Anji White Tea Is a Green Tea by China’s Own Standard

China's national standard for Anji bai cha (安吉白茶), whose name means Anji white tea, defines it as a tea of the green tea class (绿茶类茶叶)¹. The leaf must come from one cultivar, Baiye 1 (白叶一号)¹, grown within a defined area.

In 2011 China's national list of intangible cultural heritage added Anji's craft in its third batch³. The item, VIII-148, is 绿茶制作技艺（安吉白茶制作技艺）, green tea making technique (Anji bai cha making technique), and was nominated by Anji County, Zhejiang.

Baiye 1's new shoots grow pale in cool spring weather and turn green as the air warms⁴. To make Anji bai cha, the leaf is fixed with heat (杀青)³, the step that stops the leaf's enzymes. White tea is withered and dried and is never fixed.

A 2020 tea-tour guide⁵ on the agriculture ministry's International Tea Day site says experts confirmed that Anji bai cha is a different concept from silver needle and white peony. Those two are white teas made from green, downy young leaves.

Fixed with heat, then baked

The entry limits picking³ to the first twenty-odd days of the spring tea, taking one bud with one or two true leaves. By hand, the tea is made in seven steps: picking, spreading, fixing with straightening (杀青理条), a first baking, cooling, a second baking and a final drying.

Because the leaf is extremely thin and the stem thick, the entry says³, fixing and straightening are exacting about temperature. With the wrong heat the leaf scorches or the stem turns red (非焦叶即红梗).

When the leaf is pale

The standard describes Baiye 1's new spring shoots¹ as jade-white (玉白), with thin leaves and light green veins. When the air passes 23°C (about 73°F), it says, the leaf turns mottled white and then green.

Li and colleagues, writing in PLoS One in 2015⁴, say low air temperature inhibits the build-up of chlorophyll, citing earlier work.

Ma Chunlei and colleagues at the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences wrote in 2015 that the threshold is generally held to lie between 20 and 22°C⁷. Above 23°C, they wrote, the albino leaves begin to turn green. From years of field observation, they report that most of the first leaves to whiten never turn fully green. Those leaves wither and drop in early July, and the green comes from newer shoots whose veins have not yet whitened.

In the PLoS One study⁴, amino acids, among them glycine, serine and proline, ran higher in the pale stages than in the same cultivar's re-greened leaf. The paper's introduction, citing earlier work, says high free amino acids and low caffeine contribute to the tea's brisk taste. People's Daily⁶ reports tests showing free amino acids at 6 to 9 percent of Anji bai cha, three to six times the level in ordinary green tea.

The mother tree

People's Daily⁶ says the mother tree of Anji bai cha was found in 1982, a single plant on a mountain more than 1,000 metres (about 3,300 feet) high. To save the rare plant, it says, scientists propagated it from cuttings.

The tea-tour guide⁵ says Anji County forestry workers came upon the tree by chance in the 1980s, at 800 metres (about 2,600 feet), at Hengkengwu in Daxi village, Tianhuangping town. It describes a tree over a hundred years old that rarely set seed (很少结籽). Its young leaves were pure white but for a faintly green midrib. It says the tree is the only surviving bai cha tree found to date, and that people call it the ancestor of Chinese bai cha (中国白茶祖).

Ma's group writes that Anji tea farmers found Baiye 1⁷.

The name in Chinese and in English

People's Daily wrote in December 2022⁶ that people meeting Anji bai cha for the first time all share the same misunderstanding, because the name contains the character 白, white. The report begins with the host of a France 3 programme, on his first visit to China, asking why the tea was not white (怎么不是白色？). It says the tea is not of the white family (不姓“白”), and that as finished tea it is a green tea.

The Xinhua report, written in English, calls the Anji crop "white tea"⁸. The standard's English titles do not use the word. The 2006 edition² names the product Anji bai tea. A new edition, GB/T 20354-2026⁹, published on 31 March 2026, names it Anji Bai Cha and takes effect on 1 April 2027.