The History of Oolong Tea: The Black Dragon, from Fujian to Taiwan

The tea grower and the deer

In the popular folk tale, set in the Qing dynasty, a tea grower walking home from plucking was distracted by a deer and forgot to process his leaves. By the time he did, they had begun to wilt and darken, so he gave them only a little more oxidation.

The tea was like a black tea without the bitterness: smoother, sweeter and more fragrant. He named it after himself, Wu Long, which also means black dragon.

The tale is a fair picture of what oolong is. Leaf left to wilt and darken a little, then stopped, is exactly the partial oxidation every oolong maker still aims for.

Dragon and phoenix tribute cakes

The other story goes back to tribute teas, pressed into cakes stamped with a dragon or a phoenix (fenghuang). In the Song dynasty, says our 2014 blog, these cakes were also traded for horses, and the name “black dragon tea” grew from them.

Tea was big business by then. The same post notes that Song dynasty tea farms were already spread over “a whopping 242 counties.”

When pressed tea went out of fashion, the same teas were made loose: oxidized in bamboo baskets, rolled into small curls and baked, very much as an oolong is made.

Settlers from Fujian, pioneering tea makers among them, crossed the shallow Taiwan Strait in the mid-18th century. They carried their bushes and skills to Taiwan (then Formosa), whose tea makers refined them into the oolongs many drinkers now treat as the benchmark.

Taiwan in turn spread the craft. When demand for its small-batch, handmade oolongs outgrew supply, Taiwan began exporting Formosa tea cultivars and tea-making experts to Thailand, around Doi Mae Salong in Chiang Rai, and to Vietnam. Those farms now ship Formosa oolongs back to Taiwan, to Japan and to the West.

The Formosa style reached India’s hills too. In Kangra, the Dharmsala Tea Company makes Formosa pouchongs alongside its hand-rolled oolongs. More of the story is in The history of tea.

Writer Zac O’Yeah watched it done for us in Pinglin, the Bao Jong country near Taipei. His host, Uncle Wang, first rinsed the leaves to wash away the tea dust, which Taiwanese drinkers see as an unwanted by-product.

He then steeped them “barely for a few seconds” and poured the tea into shot-sized cups, round after round, for more than ten cups. Cold tea there is never sweetened, and the standard weight for selling tea is 600 g.

Our guide to brewing oolong at home, both the everyday way and gongfu style, is in What is oolong tea?

Frank Miller, writing for us in 2017, judged that the early ones were not up to the mark. But in the years since, he found, tea makers there had begun to turn out some very refined oolongs, though their take is different from Taiwan’s.

The first Darjeeling oolong came out of Sumon Majumder’s experiments with a “Formosa oolong” at the Namring estate in the early 1990s. His story, and the estates that make oolong today, are in Indian oolong tea.