The six categories and how they are made

一Classified by how it is made#

Chinese tea is sorted by process, not by plant or place. The national standard GB/T 30766-2014 《茶叶分类》 defines the categories through the steps that separate them: withering, the heat fixing called kill-green, the shaking and resting of oolong, yellowing under moist heat, enzymatic oxidation (which Chinese calls 发酵, "fermentation") and pile fermentation. The result is the six basic categories, 六大茶类, plus reprocessed tea such as scented and pressed teas made from them. Processing can take related raw material in different directions, but cultivars and picking standards differ in suitability; the six categories are not six equally good options for every leaf.

Two words need care in English. Oxidation is what turns oolong and black tea dark: the leaf's own enzymes act once its cells are bruised, and kill-green (杀青) stops them. Microbial post-fermentation is characteristic of dark-tea processing; this classification is not a claim that microbes can never act on other teas. The Chinese 发酵 covers both, which is why "fully fermented black tea" in English tea writing means fully oxidised; see fermentation.

The raw material is fresh leaf 鲜叶, the buds, leaves and tender stems of the tea plant, and the picking standard is part of the style. Green, yellow and white teas are mostly a single bud or one bud and one or two leaves; many oolong styles wait until the shoot has stopped growing and opened its last leaf, the open-face stage 开面, with three or four leaves, because more mature leaf holds more aroma precursors. The Wuyi standard published in 2026, effective from April 2027, specifies 开面 picking of two to four leaves. Oriental Beauty is an important exception to a blanket mature-leaf rule: Taiwan’s tea research station describes tender shoots affected by leafhoppers. A shoot whose growing tip has gone dormant is a paired-leaf shoot with a dormant bud; graders read all of this as tenderness 嫩度.

二Green tea: fixed at once#

Green tea uses early heat fixation to limit enzymatic oxidation, with spreading, shaping and drying arranged differently by style. “Early” does not mean that every leaf goes straight from the bush into a hot pan: the Anji Baicha heritage record explicitly includes spreading before fixation and shaping.

Keep fixation and drying separate when reading the four familiar process names. 蒸青 identifies steam fixation; Enshi Yulu is a Chinese example. In the China Tea Science Society’s classification, 炒青 is chiefly pan- or drum-dried, 烘青 chiefly baked dry, and 晒青 dried in sunlight after fixation and rolling. These names therefore do not all describe the same manufacturing stage. Baked green tea includes fine named teas such as Huangshan Maofeng as well as bases prepared for flower scenting.

Shaping also matters. The Society distinguishes long, rounded and flat forms of pan-dried green tea; Longjing is a familiar flat example. Its heritage account records a repertoire of hand movements developed for the style, rather than one generic rolling operation. For sun-dried maocha, the subsequent destination may be drinking loose or further processing into compressed tea. A drying method, a finished shape and a later processing route are three useful facts to record separately.

三Yellow tea: sealed yellowing#

Yellow tea starts as green tea and adds one step, menhuang 闷黄: the leaf is heaped or wrapped while warm and moist after a first or second drying, so that it slowly yellows. That step gives the category its yellow leaf, yellow liquor and yellow infused leaf, and its mellow, sweet taste. A Guangdong draft standard gives an idea of scale for bud tea: fixing at 180–200 °C, a first baking to 40–50% moisture and four to six hours of yellowing in a 15–20 cm heap, a second baking and 20–40 hours more, then drying to below 6.5%. Classic Junshan Yinzhen is said to take three days or more.

Yellow teas are grouped by leaf: bud teas (黄芽茶) such as Junshan Yinzhen from Hunan, Mengding Huangya from Sichuan and Huoshan Huangya from Anhui; bud-and-leaf teas (黄小茶); and large-leaf teas (黄大茶) such as Huoshan Huangdacha and Guangdong's Dayeqing. It is the smallest of the six categories, and many teas once made as yellow are now made as green.

四White tea: withered and dried#

White tea is neither fixed nor rolled: picking, withering and drying describe its core sequence. The China Tea Society's primer gives indoor withering of 36 to 72 hours at 20–25 °C and 60–80% humidity, with leaf from several trays combined near the end (并筛), and drying at 80–90 °C to 5–7% moisture. Methods vary with weather and scale: sun withering over two to three days, natural indoor withering of about 52–60 hours (the traditional method of the Fuding export factories), compound withering that alternates the two, and heated withering in warm rooms in about a day. A controlled study found that combining trays at 70% weight loss gave slightly better tea than at 65%.

