history of oolong teas
How did the tea production look like back to 1840s~1870s?
Robert Fortune was the person who brought tea trees to India. According to his records, the production processes of black tea in China were: picking fresh leaves, putting leaves under sunlight and flipping till red rims around leaves, moving leaves to shady places to increase flavors, heating leaves to release grassy flavors, kneading, re-heating, re-kneading (many times till leaves got twisted), then roasting in low temperature.
*The first heating refers to the fixation, and following heating refers to roasting.
1
Around 1870s, the processes above were reduced by deleting sunlight, the times of heating and kneading in many tea zones; as time went by, the heating was also cut, and that became the prototype of the “current black teas”.
but on the other hand, oolong tea was much more like a concept by then (1840s); all producing methods of modern time oolong were formed decades after Robert Fortune‘s deliveries to India.
2
Back to 1840s in China, except green teas, there were also black teas and white teas existed in northern Fujian; one thing in common about these two was that they were both not fixed, and the former one needed rolling and kneading while the latter one need not. So from tastes viewpoints, green teas and white teas tend to keep the most original flavors from the camellia sinensis, and it doesn’t matter if they are fixed or not, nor oxidated or not.
3
oolong tea still underwent the try & error stage for a long time, while tea makers were trying different approaches by switching kneading, fixation, & other methods. the first prototypes of oolong probably appeared at around 1860s, and thes were sold to the west from china. as orders increased, Taiwan was consigned to produce teas based on lectures from Chinese trainers, and that’s when we started our tea chapter.
4
Taiwan has its original Camellia sinensis, and we also got different cultivars from China for long time, which provided us good conditions of plantations. As the order volume grew, foreign trading companies started to have local branches for exporting affairs. in 1867, taiwan teas was firstly sold to US under the name of “Formosa Oolong”.
5
China was leading us in producing skills for more than 50 years; we kept on learning from Chinese tea makers until 1910s. except that we were searching for new approaches to make teas, another reason was because China was under civil wars for long time, yet Taiwan was relatively peaceful and developed fast in many aspects for few decades.
6
we invented new ways of handling process to create strong flowery notes, and that tea (BaoZhong) was famous for its “strong aroma without blending flowers”. Nevertheless, no matter in TW or CN, what we had in common was the modern times concept of making oolong, which was the “substances transformation via oxidation”.
The value of understanding history lies in recognizing the essence of its differences, which enables a deeper articulation of current developments.
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