Ingredients · Tea

Oolong Tea

Camellia sinensis · Theaceae (tea family)

Oolong Tea
Partly oxidised — anywhere between a green tea and a black one, which is why no two oolongs taste alike. A green Anxi oolong is floral and creamy; a roasted Wuyi one is dark, mineral and almost woody. It is the most rewarding tea to brew gongfu style, with many short infusions from one small pot, each one tasting different from the last, and the tea that most repays paying attention to. The name means black dragon.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partLeaf
KindTea
CaffeineContains caffeine
Where it is fromChina, Taiwan
TasteOrchid, honey, stone fruit and toasted grain, with a mineral finish; creamy in the Taiwanese cultivars
How to brew it
  • 195°F / 90°C
  • 3 minutes Western, or 20 to 40 seconds gongfu, five or six times

How to use it

Around 195°F. Either a Western steep of 3 minutes, or gongfu — a small pot packed a third full of leaf, infusions of twenty to forty seconds, five or six times over. The second and third are usually the best. Never milk.

With food

Dim sum and dumplings. Steamed and grilled fish. Roast duck. Peach and apricot. Toasted nuts. Butter and cream. Dark chocolate with the roasted ones.

With spices

Ginger. Orange peel. Cinnamon with a roasted oolong. Vanilla. Star anise, sparingly.

With tea

Blended with peach and berries, both of which suit its stone-fruit side; or with maple and smoke for the Canadian direction.

Its story

Where it comes from

Two heartlands in Fujian — the Wuyi Mountains, home of Da Hong Pao, and Anxi County, home of Tieguanyin — and then Taiwan, where tea trees were brought from Fujian in the late eighteenth century and Qingxin oolong was planted at Dongding in 1855. Taiwan's Lishan, above 2,200 m, produced the costliest Taiwanese tea of the 2000s. Our oolongs name no origin.

What happened

The name is documented only from 1857, in Shi Hongbao's Miscellaneous Notes on Fujian, and there is no agreed explanation of it; the most accepted traces it to the Dragon-Phoenix tribute cakes, whose dark, long, curly leaves were called black dragon when loose tea came into fashion. The legends are better. One says a hunter nicknamed Dragon was distracted by a deer and forgot the leaves he had picked; by the next day they had darkened, and the tea he made from them was the best he had tasted. Another, the Iron Goddess of Mercy, has an elderly farmer named Wei Yin sent in a dream by Guanyin to a tea bush growing in a crevice in the rocks near her run-down temple. The Big Red Robe belongs to six mother trees still standing on a cliff at Jiulongyu in the Wuyi Mountains: they were insured for 100 million RMB in 2003, and picking from them was banned outright in May 2006. Twenty grams from a mother tree sold for 208,000 yuan in 2005. Taiwan's oolong went global through a Scottish merchant, John Dodd, who started a company in Wanhua in 1867 selling Formosa Oolong to the world, after the treaty port of Tamsui was opened under one of the unequal treaties of the Second Opium War.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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