That short process summary still includes careful handling. Zhongguo mingchazhi (2000, pp. 380–381) describes Silver Needle made either from plucked buds or from one-bud-one-leaf shoots. In the latter route, the leaf can be stripped away before withering, or after an initial period of sun drying, followed by final drying and sorting. A finished single bud therefore does not, by appearance alone, prove that only the bud was taken from the bush.

For White Peony, the same account explains the purpose of combining partly withered leaf from separate trays: it encourages the leaf margins to curl rather than lie flat against the sieve. A later arrangement also retains some warmth and humidity. These are controlled handling decisions within withering, not a separate rolling stage. The account records particular production routes; it should not be read as a requirement that every present-day Silver Needle or White Peony follows the same sequence.

The national standard GB/T 22291-2017, in force from 1 May 2018, defines four products. 白毫银针 (Silver Needle) is single buds of the Dabai or Shuixian cultivars; 白牡丹 (White Peony) one bud with one or two leaves of the same; 贡眉 tender shoots of population (seed) cultivars; and 寿眉 shoots or leaves of any of them. Silver Needle has two grades, Peony and Gongmei four, Shoumei two; moisture is capped at 8.5%, a water-extract minimum of 30% was added, and the standard states that white tea can be stored long-term. The buds' down 白毫 is the visible quality mark and gives a downy aroma 毫香.

The cultivars are Fujian clones registered in 1985: Fuding Dabai, Fuding Dahao and Zhenghe Dabai. The national heritage listing for Fuding white tea dates the propagation of the local bushes to 1857 and their spread to 1875; Jianyang's government dates its Shuixian white tea to 1913. Chemistry differs by product: a study of ten white teas found total catechins highest in Gongmei and lowest in Shoumei. See White tea, Silver Needle, White Peony, Gong Mei and Shou Mei.

五New-craft, pressed and aged white tea#

New-craft white tea 新工艺白茶 was created in 1968 at the Fuding Bailin factory at the request of Hong Kong buyers, according to the China Tea Society (Babelcarp gives 1969): the withered leaf is lightly rolled and baked hot, giving a darker, stronger tea, and a 2022 study found that eight aroma compounds typical of the traditional products were missing from it. Compressed white tea 紧压白茶 is a later development, dated by the primer to 2006 and standardised as GB/T 31751-2015: sorted, blended white tea is steamed, pressed and dried, so a white tea cake is a reprocessed form of one of the four products.

Aged white tea 老白茶 has no national definition. A trade saying, quoted by Xinhua and a Taiwan magazine alike, calls white tea a tea in its first year, a medicine by its third and a treasure by its seventh; the health claims attached to it are unreferenced. In practice, tea kept five or six years is already sold as aged, its aroma fading and its liquor reddening, and Xinhua's explainer advises re-drying stored tea whose moisture rises above 9%. An association standard for aged white tea is reported to set a five-year minimum, but we could not read it.

六Oolong: shaking and resting#

Oolong is defined in GB/T 30357.1-2013 as tea made by moderate withering, 做青 (sun-withering and repeated shaking), kill-green, rolling or ball-rolling, and drying. 做青 is what makes it: shaking bruises the leaf edges, resting lets the moisture move and oxidation proceed, with the number of cycles and rest periods adjusted to the leaf, weather and intended style. A Guangdong draft standard for rock-style oolong sets withering at 12–15% weight loss (10–12% for Shuixian); the Wuyi standard published in 2026, effective from April 2027, sets withering at 35–39 °C and fixing at 220–300 °C. The partial oxidation, concentrated at the leaf edge, is the green leaf with red edges associated with many traditional oolongs, rather than a universal quality test for every style.

Shape and finish then divide the styles: strips for Wuyi yancha and dancong, balls for Anxi and most Taiwan oolong, and a wide range of roast. Oxidation runs from very light Baozhong to heavy Oriental Beauty, which is why "semi-fermented" (半发酵) is only a rough label. See Roasting yancha and Regional styles.

