Rethinking the flow of Cantonese teahouse and yumcha culture between Guangzhou and Hong Kong: A cultural diplomacy perspective

Abstract

Many studies of yumcha culture (drinking tea and eating snacks, dim sum) tend to treat Guagnzhou as the center of this popular food culture among Cantonese-speaking communities and see it as the place of origin of Cantonese teahouse. In addition, the expansion of yumcha culture to other cities or even foreign countries makes people assume that Guangzhou has long been the primary sending area of teahouse and dim sum. Different from these conventional perspectives, this paper proposes to use the perspective of ―cultural diplomacy‖ to investigate and explore the development and mutual influence of yumcha culture between Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Drawing on archive data and ethnographic observations, this paper argues that today‘s yumcha culture in Hong Kong is not the result of a one-way process of borrowing from Guangzhou teahouses but the processes of co-development and mutual learning.