--- title: 'Tibetan butter tea: po cha, the dongmo churn and tsampa' url: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/south-and-southeast-asia/tibet' markdown: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/south-and-southeast-asia/tibet.md' lang: en date: '2026-10-25' description: "Tibetan butter tea, po cha: Ya'an brick tea, dri butter and salt, the dongmo churn, tsampa, monastery tea rounds, Ladakh, Bhutan and the fluoride question." --- # Tibetan butter tea: po cha, the dongmo churn and tsampa 酥油茶 Editors · October 25, 2026 · 11 min read Butter tea starts with a dark brick simmered for anywhere from half an hour to half a day; the liquor is then churned with butter and salt. Mixed with tsampa, it makes a meal as well as a drink. The bricks came to Tibet from Ya'an in Sichuan. ![A wooden bowl of butter tea, a piece of brick tea and tsampa flour](https://howtotea.me/images/c/o/v/e/r/cover-d5824a53.webp) Illustration 酥油茶 Tibetan butter tea sū yóu chá Name: po cha, “Tibetan tea” bod ja Base: pressed dark tea, dri butter, salt Tool: wooden dongmo churn with a plunger Tea from: Ya'an, Sichuan; over 80% of imports by the 19th c. Drunk in: Tibet, Ladakh, Bhutan, Sherpas of Nepal Home-grown: Medog, plantations since 2011–2012 **30 min**, simmering the liquor **7–10**, minutes of churning **0.4–0.5%**, salt by weight A Tibetan morning begins with a bowl of something thick, salty and fatty, the color of milky coffee. It is called po cha, in Tibetan *bod ja*, “Tibetan tea,” or *ja srub ma*, “churned tea.” The woman of the house boils a dark brick, pours the concentrate into a churn, adds butter and salt, and beats it until the water and fat come together. To anyone raised in a warm climate it is closer to soup than to tea. Here tea is food as much as drink: people knead tsampa with it, and monasteries schedule tea rounds through the day. ## Where Tibet's tea came from For centuries Tibet got its tea from China; Tibetans traditionally did not grow it. The only local plantings are in lowland Medog (Nyingchi), where the first fields went in around 2011–2012; sources disagree on the exact year.[1](#fn:1) The chronicles tie the first tea to King Tridu Songtsen (676–704): a bird brought the sick ruler an unknown leaf. Working from the Dunhuang texts, the historian Ren Xinjian concludes that drinking tea was not customary in Tibet before the early 9th century. Patrick Booz puts first contact most likely in the early 8th century. When Atisha arrived in Guge in the 11th century, he was served a bowl of butter tea and blessed the drink. Tea began arriving in bulk in the 11th century, when the Song dynasty set up a tea-for-horses exchange. Hence the name Tea Horse Road: along it, Tibetan horses were traded for Chinese bricks. An imperial decree of 1397 made the road from Diaomen through the Dadu to Kangding one of two official routes into Tibet. In 1702 a tea customs post opened at Dartsedo (Kangding), and the Qing court granted the Dalai Lama 5,000 jin of tea a year. Once the Luding bridge opened in 1706, trade jumped. Kangding became the transfer point where tea passed from Chinese to Tibetan hands. It had 48 trading houses, traditionally run by women, and up to 15 million pounds of tea a year went up to the plateau. By the 19th century more than 80% of imports came from five Ya'an counties, including the tea bound for Ladakh and Bhutan. The Chinese did not drink it themselves; the bricks were made for export. ## The brick from Ya'an The raw material is called *nan lu bian cha*, 南路边茶, “border tea of the southern road,” or simply Tibetan tea. It is a [dark tea](https://howtotea.me/teas/dark) made from mature leaf of the local small-leaf Sichuan cultivar. Pickers take leaf at least six months old, whole, with stalks, flowers and fruit. The material rests for at least a year before processing, which runs to as many as 32 steps. One of them is “lucha” rolling, where two workers tread a sack of tea on a tilted wooden frame. There used to be five grades. Tender leaf went to the nobility, old leaf and thick twigs to the poor. The 砖茶 brick weighed one jin, the other grades five jin each. Four blocks, interleaved with paper, were wrapped in bamboo, and at Kangding three such parcels were sewn into raw yak hide. Two of these hide “kun” made one load for a yak or a horse. Today the main bricks are Kangzhuan (康砖) and Jinjian (金尖). The craft went onto China's second