodox?" One can ask more specifically: What tea did this bowl use? Why is it sweet? Who brought it here? Who turned it into an experience after 1998? And who was once fed by that savory taste not served on the tourism table?

What leicha truly leaves behind is not just the aroma ground from tea leaves and peanuts, but a very Hakka method: putting together whatever is at hand, grinding slowly, letting strangers also sit down and eat a bowl.

If this bowl of tea has a most reliable conclusion, perhaps it is not where it started hundreds of years ago, but that today there are still people willing to spend time grinding it. Tradition is therefore not in the distance, but in the next moment when someone hands the pestle stick to you.

And this is precisely the most memorable place about Beipu leicha: it is not an answer waiting to be preserved unchanged, but a question still being used by people.

Further Reading

National Chung Cheng University Hakka College E-Newsletter: An Initial Exploration of the Historical Culture of Hakka Leicha in Taiwan

Hakka Council: Discussion of Key Elements of Cultural Industries — Taking Beipu Leicha as an Example

References