When describing a place, you can start from the visual, and introduce its natural scenery and architectural style to strangers. You can also introduce it from the auditory point of view, whether the rural atmosphere of insects and birds is more intense, or the busy city with traffic is more noisy.
But if you want to know a place by smell and taste, how would you describe it? Among the many landscapes, if you want to choose a breath that represents Tibet, it must be butter. In the life of Tibetans, butter tea is indispensable for three meals a day in every household, and butter lamps must be lit in temples to pay tribute to gods. In addition, ghee can also be used as medicine, soaked in wine, and made into works of art such as ghee flowers.
Ghee: Taste of the Snowy Plateau
Ghee is a kind of butter, but in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, its main raw material comes from the "boat of the plateau" yak (there are also a few who use goat's milk to make ghee). It is said that when people first transported milk on horseback, the road bumped and the oil and water separated, and they accidentally discovered this so-called "milk gold" ghee.
During the Tubo period, Yutuo Yundan Gonpo, the "King of Medicine", recorded in "Four Medical Codes": "Fresh ghee is cold but can strengthen tendons, can grow moisture and remove Chiba fever", which shows that Tibetans have already known ghee. There is a long history. Of course, the use of ghee in medicine does not stop there. External application can be used to stop bleeding and treat burns. Hot kneading can detoxify, relieve pain, and treat fainting symptoms. It is even believed that it can enhance fertility.
Ghee
Refining ghee is commonly known as "beating ghee", and the tools are a barrel and a stick. The former is called "Dongmu" in Tibetan, which means "barrel", and the latter is called "Jialou", which means that its raw materials are wood such as "pine and cypress".
Before making ghee, the milk needs to be heated and fermented to facilitate the separation of oil and water. In addition, the wooden stick armor is also very particular. One end is fixed with a circular wooden board slightly smaller than the diameter of the barrel. Several holes are symmetrically cut on the board, and the large end is inserted into the barrel. After the warm fermented milk is poured into the wooden barrel, the ghee maker holds the wooden handle on the upper end of the jelly, presses down hard until it touches the bottom of the barrel, and pulls the jelly upwards, repeating the cycle. Back and forth a thousand times, the ghee in the milk floats to the surface, pick it up and put it in a basin of cold water, pinch it repeatedly with both hands while the oil is solidified in cold water, squeeze out the water completely, and it becomes a pure butter lump, arranged in a certain It can be stored in a bag made of soaked calfskin or tripe of beef and sheep.
Ghee has many uses
butter flower
Ghee craft is a traditional Tibetan folk culture. It is a variety of fine arts such as Buddha statues, figures, landscapes, pavilions, birds and animals, flowers and trees made of ghee as raw materials. Every year on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar calendar, the flower stand band composed mainly of national wind instruments plays the solemn flower stand music with slow rhythm, to set off the religious atmosphere, and with the flashing lights; in the subtle and elegant music , displaying the butter flower sculpture groups in various poses and with different expressions.
Butter Milk Tea
Butter tea, also known as the thing of God, is "Qiasuma" in Tibetan. It is a beverage of the Tibetan people. It is mostly eaten with tsampa as a staple food. This drink is processed with ghee and strong tea. First put an appropriate amount of ghee into a special barrel, add salt, then pour in the boiled strong tea juice, and beat it repeatedly with a wooden handle to dissolve the ghee and tea juice into one, and it becomes milky. Some ethnic groups adjacent to the Tibetans also have the habit of drinking butter tea.
butter lamp
Tibetans pay homage to the Buddha, thousands of butter lamps are indispensable in the Buddhist hall. In their hearts, the butter lamp is the most familiar and sacred instrument, and those jumping flames have been burning on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for thousands of years. The yellow and white halo is like the light of wisdom emitted by Buddha and Bodhisattva. The butter lamp is very important in the hearts of Tibetan Buddhist believers, and is regarded as a heart lamp for dialogue with the gods. They believe that when life is nirvana, if there is no butter lamp, the soul will lose its way in the dark.
In Tibet, as long as there are people, there is the smell of ghee. Whether it is a town or a country, whether it is a pastoral area or a farm, whether it is a home or a temple, there is always such a peculiar smell permeating around the nose, with a long lasting flavor.
