The world of teas

Tea plants are either wild or cultivated. In China, they are subdivided into six different types: white, yellow, oolong, green, red, and black. In the West there are only four classifications: green, oolong, black and white.

A common misunderstanding is to equate fermented tea with black tea, unfermented with green tea, and semi-fermented with Oolong tea. Chinese tea culture does not categorize it this way. Rather, they classify tea according to the kind of tea leaf and the way in which the tea is prepared. To truly understand tea you have to know its type and variety, how it started out in seed, how it was cultivated and picked, how the leaves were separated, and how they were cooked and packaged.