Two Fujian Counties Still Argue Over Who Invented Oolong

Nobody can prove which Fujian county invented oolong, and the counties have not stopped trying. Wuyi's claim rests on a Qing-dynasty tea essay, folded into a scholar's later compilation, that some historians read as describing black tea rather than oolong at all. Anxi's claim rests on twentieth-century county records and a folk legend about a hunter so sun-darkened his neighbors called him Wulong, black dragon, and sources crediting Anxi date the invention to three different centuries. Both counties still print their version as settled fact.

The essay that names Wuyi

The earliest written claim comes from a Qing-dynasty scholar named Wang Caotang, in a short essay called Cha Shuo, Tea Talk. The essay does not survive as its own printed book; it survives because the tea historian Lu Tingcan quoted it inside his own 1734 compilation², Xu Cha Jing, the Continued Classic of Tea. The passage, read directly off that text, says Wuyi tea "combines frying and roasting; when brewed it comes out half green and half red, the green being the color of the fry, the red the color of the roast" (续茶经, 武夷炒焙兼施，烹出之时，半青半红，青者乃炒色，红者乃焙色). A leaf that browns at the edge while staying green at the center, worked by hand and finished over heat, is close kin to what a modern gaiwan pours today: partial oxidation, stopped on purpose.

A second document, written by someone who actually lived on the mountain, backs the timing. Shi Chaoquan, a Buddhist monk born Ruan Minxi in 1627, took up residence as a tea monk at Wuyi's Tianxin temple. He wrote a pair of poems, Wuyi Tea Song and its companion Anxi Tea Song, the second of which states plainly that "Anxi tea then copied the rock-tea style, fried then roasted, no different" (溪茶遂仿岩茶样，先炒后焙不争差). Lu Tingcan thought enough of the Wuyi Tea Song to quote a line from it in the same 1734 book that carries Wang Caotang's essay. If Shi Chaoquan's claim is taken at face value, Wuyi's method was already established, and being copied, sometime before his death in 1712.

Neither text closes the case. A 2023 review co-written by three Anxi county tea officials argues that "fry then roast" describes tea production in general, not the specific act of letting oxidation run partway on purpose, and contends Wang Caotang's "half green, half red" leaf describes the small-leaf black tea method, not oolong. Read uncharitably, Wuyi's whole documentary case rests on one borrowed essay and one monk's poem, neither of which uses a word for the category that exists today.

The gazetteers that name Anxi

Anxi's case does not lean on poetry. It leans on twentieth-century county records. The 1929 Jian'ou County Gazetteer records that the leaf is "thick and deep-colored, with a taste that carries far," suitable for planting on any high open ground, and that "its cultivar was transmitted from Anxi county, Quanzhou," a claim about where the plant came from, not who invented the process. The 1936 Fujian Construction Department report makes the stronger claim outright, opening with "oolong tea began in Anxi" before dating the invention to "the early Guangxu reign," after 1875, when Anxi "invented a tea that is neither red nor green, semi-fermented." The 1940 New Chong'an County Gazetteer, compiled in what was then Wuyi's own home county before it was renamed Wuyishan in 1989, records that "oolong tea comes from Anxi; during the Qing dynasty, a person surnamed Zhan transplanted it to Jian'ou."

Two well-credentialed modern scholars back Anxi as well, for different reasons. Chen Chuan, a tea historian, argues that Wuyi's own oolong-making families are themselves descended from Anxi refugees who fled first to Shaxian and only later settled in Wuyi, meaning the technique traveled with the people rather than being invented twice. Chen Zongmao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief editor of the reference work The Chinese Tea Classic, states without qualification that "southern Fujian is oolong's birthplace, spreading from there to northern Fujian, Guangdong, and Taiwan."

The 1936 report's "early Guangxu," after 1875, sits about a century and a half after the Yongzheng-era date (1725 to 1735) that China's own national tea-processing textbook and the Anxi county gazetteer elsewhere both give for the same invention.

A hunter, a deer, and two different centuries

The story usually told to visitors is more specific than any gazetteer, and it belongs to Anxi alone. A tea farmer and hunter named Su Liang, from Nan'yan village in Xiping township, was dark-skinned enough that his neighbors nicknamed him Wulong. Chasing a deer he had startled during a day's picking, he left a full basket of fresh leaf jostling on his back for hours. By the time he returned home, the leaf had wilted and reddened along its edges. Fried the next morning anyway, it came out fragrant and floral, without its usual bitterness. He worked out what the deer chase had done to the leaf, repeated it on purpose, and taught the method to his neighbors. After his death, the village kept his nickname for the tea.

The legend is set in Xiping, the same township as the Wei Yin dream, Tieguanyin's own separate founding story. The 2023 review by three Anxi county tea officials dates it to the Ming dynasty's Chenghua reign, 1465 to 1487, two and a half centuries before the Yongzheng date, based on field interviews and the logic of local naming rather than any single surviving document.

The word carries its own argument

Even "wulong" itself is contested, as a separate question from who invented the tea. One theory ties the name to an eleventh-century place reference recorded alongside other famous teas of the era. A 1941 provincial survey, The Tea of Fujian, names a different man, Su Long, a man from Anxi who carried Anxi tea stock to Jianning prefecture, where the tea took the name Wulong after his death. A third, minority position traces "long", dragon, back further still, to the pressed dragon-and-phoenix tribute cakes made near Wuyi centuries before anyone stopped oxidation on purpose, arguing the name outlived that older tea rather than naming this one. The tea scientist Zhuang Wanfang gives yet a fourth telling, locating oolong's earliest ancestor in the Northern Song tribute tea grown on Jian'ou's own Fenghuang Shan, a different mountain entirely from the Guangdong Fenghuang range that gives Phoenix Dancong its name.

The families blur the line

In 1982, the Anxi researcher Xie Zhiqun, together with the deputy director of Anxi's own County Science Committee, visited Wuyi's Tianxin village and interviewed an elderly tea master surnamed Chen, then in his seventies, whose family had guarded its own oolong-processing method for generations, teaching it only to sons and daughters-in-law, never to daughters. Asked about his own family's roots, he traced them to Penggé, in Anxi, migrants who had gone first to Jiangxi's Shangrao and only later to Wuyi, more than three centuries earlier. If the account holds, the family that held Tianxin's oolong method carries Anxi ancestry.

Who is still arguing

The fullest modern case for Anxi is co-written by three named officials: a senior agronomist at the Anxi County Agricultural and Rural Bureau, the deputy party secretary of the Anxi China Tea Capital Group, and the director of the Anxi County Tea Management Committee Office.