Yuenyeung is Hong Kong’s answer to the coffee or tea question: brewed coffee mixed with Hong Kong-style milk tea, served hot or poured over ice. The milk tea alone is intense, built from a strong Ceylon blend of broken leaves and tea dust, sweetened and thickened with evaporated or condensed milk whose concentrated proteins bind the tea’s tannins. The Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department records the traditional ratio as three parts coffee to seven parts milk tea, a balance that keeps the roasted coffee from drowning out the tea. The name is the Cantonese word for mandarin ducks, a symbol of conjugal love, chosen because the vivid male and the mottled brown female look like opposites swimming as a pair.

The drink grew out of Hong Kong’s 1950s street food scene, in open-air dai pai dong stalls and cheap cha chaan teng cafes where canned milk and tea dust kept costs down. Lam Muk Ho of Lan Fong Yuen, a stall that still operates, claims he invented yuenyeung in 1952, the same year he claims for silk stocking milk tea. Historians broadly credit him with the silk stocking method, but his yuenyeung claim remains unverified. The drink later spread across the city, crossed into Malaysia under another name, and even got a frozen corporate makeover.

• Silk stocking milk tea is pulled repeatedly through a long white cotton sack that stains the color of hosiery, straining, aerating, and smoothing the tea.
• Evaporated milk has about 60 percent of its water removed, which gives Hong Kong milk tea its velvety body.
• In summer 2010, Starbucks in Hong Kong and Macau sold a Yuenyeung Frappuccino Blended Cream.
• In Malaysia the same mix is called kopi cham, joining the Malay word for coffee with the Hokkien word for mix.
• Children’s yuenyeung skips caffeine entirely, blending Horlicks and Ovaltine to mimic the light and dark pairing.