The History of Oolong

Oolong has no single founding moment. Wuyi and Anxi each hold a claim to its invention, and Guangdong's Phoenix mountains hold a separate founding legend.

The Fujian dispute: two counties, one unresolved invention

Northern and southern Fujian each maintain the other borrowed the method. Wuyi's evidence is the older paper trail: a Qing-dynasty essay called Cha Shuo, Tea Talk, survives only because the historian Lu Tingcan quoted it inside his own 1734 compilation³, describing a leaf worked until it came out "half green and half red."

A monk who lived at Wuyi's Tianxin temple until his death in 1712 left a companion poem stating plainly that Anxi tea had already copied the Wuyi style, meaning Wuyi's method was established, and being imitated, decades before the dates Anxi's own gazetteers claim for its invention.

Anxi's evidence is the fuller institutional record: twentieth-century gazetteers and reports credit Anxi, though they cannot agree among themselves whether the year falls in the Qing dynasty's Yongzheng reign (1725 to 1735) or, in one account, a century and a half later.

Two modern tea historians back Anxi on different grounds, one of them arguing that Wuyi's own oldest oolong families are themselves descended from Anxi refugees who fled first to Shaxian county before settling in the Wuyi cliffs, meaning the technique may have traveled with the people rather than being invented twice. Neither county holds the single document that would end the argument. The full dispute, essay by essay and gazetteer by gazetteer, is recorded at the invention dispute, along with Tieguanyin's own separate founding legend, a dispute about one cultivar rather than the category itself.

What the word first meant, and when

Four explanations compete for where the name "wulong," black dragon, actually comes from: a sun-darkened hunter's nickname, a grower named Su Long whose cultivar carried his name into Jian'ou, an old dragon-and-phoenix tribute cake whose name outlived it, and an eleventh-century place reference.

None of the four agrees with the others, and each is examined in full at the invention dispute. One early text that uses "wulong" as a tea's name is not set in Wuyi or Anxi at all: it is Miscellaneous Notes on Fujian (闽杂记), the field notes of the Hangzhou-born official Shi Hongbao, compiled during his own residence in the province and usually dated to 1857, which records that among Fujian's many fine teas, "the wulong produced in Shaxian county is now held above all the others."¹

Shaxian sits between Wuyi and Anxi, and is precisely the county one migration theory above names as the resting place of the Anxi families who later settled in the Wuyi cliffs.

Etymonline dates the loanword "oolong" itself to 1844⁴. Western traders had already been buying Wuyi-region leaf under a different name: Bohea¹¹, from the name of the Wuyi district, which by the end of the eighteenth century meant the lowest grade of so-called black tea.

Guangdong's separate lineage: the Phoenix mountains

Guangdong's Phoenix mountains claim a founding story of their own.

Local tradition dates the tea to the end of the Southern Song dynasty, when the boy emperor Zhao Bing, fleeing south as the dynasty collapsed, passed through the range exhausted and thirsty. The She hill communities⁸ that farmed the range offered him a tea broth, and he named it Song Cha, Song tea.

The Song Cha mother tree, preserved on the mountain as a living relic for roughly seven and a half centuries, finally died in late 2016⁷.

The written record catches up centuries later: a Chaozhou prefectural gazetteer compiled in the mid-to-late Ming dynasty records Raoping county's annual tribute as more than 150 jin of leaf tea and more than 100 jin of bud tea⁵, evidence Chaozhou's tea was a recognized, tribute-grade good long before anyone called a single tree from it a dancong. Dancong, single bush, is the later refinement: by some accounts, during the late Qing dynasty's Guangxu reign (1875 to 1908), growers began picking, processing, and selling more than ten thousand recognized old trees separately⁶ rather than blending a garden's leaf together, and it was this practice that gave the whole category its name.

In the twentieth century a Chaozhou merchant remembered locally as the tea king, Chen Chuanzhi, is credited with opening the Republican-era trade that first carried Phoenix Dancong into Southeast Asia, an export path distinct from the Fujian and Taiwan routes. Phoenix Dancong gained geographical-indication protection at home and, through a bilateral agreement, in the European Union too. See Phoenix Dancong's named aroma types for how the modern trade classifies what these old trees now produce.

Crossing the strait: Taiwan's two migrations

Zhang Naimiao carried Tieguanyin cuttings to Muzha, in the hills above modern Taipei, across three documented trips between 1895 and 1919.

A separate merchant route brought a different method across: Wu Fulao carried Wang Yicheng's wrapped-leaf bao zhong method to Taiwan in 1881. Four years later, two former camphor traders, Wang Shuijin and Wei Jingshi, resettled in Nankang and could not agree how to make the tea, splitting into rival Wenshan-style and Nankang-style processing; growers increasingly favored Wei's lighter style, which took the market and, alongside Wang's Wenshan method, was named among the era's best in a 1916 colonial-government survey. The full migration, family by family, is recorded at how oolong reached Taiwan.

Formosa Oolong: the export brand

The Scottish trader John Dodd, whose Taiwan operation had begun manufacturing tea on the island the year before, shipped the island's oolong directly to New York in 1869 under the name Formosa Oolong, built largely with his comprador Li Chunsheng, who arranged the growers' credit and training, launching a boom that made the Dadaocheng district Taiwan's tea capital for the following century. The fuller account, including how much of the credit the English-language history gives Dodd alone, is at the Formosa Oolong export history.