The History of White Tea

White tea is the withered-and-dried leaf of Camellia sinensis, made in two steps. The leaf is not rolled, roasted, or fired to fix it; it is withered, then dried, and the slow changes that follow happen without further handling.

Its documented history begins in Qing-dynasty Fujian, not in the Song, despite a name the two share. This record covers that history: the earlier tea that borrowed the same two characters and was not this class, the first silver needle around 1796, the large-budded cultivars that standardized it, the century it spent as an export, the widening of its grades, the kneaded style built for Hong Kong in 1968, and the recent turn toward storage and the domestic market. Where the record is a legend or a market phrase rather than a verified fact, this history says so.

The old name and the different thing

In 1107 the Song emperor Huizong wrote the Treatise on Tea, the Daguan Chalun. Its seventh section praises a tea he called bai cha, white tea, and rates it the finest of all.

That tea was not this class.

The Song white tea was a naturally white-leaved tree, a chlorophyll-deficient mutant growing wild near Beiyuan in Jianzhou, in northern Fujian. Huizong described it as its own kind, unlike ordinary tea, grown by chance among cliffs and woods. No more than four or five families had it. No more than one or two plants each.

It was made the Song way. Steamed, pressed into a cake, ground to powder, whisked to a pale liquor that suited an aesthetic prizing a white brew. Nothing in that touches the two-step withered-and-dried process that defines the modern class. The whiteness was in the leaf of the tree, not in the making.

The nearest living echo of that tree is today's Anji Bai Cha, the white-leaf tea of Zhejiang, which is also made as a green tea rather than a white one. The name reaches back centuries; the processing class it now labels does not.

The first silver needle, about 1796

The modern class begins in the early Jiaqing years, about 1796, in Fuding.

Makers there took the stout buds of the local cai cha, the seed-grown mixed-population bush native to the area, and made bai hao yin zhen, white-hair silver needle. The bud was picked, withered, dried. Nothing else was done to it. This early needle from the small-budded bush was called xiao bai, small white.

This is the true start of white tea as a processed class. Not a white-leaved tree, but a way of handling an ordinary one: pick a bud, let it wither, let it dry, and stop.

The Da Bai cultivars, 1857 onward

Around 1857, in the seventh year of Xianfeng, Fuding selected and propagated two large-budded cultivars: Fuding Da Bai, later registered nationally as Hua Cha No. 1, and Fuding Da Hao, Hua Cha No. 2. Their buds were far larger and downier than the cai-cha bud the first needle was made from.

Local legend places the mother tree on Taimu Mountain in Fuding. The Luxueya tree there, the Green Snow Bud, is treated as the ancestor of the region's white-tea cultivars, and a merchant named Chen Huan is named as the one who propagated it. This record carries that as legend, which is how the region carries it, not as a documented fact.

From 1885 the Fuding makers switched their silver needle from the small cai-cha bud to the large Da Bai and Da Hao buds. The trade's own histories give the date as 1885, within the Guangxu reign. The needle a modern drinker knows, plump and silver-downed, dates from that switch, not from the first small-white bud of 1796.

Fuding and Zhenghe

Around 1880 the inland county of Zhenghe selected its own large cultivar, Zhenghe Da Bai, from a tree in Tieshan. From about 1889 Zhenghe made silver needle from it.

Two counties, two cultivars, two bud characters. That is the root of the Fuding-versus-Zhenghe distinction, which has its own dedicated record here. What matters to this history is only that white tea did not have one birthplace with one bush. Fuding standardized first; Zhenghe followed within a decade with a cultivar of its own.

The export tea, 1891 onward

From 1891 the silver needle began to be sold abroad.

The Fuding merchant Mei Bozhen, 1875 to 1947, carried Bailin white tea out to Tianjin, to Hong Kong, and into Southeast Asia including Singapore, and did much to make it known overseas.

For most of its modern life white tea was an export product. It was drunk mainly by overseas Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and it was barely a domestic tea in China. The large Da Bai buds were more often turned into green tea for the home market. The white tea left the country; the drinker at home reached for something else.

Bai mudan and the leafier grades

Silver needle is the bud alone. The grades that followed added leaf.

Bai mudan, white peony, a bud with its first leaves, was first made in the town of Shuiji in Jianyang, in northern Fujian, sometime before 1922. From 1922 Zhenghe took up the style too, and it later reached Fuding as well.

The order of the styles is fixed. Silver needle came first, then bai mudan, then the leafier gong mei and shou mei. By cultivar the order runs from the small-white cai cha to the big-white Da Bai to the shui xian white. Gong mei was traditionally made only from the cai-cha population bush. Shou mei, the latest and leafiest pick, became the largest-volume white tea of all, and it can be made from any of the cultivars.

New-craft white tea, 1968

In 1968 the Hong Kong teahouses served white tea freely to their customers, and demand ran ahead of what the traditional style could supply at the price.

To meet it, the Fuding Bailin Tea Factory, under the provincial foreign-trade tea company and a maker named Wang Yisen, developed a lightly kneaded white tea. It adds a light kneading step to the withering and drying, and the kneading gives a darker, more concentrated cup. A first small lot sold out in Hong Kong. Larger orders followed.

In 1969 it was named xin gong yi bai cha, new-craft white tea, and listed as its own export category. It later reached Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia. It is still white tea. It is also a deliberate departure, a denser style built for one market, and it is the one point in this history where a step was added rather than withheld.

The aged-white turn and the revival

White tea's turn toward the domestic Chinese market is recent.

In 2007 a government-led group was formed to brand Fuding white tea and build the industry at home. Aged white tea, lao bai cha, rose in the early twenty-first century, and after about 2010, carried along by the collecting boom in aged puerh, the market for it heated rapidly.

A saying spread with it. "One year tea, three years medicine, seven years treasure." It drove the market. This record reports it as a market phrase, which is what it is, and does not endorse the medicine in it. What is documented is narrower and duller and true: stored white tea changes measurably. The liquor darkens. The aroma shifts. The character mellows over years.

Standardization followed the trade. The national standard for white tea, GB/T 22291, was issued in 2008 and revised in 2017, the revision taking effect in 2018 and formally recognizing white tea's suitability for storage. A separate standard for compressed white tea, GB/T 31751, was issued in 2015 and took effect in 2016. Pressing white tea into cakes, a habit borrowed from the puerh trade, made stored white tea a tradeable, gradeable thing, sold by the year and by the pressing.