Chinese tea: what UNESCO listed in 2022 was making tea, not drinking it
In November 2022 the traditional tea processing techniques and associated social practices of China were inscribed as intangible cultural heritage, and what was listed was not tea itself but the craft of making it and the customs around it. This article explains how each of the six classes of tea is made, why the same leaf can become green tea or black tea, the forty-four national items the listing covers, how a tea maker's hands judge, and the long friendship between qin players and tea.
An ongoing record of guqin study, technique and digital notation.
Translated from the Chinese original.
A few days before the Qingming festival in early April. Longjing village, in the hills beside West Lake in Hangzhou. Eleven o'clock at night.
A light is on in one room. On the stove sits an iron pan, set at a slant, with no oil and no water in it. The pan is at roughly two hundred degrees Celsius. A man stands in front of it and tips in a handful of tender buds picked that day, still damp with dew. There is a sharp hiss as the leaves hit the hot metal, and a smell of green grass rises.
He puts his hand straight into the pan. Not a spatula, his hand. With his palm flat against the iron, he shakes the leaves loose, gathers them, presses them down, pushes them away and gathers them again, without stopping. His hand moves through the hot pan stroke after stroke, as if massaging the leaves. After ten minutes or more the leaves have turned from bright green to a darker green, from open to flat, and the grassy smell has become something like roasted chestnuts.
His palm is yellowish brown. It has blistered many times. It no longer does.
This panful will make about three hundred grams of finished tea. He will be firing until dawn.
First, the heritage listing
On November 29, 2022, UNESCO inscribed "Traditional tea processing techniques and associated social practices in China" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Note the wording. Not "Chinese tea", but processing techniques and social practices. Intangible heritage has never protected things. It protects the people who make them and the ways they are made: the hand of the man in the opening scene, not the tea he produces.
One leaf, six teas
Chinese tea is divided into six classes: green, white, yellow, qing cha (青茶, usually called oolong), hong cha (红茶, "red tea", known in English as black tea) and hei cha (黑茶, dark tea). All are made from the leaves of one plant, the tea bush, Camellia sinensis. The difference lies in the processing, and the key word is "fermentation".
In Chinese tea terminology, "fermentation" mostly does not mean the work of microbes. It means how far the polyphenols in the leaf have oxidized. Oxidation begins the moment a leaf leaves the bush. Making tea is a matter of deciding how far to let it go, and then stopping it.
Green tea is unfermented. The fresh leaves go straight to shaqing, "killing the green": high heat, from pan-firing or steaming, destroys the enzymes that drive oxidation, and oxidation stops. The leaves are then rolled and dried. They stay green and the taste is fresh. The panful in Longjing village was being killed green. Longjing, Biluochun and Huangshan Maofeng are all green teas.
White tea is very lightly fermented. It is neither killed green nor rolled. The fresh leaves are spread out to wither naturally for two or three days and then dried. It is the simplest process and gives the lightest taste, and the fine white down on the buds is preserved. Examples are Baihao Yinzhen ("Silver Needle") and Bai Mudan ("White Peony").
Yellow tea is lightly fermented. It follows the green-tea process with one extra step, menhuang, "sealing yellow": after killing green, the leaves are piled and covered with cloth so that they slowly turn yellow in the moist warmth. An example is Junshan Yinzhen.
Oolong is semi-fermented. The fresh leaves are first withered, then put through zuoqing, "making green": they are tossed repeatedly so that the leaf edges are bruised and oxidize while the centers do not, producing the "green leaf with a red rim". Only then are they killed green, rolled and roasted. Examples are Tieguanyin, Wuyi rock tea and Fenghuang Dancong. Making green is the hardest step in all six classes. How many times to toss, how long to rest, how many rounds to repeat, all depend on the state of the leaves that particular night.
Black tea is fully fermented. After withering and rolling, the leaves are left to oxidize completely until they turn red-brown, and are then dried. Examples are Keemun and Lapsang Souchong.
Dark tea is post-fermented. After killing green and rolling, the leaves are heaped and sprinkled with water in a process called wodui, "pile fermentation", in which microbes do take part. After some weeks the tea is often pressed into bricks or cakes. Examples are ripe Pu'er and Anhua dark tea.
So the same leaf, killed green the day it is picked, becomes green tea; spread out for two days, white tea; tossed, oolong; oxidized through, black tea; heaped, dark tea. The craft of tea making is the craft of controlling how this one leaf changes.
Forty-four items
The nomination bundled forty-four national-level intangible heritage items, covering the processing of all six classes and the customs around them. They include West Lake Longjing, Biluochun, Wuyi rock tea, Tieguanyin, Keemun, Pu'er, Fuding white tea and Anhua dark tea, and also drinking customs such as Chaozhou gongfu tea, the tea feast of Jingshan Temple, the "three-course tea" of the Bai people and the butter tea of Tibet.
