Ghee, or butter refined from the milk of cows and sheep, is a highly nutritional daily food of Tibetans. People in Southwest China's Tibet autonomous region, especially those living in pasture areas, usually eat few fruits and vegetables, as ghee, besides meat, supplies their daily requirement of heat energy.

The Tibetan way of refining ghee is very intriguing. As milk segregators are not widely used in the pasture areas of Tibet, in some places Tibetan woman still refine milk manually via primitive segregators.

They pour the heated milk into a big wooden bucket called a xue dong, and then whip forcibly (in an up-and-down motion) many times to separate the butter from the liquid. Gradually a tier of a light yellow substance floats to the top. Subsequently, the women ladle the butter and put it into a leather bag to cool it, hence refined ghee.