Two Fujian Counties Still Argue Over Who Invented Oolong
Wuyi has the older paper trail, and scholars dispute what tea it actually describes. Anxi has the founding legend, dated to three different centuries depending on who tells it. Neither county can prove which one first stopped oxidation partway and built the category.
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 a folk legend about a hunter so sun-darkened his neighbors called him Wulong, black dragon, and the legend cannot agree with its own retellings on which century it happened in. Three hundred years on, both counties still print their version as settled fact, and the fullest modern case for each side comes from people whose job is to promote that county's tea.
This is a different question from the one this site already answered about Tieguanyin's own founding legend: whether the farmer Wei Yin or the scholar Wang Shirang really found that one cultivar is a dispute about a single plant. This is older and broader: who worked out how to stop oxidation partway at all, the decision that makes every oolong an oolong, Tieguanyin included.
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 in 1685 and stayed until his death in 1712. 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, decades ahead of any date Anxi claims for itself.
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 is at least as consistent with the small-leaf black tea Wuyi was also making in the same period as it is with 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, and those records are blunt. The 1929 Jian'ou County Gazetteer is more measured than it is sometimes given credit for: it 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." A gazetteer written in Wuyi's own backyard crediting the rival county, by name, is not the kind of detail a promotional case usually volunteers against itself.
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."
But the 1936 report's own date is the tell that this case is not as settled as it sounds. "Early Guangxu," after 1875, sits a full 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. Different Anxi sources are not agreeing on a story. They are agreeing on a county.
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, out of habit or necessity, it came out fragrant and floral, without the raw, grassy bitterness of a green tea made the usual way. 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, and by most tellings the same Yongzheng reign (1725 to 1735), as the Wei Yin dream that this site has already covered as Tieguanyin's own separate founding story. But even Su Liang's dating does not hold still. A 2023 review written by Anxi's own county tea bureau argues instead for the Ming dynasty's Chenghua reign, 1465 to 1487, two and a half centuries earlier, based on field interviews and the logic of local naming rather than any single surviving document. A legend meant to fix the exact moment oolong began cannot agree with its own tellers on the century, let alone the year.
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 rival, Wuyi-aligned account relocates the hunter entirely, and renames him along the way: there he is Su Long, not Su Liang, a real grower who carried a soft-branch oolong cultivar not out of Xiping but into Jian'ou, in Wuyi's own territory, and the name passed from grower to plant to finished tea there instead. 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. Four sources, four specific and mutually exclusive claims. Two sides was never the right count for this argument.
The families blur the line
In 1982, the author of a later Anxi tea-bureau review, 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, one of Wuyi's own oldest oolong lineages carries Anxi ancestry, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes "Wuyi or Anxi" the wrong shape for the question. The people who built Wuyi's tradition may have carried Anxi's own hands with them.
Who is still arguing, and why
The fullest modern case for Anxi, the 2023 review this piece has drawn on repeatedly, 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. The equivalent case for Wuyi circulates chiefly through a Wuyi tea company's own website, in essays with no named historian attached. A centuries-old technical question is still being carried, in large part, by the tourism and export offices of the two counties that would each gain from winning it.
No side has the document
What the record actually supports is not a tossup between two equally good stories, and it is not nothing either. Wuyi has the earlier paper trail, an essay and a monk's poem that predate Anxi's own traditional dates, but historians dispute what tea that trail even describes. Anxi has the fuller legend, the later state cultivar recognition, and gazetteers as far away as Wuyi's own county crediting it by name, but its own sources cannot settle on a century between them. Nobody alive has a document proving who first let a basket of tea leaf sit too long on purpose. Both counties keep telling their own version anyway, on packaging, on county websites, and to visitors standing at the cliffs or in the hills, because a tea's origin story sells the tea, whether or not anyone can actually prove it. For how this dispute sits against Guangdong's separate founding legend, Taiwan's later migration, and the word "oolong" itself first reaching print, see The History of Oolong.