Seen together, they show that tea in China is not one drink but dozens of local ways of life. People in Chaozhou, in eastern Guangdong, drink a dozen or more rounds of gongfu tea a day from three tiny cups too hot to hold. Tibetans churn tea with butter and salt, and for them it is food rather than a drink. The tea feast of Jingshan Temple near Hangzhou followed the rules of Chan monasteries in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and later reached Japan, where it became one of the sources of the tea ceremony. The same leaf, in different places, has become different ways of living a day.
Tea through the year
Tea making also has a dimension of time. The tea bush puts out several flushes of new growth a year, and when the leaves are picked decides what the tea will be.
Green tea races the calendar. Leaves picked before Qingming, around April 5, are called mingqian tea: the buds are the most tender, the quantity smallest and the price highest. Leaves picked before Guyu, around April 20, are called yuqian tea and rank next. After Guyu the leaves grow too large for fine green tea. That is why Longjing village is busiest from late March to mid-April, and why the man in the opening scene fires through the night. The buds cannot wait. What is picked today must be killed green today; left until tomorrow, it is no longer mingqian tea.
Oolong does not race. It waits until the leaves have opened out and reached a certain maturity, so that making green can draw out their fragrance; Wuyi rock tea is picked around May. White tea watches the weather, since withering goes well only after several clear days in a row. Dark tea pays no attention to season, only to the weeks in the pile.
Through the year, different teas are busy in different months. A tea maker may spend a whole life on a single tea, busy for one month a year and waiting for the other eleven. It is the same kind of waiting as the qin maker waiting for lacquer to cure, or the player waiting for the last resonance to die away.
The tea maker's hand
Back to the hand in the opening scene.
The firing of Longjing has "ten hand techniques", each named by a single verb: dou (shake), da (lay over), ta (press flat), na (press down), shuai (fling), zhua (grasp), tui (push), kou (cup), ya (press) and mo (grind). Each is one movement. When to use which, how hard and for how long has no numbers, only feel. When the leaves are too damp, shake them to release the moisture. When they soften, lay them over and press them flat. When they are nearly dry, grind them against the pan to bring out a sheen. The pan's temperature is also judged by hand: the hand goes in, and how hot it feels tells the maker which technique comes next.
It takes a tea maker three years to learn the ten techniques and ten years to fire good tea. In those ten years the hand is burned hundreds of times, until it grows a callus, and until it knows what to do without looking at the pan or the clock.
Machines can fire tea. Most of the Longjing sold today is machine-fired: cheap, even, and nobody's hands get burned. But a machine does not judge. It follows its program regardless of whether today's leaves are a little wetter or a little drier. Good tea still needs a person at the pan. What heritage protection protects is that hand in the pan.
Tea and the qin
The bond between qin players and tea was put into verse by the Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846):
Among qin pieces, the one I know well is only Clear Water; among teas, my old friend is Mengshan.
A separate article, the qin and tea, is devoted to that bond. One point here: tea and the guqin, the seven-string Chinese zither, entered the heritage list nineteen years apart, in 2003 and 2022, but in the daily lives of the literati they were never apart.
At qin gatherings today, one person playing while everyone drinks tea is the most familiar scene. Of the six classes, players mostly drink the lighter ones, green tea, white tea and lightly roasted oolong, for the same reason as with incense: the flavor should not overpower the sound. With a strong ripe Pu'er beside it, the qin sounds thin.
What heritage protects
The listing of tea making follows the same logic as the listings of the guqin, of Kunqu opera (2001) and of calligraphy (2009). These crafts have centuries or millennia of transmission and many practitioners, but fewer and fewer who do them well, and machines are taking over their steps. Killing green can be done by machine, and so can rolling. But when to kill green and how far to roll still depend on the tea maker's hands and nose.
As with qin making, what a machine can do is the making; what it cannot do is the judging. The qin maker taps the wood and listens, the tea maker puts a hand in the pan to feel the heat, and both are making judgments based on decades of experience stored in the body. That judgment is what heritage protection is for. It lives in one person's hands, and if that person does not teach the next, it is gone.
Drink a cup
When you finish reading, make a cup of tea, any kind. Watch the leaves open in the water and think about how they came from the bush to the cup: picking, withering, killing green, rolling, drying, each step someone's hands. If it is Longjing, each flat leaf was pressed into shape by a palm like the one in the opening scene, in a pan at two hundred degrees.
Then play a piece. By the time the tea has gone cold, the piece will be nearly over. That is how Bai Juyi spent his afternoons.