Chinese Tea Types And Its Production Since The Early Years
Sarah Williams
Chinese has been drinking tea for approximately 4,000 years.
Along with firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, and vinegar, the
Chinese considered tea as one of the seven necessities to begin
a day.
Types of Tea
The Chinese tea may be classified into five types according to
the different methods by which it is processed. Here are the
classifications of Chinese Teas:
Green Tea is the variety which keeps the original color of
the tea leaves without fermentation during processing.
Black Tea This is known as red Chinese tea, the type
which is fermented before baking. Note also that black tea is
a later variety developed on the basis of the green tea.
Wulong Tea Also known as Oolong Chinese tea, this category
represents a variety half way between the green and the black
teas. This is being made after partial fermentation.
Compressed Tea is the kind of Chinese tea which is
compressed and hardened into a certain shape. Many people
considered this as good for transport and storage and are
mainly supplied to the ethnic minorities living in the border
areas of the country.
Scented Tea This kind of Chinese tea is known as scented
because it is made by mixing fragrant flowers in the tea leaves
in the course of processing. The flowers that are commonly used
for this purpose include the jasmine and magnolia, among
others.
The Tea Production
Chinese has maintained that a new tea plant must grow for five
years before its leaves can be picked. The trunk of the old
plant must then be cut off to force new stems to grow out of
the roots in the following year. This sort of rehabilitation
must be repeated as this allows the tea plant to serve for
about a hundred years.
The season of tea picking generally depends on the local
climate and it varies from area to area. As you all know,
China is the homeland of tea. It has tea shrubs as early as
five to six thousand years ago, and human cultivation of these
plants dates back two thousand years. Today, it was reported
that tea is produced in vast areas of China from Hainan Island
down in the extreme south to Shandong Province in the north,
from Tibet in the southwest to Taiwan across the Straits. To
sum up, the Chinese tea grows at more than 20 provinces.
On the shores of West Lake in Hangzhou, where the famous green
tea Longjing comes from, it was reported that the picking
starts from the end of March and lasts through October. A
skilled woman picker can only gather 600 grams of these green
tea leaves in a day.
After the harvest, the new leaves must be parched in tea
cauldrons. Accordingly, this work has now been largely
mechanized, although the top grade Longjing tea still has to be
stir-parched by hand, doing only 250 grams every half hour.
Then, the tea cauldrons are heated electrically to a
temperature of about 25 degree centigrade or 74 degree
Fahrenheit. It then takes four pounds of fresh Chinese tea
leaves to produce one pound of parched Chinese tea.
For the processes of grinding, parching, rolling, shaping and
drying, different kinds of machines have been developed and
built. This work turned out about 100 kilograms of finished
Chinese tea an hour, relieving the workers from much of their
drudgery.
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