Five-Flower Tea & Wang Lo Kat (???????): business and pleasure as usual

or most Westerners the idea of a quick drink in the street to quench a sudden onslaught of thirst is a can of soda. A sweet fizzy concoction of most bizarrely named chemicals - just read the label! - that, if you think about it, tastes like nothing found in the natural world. The fact that some of commercial sodas - like Coca Cola - are routinely used to clean windshields or accumulator contacts does not seem to hinder their worldwide popularity.

I watched this little shop on a busy street corner in central Kuala Lumpur. Richly festooned with Chinese paraphernalia of gilded auspicious slogans and portraits of ancient emperors, it however does not seem to attract any tourists. A small but steady trickle of locals provides the client base here: here a street cleaner drops by for a wee bowl of tea from one of the two huge shiny samovars, there a couple of businessmen find respite from their hectic routine. People pop by, spend a few minutes over their tea and go their merry way. Mostly Chinese - it's Chinatown after all - but Malays and Indians too.

The trade goes in two kinds of hot herbal drinks: Ng Fa Cha (???), known in Beijing as Wu Hua Cha, Five-Flower Tea as well as Wong Lo Kat (???) or Wang Lao Ji, which, . The former tastes like sourish stewed fruits, the latter - like your classic bitter pill so a sour-sweet plum candy is proffered with it to make it more palatable.

Unlike many a canned drink, these two rely on herbal formula for both taste and, most importantly, healing effect. It was revealed by a Taoist monk to a certain Wang Zebang he was escaping an epidemic-stricken Guangzhou back in 1813. The magic five in Ng Fa Cha are Jasmine, Silk Cotton Flower, Yin Chen, Chrysanthemum and Honeysuckle (aka Chrysanthemum morifolii, Lonicera japonica, Bombax malabaricum, Sophora japonica, and Plumeria rubra). The claimed effect is cooling and soothing, whilst also nourishing your spiritual energy, or ?? in Chinese. No, seriously, even in Chinese you can't cram so much in just two characters: the spiritual energy bit has been added to lure the New Age crowd.

Wong Lo Kat in its unadulterated form does take some determination to drink. The taste of a crushed acorn has an ever-thinning-out public appeal so there is a hugely popular canned variety that tastes much more palatable thanks to a high sugar content which the old Chinese consider detrimental to the tea's medicinal properties. In an inadvertent allusion to the New Testament, the white-bearded sages insist that to benefit fully, you need to put up with the quinine taste and just gulp it down as soon as you can.

In an interesting example of combining traditional Chinese business shrewdness with modern internet technologies, the PR hand of the company that produces Wong Lo Kat organised a viral campaign "Force Out Wong Lo Kat" capitalising on the company's high-profile 100-million RMB donation to the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Internet users, initially attracted by the seemingly controversial slogan, were invited to buy available Wong Lo Kat in their supermarkets to support the manufacturer's charity activities.