Evidence from a 1982 Field Investigation

In 1982, a small research group travelled through northern Fujian to collect background material on qingcha (oolong tea). Their work, though limited in scope, preserves a set of oral accounts concerning the transmission of tea-making techniques in the Wuyi Mountains. Their route brought them first to Chongan—the historical county name for the Wuyi area—where they posed a straightforward question at the local tea bureau: how long had qingcha been produced there? The replies were inconclusive. Some suggested the technique had arrived from Anxi; others believed it had developed locally in the mountains. Rather than resolving the question, officials advised the researchers to leave the offices and go into the villages, where tea production was actually carried out. Following this suggestion, the group travelled deeper into the hills and eventually reached Tianxin, a village within the scenic area where older methods might still be remembered.

In Tianxin they met an elderly tea maker, Chen Shusheng, already in his seventies. Conversation began in the customary manner—tea brewed, cups passed, and questions introduced gradually. When the visitors mentioned that they were from Anxi, Chen noted that his own family traced its origins there as well, specifically to Penglai, from a place locally known as Pengge. According to his account, the family’s history involved several stages of migration: from Anxi to Shangrao in Jiangxi, and later back south to the Wuyi Mountains, where subsequent generations continued working with tea. Asked when this movement had occurred, he responded in approximate terms—thirteen or fourteen generations, perhaps three centuries. The number was uncertain, but the memory of migration remained clear.

Discussion then turned to tea-making practices. Chen explained that the craft had traditionally remained within the household, passed from father to son. Daughters-in-law might learn after marrying into the family, but daughters were rarely taught the full method, since they would eventually marry into other households. The rule, as he described it, was straightforward: teach the sons, and the sons’ wives, but not the daughters. When asked what would happen if a son died, leaving only a widow, Chen replied that she would not remarry outside the household; instead, another husband might be brought into the family so that the craft remained within it. Such arrangements were presented without emphasis. In traditional craft communities, practices of this kind were not unusual. Processing knowledge—particularly techniques such as zuoqing (leaf bruising and controlled oxidation)—was understood as something accumulated gradually over generations, and belonging, in a sense, to the household itself.

A smaller account recorded some years later echoes this encounter. A traveller from Fuzhou described stopping in the Wuyi area while passing Dawang Peak, Manting, and Sangu on his way toward Matouyan. Near the base of the cliffs, he paused at a small house beside the road to drink tea. The host, an elderly woman, asked where he had come from; when he replied that he was from southern Fujian, she answered him in Minnan dialect. Her family, she explained, had originally come from Anxi and had lived in the Wuyi Mountains for several generations. In their village, many households shared the same background, and among older residents a form of the southern dialect was still spoken. The traveller later described the scene simply: sitting on a wooden balcony, drinking freshly brewed yancha (rock tea), with the dark cliffs of Matouyan rising above the rooftops. Nothing about the encounter seemed remarkable, yet it echoed the earlier investigation—families from Anxi had settled in parts of the Wuyi Mountains, and with them, it appears, travelled the craft of tea.

The Tianxin investigation does not resolve the question of qingcha origins. Oral accounts rarely do; memory shifts, and details blur over time. Nevertheless, such fragments remain valuable. They point not to a single place of origin, but to a process of transmission—through migration, apprenticeship, and family networks. What began in one place could be carried, adapted, and continued in another. The record, then, does not conclude the history of qingcha, but preserves a trace of how that history may have moved.

Further Reading:

• Part 9 : The Anxi Evidence Chain and Technical Logic
• Part 11 : Where Oolong Began — and Why We Can’t Quite Say