national intangible heritage list in 2008 and became part of a UNESCO element in 2022. A Japanese overview gives a plain reason for the choice: dark tea has already been fermented and aged, survives repeated boiling and goes a long way. English-language sources sometimes name [pu-erh](https://howtotea.me/teas/dark/puer) as the best base, but trade historians show that most of Tibet's tea came from the Sichuan counties. ## How it is boiled and churned People break off a piece of brick and crush it, and from there everyone works at their own pace. Herders in northern Tibet drop a big chunk into a pot, bring it to a boil and simmer it for about half an hour more. Towns and monasteries boil it longer, and one English-language overview says the best po cha simmers for half a day. The fire starts high and is then turned down. The liquor comes out dark brown and astringent, but not bitter. Natural soda often goes into the pot: water boils at a lower temperature at altitude, and without soda the flavor never comes through. The liquor is then strained to separate the grounds from the concentrate (*ja khu*) and ladled back and forth several times to bring out the aroma. Town households keep the concentrate for a few days. Outline from the descriptions Boil the brick into a liquor: half an hour or longer, strong fire first, then low. Strain off the concentrate. Pour it into the dongmo, add butter and salt, and milk if you like. Churn for 7–10 minutes, or several dozen strokes of the plunger, until the emulsion is smooth and pinkish white. Pour it into a pot, heat it without letting it boil, and keep it hot by the hearth. Sources differ on ratios: 1:100 by weight in a Japanese summary, 0.7 g of tea per 100 ml in a 2025 lab study. Salt runs 0.4–0.5%, butter about the same weight as the tea. The Japanese summary of Lü Caiyu and Liu Qinjin's study puts tea to water at 1:100, salt at no more than 0.4% and butter at roughly the weight of the tea; the original has not been checked. A 2025 lab optimization landed on 0.7 g of tea, 0.4–0.5 g of salt and 1.0 g of butter per 100 ml. In a home kitchen, treat that as a range, not a law. ## The dongmo and the bowls The dongmo churn is an upright staved cylinder of hardwood, or in Tsayul a single bamboo joint. It usually stands over a meter tall with a mouth about 15 cm across; a travel churn is about 60 cm. The body is bound with vine or with copper and iron hoops, and festive churns carry copper rings engraved with auspicious wishes. The plunger rod is slightly longer than the body and ends in a perforated disc. Churning takes “several dozen” strokes, and people say you can tell a skilled hostess by the sound. The cauldron is usually copper, though aluminum ones spread after the 1950s. A bamboo strainer holds back the leaves. The teapot may be copper, tin, aluminum or ceramic, and for the nobility silver or gold set with coral and turquoise. Bowls are turned from the trunk, burls and roots of birch and other trees, and burl with a dense grain is prized most. The main centers are Tsona, Gyantse, Tsayul and Kyirong. A fine bowl is mounted in silver and set on a silver stand; tradition holds that silver detects poison and wood neutralizes it. The bowl is light and strong, does not burn the lips and does not take on odors, so people carry one with them in a case. Silver bowls are reserved for the highest hierarchs, such as the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. ## Tsampa, etiquette and the monastery Tsampa is never far from tea either. People pour butter tea over the roasted barley flour, or dip the flour into the bowl and knead it into dough with their fingers. That is breakfast, and food for the road; in poor families leftover butter was carefully set aside to mix into tsampa. In Kham, people made a tea “concentrate” (茶卤) ahead of time: five jin of tea were boiled down with alkali until dry, and the paste was dried and carried in a leather bag. The etiquette is simple but exact. The host refills the bowl after every sip, so the guest never empties it. If you do not want more, leave it untouched and finish it before you go. To decline a refill, cover the bowl with your hand. In Lhoka the hostess offers the bowl with both hands and a bow; the guest blows aside the floating butter, drinks about half and waits for the refill. Three bowls is the minimum, and no slurping. In monasteries the whole community drinks tea