LOCAL FOOD GUIDE

Tsampa Roasted Barley Flour 糌粑

Zanba

Tsampa Roasted Barley Flour is featured among the local specialties of Yunnan.

Roasted barley flour and butter for preparing tsampa, before mixing. This is an ingredient photograph, not a finished serving.
Dish photograph · see caption for contextRoasted barley flour and butter for preparing tsampa, before mixing. This is an ingredient photograph, not a finished serving. The source photograph does not establish a local vendor, current menu or universal regional recipe.Photo: jqn · CC BY-SA 2.0
Photo adjustments

EXIF orientation applied where present; resized proportionally to at most 640 px on the long edge and encoded as WebP. No crop, retouching, recoloring or subject changes.

Tsampa Roasted Barley Flour (糌粑) is roasted barley flour used as a traditional Tibetan staple in Diqing (迪庆). Shangri-La News (香格里拉网) describes a household serving of barley flour with milk tea, golden butter, chula (曲拉) and sugar.

Roasted, finely ground barley

In the local account, qingke barley (青稞) is dried, roasted and finely ground. The flour is not sieved. The text explains that the name tsampa refers to roasted flour and describes both pale and purple-black barley among its raw materials.

Flour, butter and tea

Hosts set the ingredients before guests, combining the barley flour’s place as a staple with milk tea, butter, chula and sugar on the table. A later Diqing broadcaster guide describes forming tsampa into small portions by hand and pairing it with butter tea.

China Revealed · Editorially updated 2026-09-30

Sources & reading

Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-30. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.