七Black tea (红茶): rolled and oxidised#

What English calls black tea is 红茶, "red tea", in Chinese. It is made by withering, rolling (or cutting), oxidation and drying. China's agricultural standard NY/T 780-2004 distinguishes congou, the long strips of 工夫红茶; broken black tea; and souchong, which adds smoke-drying over pine. The oxidation step is called 发酵, or in older Fujian practice 渥红, a word kept in the heritage listing of Tanyang Gongfu (2021). For the cut style, 揉切 or CTC, a Guangxi draft sets withering to 65–68% leaf moisture, oxidation at 24–28 °C and 90–95% humidity for 40–90 minutes, and drying at 140–160 °C to below 6%.

The Chinese name follows the liquor. Oxidation turns catechins into theaflavins and thearubigins, darkening the leaf and turning the infusion red, so Chinese, Japanese and Korean call it red tea while European languages name it after the dark leaf. In English "red tea" usually means rooibos, so this site writes black tea for 红茶 and dark tea for 黑茶, and never "black tea" for 黑茶. Drying is often done in two passes, a quick first drying 毛火 and a slower 足火; outside yancha 足火 means only that final drying, not a roast level.

八Dark tea and scented tea#

Dark tea 黑茶 is characterized by microbial post-fermentation. Its defining step is pile fermentation 渥堆, in which moistened leaf is heaped to promote microbial and chemical change; durations differ between products. Ripe pu'er is a familiar example. For Liubao, clause 9.3 of the association standard T/GXAS 677—2024 specifies process controls and an end point judged by leaf colour and aroma; it does not set a fixed 45-day minimum for piling. Fu brick and some Liubao add "golden flowers", a deliberately grown fungus: a Wuzhou draft sets the 发花 stage at 18–28 °C and 60–90% humidity for about 45 days. Raw pu'er sits awkwardly: its initial processing resembles sun-dried green tea, followed by storage changes whose microbial and non-microbial contributions depend on conditions, yet the pu'er standard places raw and ripe together, and many writers put both in the dark category. Aged raw pu'er is chemically not the same as ripe; see Ageing and storage.

Scented tea is the main reprocessed tea. In scenting 窨制, fresh flowers are shut in with finished tea, which absorbs their fragrance, and the spent flowers are sieved out; the tea is not made of petals. Jasmine tea on a green base is the classic, though red, white and oolong bases are used. Fuzhou's jasmine scenting was listed as national heritage and as an FAO agricultural heritage system in 2014. Refining steps such as sieving 筛分 and picking out stems are shared by every category.

九Why older descriptions can classify pu’er differently#

Category words can answer different questions. Wang Jidong’s Pu-erh Tea (2010) places pu’er within dark tea, then uses “processed tea” broadly enough to include both naturally aged raw tea and tea made by artificial piling. In Part 1 he explicitly explains that usage; Part 2 also records confusing conversations in which “old” and “raw” are treated as opposites. Read those passages as the terminology of that book, not as evidence that storage changes a sheng manufacturing history into a shou one.

TeaDB keeps manufacturing route and storage age separate. Aged sheng remains raw pu’er; shou identifies the piled route. Similar colour or mellow flavour does not establish identical chemistry: Pedan and colleagues distinguished the aged raw and young ripe commercial samples they tested by their chemical profiles. Their comparison does not authenticate every old cake, but it does rule out treating sensory resemblance as proof of chemical identity. When sources disagree, first ask whether they are classifying the starting leaf, the manufacturing process or the stored product’s character. See Ageing and storage.

十Spreading and withering: similar handling, different purposes#

Leaf lying on a tray does not identify a tea category. In Anji Baicha, the national heritage record describes spreading before heat fixation and shaping, followed by successive drying stages. Despite its name, this is a green tea. In traditional Fuding white tea, the same heritage authority describes withering and drying as the core stages and explicitly recognizes natural oxidation. “Minimally processed” therefore describes a relatively short sequence of operations, not chemically unchanged leaf.

A 2020 study by Chen, Tian and Zhang compared fresh leaf with indoor-withered white-tea leaf sampled at 29 and 53 hours. Its metabolite measurements found changes in amino-acid derivatives, sugars and nucleic-acid metabolites. Those sampling times describe an experiment, not a recommended schedule for every workshop. Weather, starting material and handling still require attention; a process diagram alone does not establish the endpoint.

When comparing teas, ask whether a reported temperature belongs to fixation, drying or later roasting, and whether a duration belongs to spreading or the longer white-tea wither. Two teas can both be baked dry without sharing the same earlier chemistry. See Roasting yancha for interpreting heating stages and Tea in modern science I for separating compositional change from health claims.