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.

The old name and the different thing

In 1107 the Song emperor Huizong wrote the Treatise on Tea, the Daguan Chalun¹. Its seventh section praises a tea he called bai cha², white tea, and rates it the finest of all.

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 steamed, pressed into a cake, ground to powder and 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.

Today's Anji Bai Cha, the white-leaf tea of Zhejiang, is made as a green tea rather than a white one.

An older bud, a different question

Tea excavated from the tomb of Emperor Jing of Han, buried around 141 BCE, is the oldest physical tea yet confirmed, and it consists almost entirely of buds, the same selective pluck silver needle is graded on. The record says nothing about how those buds were prepared, and the wider history of Han-era tea points toward a boiled soup, not a withered leaf.

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 cha³, the seed-grown mixed-population bush native to the area, and made bai hao yin zhen, white-hair silver needle⁴. 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.

A less firmly dated tradition⁵ places an unrolled, unfired tea in Nankeng village, Jianyang, as early as 1772 to 1782, which would predate Fuding's needle; the Jianyang record is thinner.

The Da Bai cultivars, 1857 onward

Around 1857, Fuding selected and propagated two large-budded cultivars³: 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 tree on Taimu Mountain, called Luxueya, the Green Snow Bud, as the mother tree of Fuding Da Bai, and names a Qing-era grower, Chen Huan, as the one who dug up a tea tree at Hongxue cave on the mountain and planted it at home⁶.

From 1885 the Fuding makers switched their silver needle from the small cai-cha bud to the large Da Bai and Da Hao buds³. 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, and by about 1889 was making silver needle from it⁹.

The two cultivars are the root of the Fuding-versus-Zhenghe distinction.

The export tea, 1891 onward

From 1891 the silver needle began to be sold abroad³.

For most of its modern life white tea was an export product.

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 Fujian³, and reached Fuding later.

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 from the cai-cha population bush.

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 tea⁷. It adds a light kneading step to the withering and drying, and the kneading gives a darker, more concentrated cup. Seven cases went to Hong Kong, then a larger lot, and the tea sold out.

In 1969 it was named xin gong yi bai cha, new-craft white tea, and listed as its own export category. It later reached the European Union and Japan too, alongside the silver needle and bai mudan exports, in the mid-to-late 1990s¹¹.

The aged-white turn

White tea's turn toward the domestic Chinese market came in the twenty-first century.

In 2007 Fuding formed a tea-industry leading group to protect and develop its white tea industry¹⁰. Aged white tea, lao bai cha, rose in the early twenty-first century.

The national standard for white tea, GB/T 22291¹², was issued in 2008 and revised in 2017, the revision taking effect in 2018. A separate standard for compressed white tea, GB/T 31751¹³, was issued in 2015 and took effect in 2016.