The 'Taiwan-Style' Oolong That Was Never From Taiwan
Zhangping, a Fujian county, grows oolong under a national standard written for a style that never crossed the strait. Land, not origin, is what the standard actually measures.
Some tea labeled "Taiwan-style oolong" has never been near the island. Zhangping, a county-level city in Fujian, marked five years last month under a national standard for exactly that tea, grown on the mainland, in soil a Taiwanese farmer once measured against Ali Mountain's own before he planted a leaf.
The measuring was literal. In 1996 the Taiwanese grower Xie Dongqing leased 350 mu (about 58 acres) of barren hillside in Zhangping's Yongfu township and, the next year, planted 400,000 oolong seedlings, betting that Yongfu's altitude, climate, soil, and latitude sat close enough to Taiwan's Alishan to grow the same tea, according to a People's Daily Online report from December. The wager is now the mainland's largest Taiwan-style oolong production base, per the same account.
What that base lacked, for two and a half decades, was a shared rulebook. Growers on each side of the strait judged the tea by their own conventions until Taiwan-style Oolong Tea and Taiwan-style Oolong Tea Processing Technical Specification, GB/T 39562-2020, took effect June 1, 2021, according to China's national standards registry. The first standard fixes the tea's definition, grade classification, sensory quality, and physicochemical limits, plus testing, labeling, packaging, and storage; the second sets the processing environment and workflow, picking through firing. Fujian officials call the pair the first national standards mainland and Taiwan tea people ever wrote together.
Zhangping marked the standards' fifth anniversary with a symposium and a cross-strait tea farmers' skills competition, held June 30 in Yongfu, co-hosted by the Zhangping Taiwan Farmers' Entrepreneurship Park Management Committee and the Zhangping Market Supervision and Administration Bureau, the committee said in a July 2 account carried by People's Daily's Fujian bureau. The committee's standing proof of the standard's effect is a single figure, dated to the standard's second year: Zhangping's Taiwan-style oolong output reached 3,300 tonnes (about 3,600 US tons) and 1.6 billion yuan (roughly US$220 million) in value, gains of 115% and 112% over the year before, while complaints against the category fell from 15 a year to zero. This account does not update the number or name an outside auditor for it.
The Order's rule on Taiwan's four classic origins, set out in Oolong's regions, Wuyi, Anxi, Phoenix, and the island itself, still holds. Zhangping is a fifth thing entirely: not an origin claiming to be Taiwan, but a transplant measured against it and now held to a rule both sides signed. A gaiwan does not care which side of the strait grew the leaf. It cares whether the leaf was grown right, which is the one question a standard can actually answer.
Sources: People's Daily Fujian bureau, 闽西山区小"镇"凭什么捧出两项国家标准 (July 2, 2026, in Chinese); People's Daily Online, Taiwan-style oolong tea takes root in Zhangping, SE China's Fujian (Dec. 17, 2025); China National Standardization Administration, 台式乌龙茶加工技术规范.
Correction, July 21, 2026: An earlier version said the standard's second-year output and value figures (3,300 tonnes, 1.6 billion yuan, 115%/112% growth, complaints falling from 15 to zero) were repeated unchanged in the article's cited December 2025 People's Daily Online account. That account, fetched and checked in full, does not contain those figures; they appear only in the July 2 account cited here.