Xarope (Syrup)

By Patrick A De Lemos Rozario

I recently heard from the news that fewer people are drinking watercress syrup. Watercress honey (syrup), commonly known in Cantonese as “西洋菜蜜”, is made by simmering fresh watercress and blending the extract with sugar or honey. The reasons may be obvious enough; younger people no longer drink traditional concentrated syrups as much as before. Instead, they prefer bubble tea and the endless variety of trendy drinks sold in fashionable cafés and convenience stores.

What surprised me most was not the decline itself but learning that watercress syrup originated in Macau. I had always thought of it as something shared by Hong Kong and Macau, through the cha chaan tengs (local cafés).

Once I began looking into it, I realised that watercress itself had travelled long before it became a base for syrup. The Chinese name of Club Lusitano is “西洋會所”, the “Western Ocean Club”. The Cantonese name of watercress is “西洋菜”, or “Western Ocean Vegetable”. Watercress is not native to China. It originated in Europe and Western Asia, where it was valued as both food and medicine as early as ancient Greek and Roman times. It was introduced to Macau and the Pearl River Delta in the late nineteenth century through Portuguese trade routes.

As I read further, I found that watercress syrup moved from humble street-side preparation into smallscale industrial production, and from there into everyday life of cha chaan tengs across generations. The story of Kam Loi, the oldest surviving watercress syrup maker in Macau, reflects that path. It began as a street stall in 1954 and expanded in the 1970s into a factory producing concentrated watercress and chrysanthemum syrups for local cafés. Other brands followed. Crown Brand, a familiar back-of-house syrup in many Hong Kong cha chaan tengs, still supplies watercress honey across the city, while Macau producers such as Hong Koon and other long-established makers have helped preserve the tradition of concentrated herbal drinks for restaurants and households across the Greater Bay Area and overseas. The usual dilution ratio is one part syrup to six parts water.

A contemporary bottle of Kam Loi watercress honey (syrup)

from the website of Macau’s Instituto de Promoção do Comércio e do Investimento

The deeper I went into the story of watercress syrup, the more I began to see it not as an isolated cha chaan teng drink, but as part of an older tradition I already knew through fig leaf syrup. Fig leaf syrup now seemed, in many ways, like an earlier herbal syrup tradition brought to Macau by the Portuguese and gradually absorbed into Macanese family kitchens long before cha chaan teng culture gave watercress syrup its familiar place.

My grandaunt made fig leaf syrup in Macau and sent them to us in Hong Kong, and my mother made a few batches herself over the years. I still remember helping as a child. The fig leaves had to be washed carefully and left to soak, and I was often given the task of brushing away the fine fuzzy hairs clinging to their surface before they could be boiled. Then the leaves would simmer slowly on the stove, filling the kitchen with their warm green smell.

In winter we drank the syrup with hot water; in summer it was mixed with cold water and served against the heat. At the time, it felt like nothing more than an ordinary household drink. But once I learned that Macau factories had long produced both watercress syrup and other herbal syrups, the relationship between the two became impossible to ignore. They belonged to the same liquid logic, leaves and greens drawn into water, sugar added not only for sweetness but also for preservation, and the syrup stored as a concentrate to be revived later with hot or cold water depending on the season.

Because fig leaf syrup was so laborious to make, my mother eventually stopped preparing it at home and we bought them instead from the Carmelite Convent in Stanley. As a child, I went with my mom to fetch the bottles. The convent, founded in the 1930s and known for its red-brick modernist buildings around a quiet enclosed courtyard, struck me as a place of deep stillness, withdrawn from the world yet somehow tied to the life around it. Behind its high walls lived the Carmelite nuns, devoted to prayer, silence, and the patient rhythms of daily work. The fig leaf syrup they sold was part of that hidden economy of devotion, a modest way of helping support the convent. Even then, I remember the hush of the place, its order, and its quiet sense of purpose. The syrup seemed to carry something of the convent itself, as if patience, care, and restraint had entered the bottle.

Carmelite Monastery Stanley

Here is a fig leaf syrup recipe from Aunty Noreen Souza:

1. Preparing the leaves. Take 30 to 40 large fresh fig leaves and remove the stems. Wash them well, then rubbing the leaves together (or gently brush both sides) to remove the fine fuzz and any residue clinging to the surface.

2. Soaking and boiling. Soak the leaves in cold water for several hours, or overnight if time permits. Then transfer them to a large pot and add enough fresh water to cover them completely. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and let them simmer for about 1.5 hours, turning the leaves from time to time. Continue until they have released their fragrance and flavour into the water and have turned into dark green colour.

3. Straining and sweetening. Lift out the leaves, squeeze them to extract as much liquid and flavour as possible, then strain the liquid through a fine sieve or cloth. Return the liquid to the pot, add Chinese rock sugar (about 300g for every 1 cup of liquid) to taste, and simmer again until it thickens slightly into a light syrup (like honey). Do not stir, as any disturbance will cause the liquid to crystalize.

4. Bottling and serving. Allow the syrup to cool completely before pouring it into clean sterilised bottles. If desired, the syrup may also be clarified in the old way with lightly beaten egg white before the final straining. The syrup may be diluted with cold water and ice to make a refreshing and cooling drink for the summer or stirred into hot water for winter.

What linked watercress syrup and fig leaf syrup most deeply, I came to realise, was not the plants themselves but the preservation method behind them. In the medieval Islamic world, sugar was used not only to sweeten but also to preserve herbal extracts and make them easier to store, transport, and consume over time. This practice was especially developed in Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth to the fifteenth century, where Arabic, Mediterranean, and local Iberian knowledge met. From there, Iberian societies inherited a sugar-based way of preserving botanicals and carried it onward through trade, monasteries, and household practice.