together three times a day, after the morning, midday and evening services, and up to seven times on feast days. A designated monk pours, everyone drinks in silence and holds out the bowl for more. Tea that a layperson offers the whole community is called *mang ja*. An 18th-century Sera Je guide reckons that 3,000 monks need at least 60 nyag of tea and three times as much butter. At Ganden tea is boiled every evening in big cauldrons, and a gong sounds when it is ready. ## Ladakh, Bhutan, the Sherpas and Lhasa In Ladakh the drink is called gur-gur cha, after the sound of the churn. For three bowls you need two cups of milk, a cup of concentrate (*chathang*), three tablespoons of yak butter, a teaspoon of salt and a pinch of soda. The soda turns it pinkish. It is served warm rather than scalding, in shallow *zombat* cups. The Ladakhi churn is made of willow with brass fittings. Sources disagree on whether *chathang* is a tea liquor or an herbal one; the museum description leans toward tea. In Bhutan the same drink is *suja*, served with *zaw* (puffed rice) or *sip* (crushed maize). The tea is kept in a copper cauldron, and cow butter is replacing yak butter. Bowls are refilled in order of seniority, and the butter is blown aside and left at the bottom. Among the Sherpas of Solukhumbu, *su cha* is strong [black tea](https://howtotea.me/teas/black) with dzomo butter and salt, sometimes with tsampa. From here it is a short step to [tea in South Asia](https://howtotea.me/traditions/south-and-southeast-asia/south-asia). In the towns of Central Tibet, above all Lhasa, people drink a different tea: black tea with milk and sugar, and no butter or salt. According to the TAR culture and tourism office, it came from Nepal no more than a hundred years ago. It tastes closer to the [milk teas of Asia](https://howtotea.me/traditions/south-and-southeast-asia/asian-milk-teas). Mongol and Kalmyk [steppe tea](https://howtotea.me/traditions/middle-east-and-central-asia/steppe) is also made with milk and salt, but it is a different drink. ## Fluoride and today Electric churns and instant powder in sachets are replacing the dongmo, and the tea is slowly losing its weight as a symbol. The brick carries a health cost too: of 107 brick tea samples from the Tibet Autonomous Region, only one stayed within the [fluoride](https://howtotea.me/science/chemistry/tea-safety) limit.[2](#fn:2) Only the core of it travels to a home kitchen: a strong liquor of dark brick, butter and salt. The rest, the dongmo, the dri and the altitude, stays in Tibet. ## Common questions What tea is Tibetan butter tea made from? The classic base is pressed Sichuan tea from Ya'an, dark and post-fermented: the Kangzhuan and Jinjian bricks. It has already been fermented and aged, stands up to long boiling and goes a long way. In exile and in Bhutan people use whatever is at hand: ordinary black tea, Indian or Chinese brick. Why is it called yak butter if it comes from a female? It is the dri, the female yak, that gets milked, so the butter in the tea is dri butter; among the Sherpas of Solukhumbu it is dzomo butter, from a yak-cow cross. The name yak butter is common but inaccurate. In towns and in Bhutan, cow butter is increasingly taking its place. Why does the host keep refilling the bowl? It is the custom: a guest never empties the bowl, because it is topped up after every sip. To decline, cover the bowl with your palm. If you do not want more, leave it full and drain it just before you leave. Notes 1. State sources date the first trial plantation in Medog to 2011 or 2012, while a 2018 Chinese news item speaks of tea grown “since the 1970s.” See [Xinhua, 2024](https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202405/15/content_WS66440af5c6d0868f4e8e71a1.html). [↩](#fnref1:1) 2. Fan Z. et al., [Prevalence of Brick Tea-Type Fluorosis in the Tibet Autonomous Region](https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4728115/), J Epidemiol 2016. The samples held 348–1,086 mg/kg against a limit of 300 mg/kg. [↩](#fnref1:2) --- ## Navigation - Parent: [Tea in South and Southeast Asia](https://howtotea.me/traditions/south-and-southeast-asia.md) - Previous: [Asian milk teas: from Hong Kong to bubble tea](https://howtotea.me/traditions/south-and-southeast-asia/asian-milk-teas.md) - Next: [Tea in Vietnam: chuyên trà, lotus and trà đá](https://howtotea.me/traditions/south-and-southeast-asia/vietnam.md)