“Preparing Medicine from Honey”, from a Dispersed Manuscript of an Arabic Translation of De Materia Medica of Dioscorides. 1224. Calligrapher: 'Abdullah ibn al-Fadl. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/451400.

In Macau, that preservation logic met Cantonese ideas of “cooling” and lung-soothing drinks, which mattered deeply in the hot and humid climate of southern China, where excess internal “heat” and respiratory discomfort were understood as constant bodily risks. Cantonese herbal drinks long predated Portuguese arrival and came from their own medical logic of clearing heat, moistening the lungs, and restoring bodily balance. Unlike traditional herbal decoctions, which usually had to be prepared fresh each time and does not keep for long, syrup-based drinks were made to last: the herbal extract was preserved with sugar into a concentrate that could be stored and later mixed with water as needed.

Fig leaf syrup was not a simple import from Portugal, nor merely an extension of Chinese herbal tea, but a hybrid form: a sweetened botanical concentrate that could be kept, diluted, and folded into daily life. Watercress followed a similar path. In this sense, its history runs parallel to South China herbal tea rather than descending directly from it. Watercress entered that existing framework not as an origin

point but as an ingredient that could be absorbed into it. That is why watercress soup and watercress honey could feel both foreign and immediately familiar, the ingredient was imported, but the bodily idea was already waiting for it. Once I understood this, fig leaf syrup and watercress syrup no longer seemed like disconnected childhood memories. They became local expressions of a much older technology of care.

That insight also made me look outward. Macau was not the only place where Portuguese habits of cordial-making took root and changed shape. Across the Portuguese colonial world, what travelled was not a fixed recipe but a method, extract a local plant into liquid, preserve it with sugar, and make it available for heat, health, and daily use. In Goa, the cooling drink is kokum rather than watercress. In Melaka, pandan and palm sugar do some of the aromatic work that fig leaves did for us. In Brazil, medicinal syrups made from leaves, bark, and roots preserve the more pharmaceutical side of the same tradition. Macau, though, offers one of the clearest surviving versions, because it preserves with unusual clarity the meeting of an Iberian preservation technique and a Cantonese medicinal framework. That may be why these syrups still feel so intimate: even when bought from a factory bottle or ordered in a cha chaan teng, they still carry the sense of two traditions meeting within the same drink.

From there, I began to see another part of my childhood differently. If the Portuguese world taught me to think of cordial as leaves preserved in sugar, British Hong Kong taught me to think of cordial as bright, bottled concentrate. Robinson Lemon Barley, Watson orange and lemon, and Ribena tasted different from watercress syrup, but they followed the same basic idea. They were concentrates meant to be mixed with water and drunk cold.

“A.S. Watson's Lemon and Orange Cordial bottles (early 1980s)”, reconstructed from a combination of childhood memories and archived web imagery, image generated by Google’s Nano Banana model, 17 June 2026.

Robinsons had older roots in barley drinks, and its Lemon Barley Water became widely known from the 1930s through its link with Wimbledon. Watson cordials brought the British habit into everyday colonial life in Hong Kong: citrusy, easy to store, easy to mix, and less tied to medicine than local herbal drinks. Then there was Ribena, the dark purple drink that became part of many Hong Kong childhoods.

As a boy in Hong Kong, those British cordials felt completely normal. Robinson Lemon Barley seemed light and cooling. Ribena tasted like everyday family routine, taken from the cupboard and mixed with cold water on hot days and with hot water and lemon when not feeling well.

A.S. Watson’s orange and lemon cordials belonged especially to after-sports, for me was football and

tennis, when something sweet and cold felt most satisfying. What I did not realise then was that these

drinks had already simplified an older cordial tradition. The British had invented a broader syrup culture of fruits and barley for family refreshment with huge commercial success. The basic gesture stayed the same: pour, dilute, drink. They joined the same everyday habits of dealing with heat, thirst, and repetition.

Later, cordial changed setting again. As an adult, I found it not only in kitchens and local cafés but also in bars, where lime cordial and blackcurrant mixers slipped easily into alcoholic drinks. Lime cordial makes that continuity especially clear. It lasted when many other cordials faded because it was so adaptable, sweet enough to keep, sharp enough to stay lively, and simple enough to mix with water,

soda, or spirits. It moved easily from household refreshment to bar culture without losing its basic identity. A lime soda in the afternoon and lime cordial with vodka in the evening are not opposites. They are different moments in the same long story of preservation and dilution. The old Macanese fig leaf syrups stayed closer to home, more seasonal, and less industrial. British cordials became more public and commercial. Cocktails inherited their flexibility. What stayed constant was the lesson I had immersed in long before I could explain it, a concentrated thing becomes sociable when opened. That, perhaps, is why cordial became such a fitting companion to growing up between Hong Kong and Macau.

So, when I think now about the decline of watercress syrup, I no longer see it only as the fading of an old cha chaan teng drink. I see it as a small weakening in a much longer chain of memory; from watercress arriving in Macau and entering the herbal imagination of South China, to syrup factories like Kam Loi turning it into a city drink, to fig leaf syrup in my mother’s kitchen, to the bottles from the Carmelite Convent, to Robinson Lemon Barley, Watson orange and lemon, and Ribena in British Hong Kong, and finally to cordial as part of adult sociability.

The deeper pattern, as I now see it, is that the Portuguese spread cordial-making not by carrying one fixed recipe everywhere, but by carrying a preservation method, local plants, sugar, storage, dilution. Macau kept one of its most intimate forms. Hong Kong absorbed another, lighter British version of the same structure. Growing up between the two, I learned without knowing it that history could be poured into a glass, mixed with water, and still remain strong enough to taste.