Talking Pu-erh : Basic names and terms

In my scarce spare time I have been reading up on Pu-erh tea to familiarize myself with the basic names and terms. In addition to the bits and pieces I picked up in the odd brochure and book over time, I have been perusing fairly authoritative Web resources. This includes relevant pages in the English, German, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Fukienese and Japanese editions of “Wikipedia” (wikipedia.org/) as well as some of the external pages to which they link. I found most of the information on the pages for “Pu-erh” and their accompanying specialized pages. Another invaluable resources I consulted is “Babelcarp: Chinese Tea Term Translator” (www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html).

Originally I compiled, synthesized and sorted the information for my own use, but now I decided to share this simple guide with others, especially with those that study tea and don’t read Chinese. The guide allows you to decipher Chinese tea packaging by means of traditional or simplified Chinese characters as well as the Romanized names and their alternatives in the three Chinese languages (“dialects”) that are most relevant to the subject of Pu-erh: Mandarin (in Pinyin spelling), Hakka, Cantonese (in Yale spelling), and Minnan (Bân-lâm-gú, i.e. Amoy and Taiwan Fukienese, in Pe'h-ôe-ji spelling). I added commonly encountered alternative spelling and translations of names.

Unfortunately, Gather does not yet make it easy to display characters other than those used in English and a few “important” European languages. This is why I present first present a glossary as a list followed by a graphic file with Chinese characters and dialect forms. If you print it separately, it should fit onto a single page of US letter or international A4 size.

GLOSSARY

Bingcha (Ping-ch’a): Biscuit tea; tea cake; tea disk

Cha (Ch’a): Tea

Da ye (Ta-yeh): “Large leaf;” broad-leaf tea; leaves from old, wild tea trees

Fangcha (Fang-ch’a): Square tea (cake)

Gan (Kan): “Sweet” aftertaste

Gancang (Kan-ts’ang): Kan-ts’ang; dry storage

Huigan (Huei-kan): “Sweet” aftertaste

Jingua (Chin-kua): “Golden melon;” “golden gourd;” type of tea cake in the shape of a pumpkin

Jinyacha(Chin-ya-ch’a): Compressed tea

Leicha (Lei-ch’a, Luei-ch’a): Hakka-style ground tea mixed with foods

Liu Da Chashan (Liou ta ch’a-shan): The six great tea mountains of Yunnan

Maocha (Mao-ch’a): non-oxidized green tea

Neifei (Nei-fei, Nuei-fei): Small ticket/label on a tea brick

Neipiao (Nei-p’iao, Nuei-p’iao): Large ticket/label on a tea brick

Pu’er (Pu-erh): Pu-erh

Qingcha (Ch’ing-ch’a): Raw/uncooked pu’er

Sha qing (Sha ch’ing): “Killing the green;” pan-frying green tea

Shengcha (Shêng-ch’a): Raw/uncooked pu’er

Shicang (Shih-ts’ang): Wet storage

Shoucha (Shou-ch’a): Ripened/cooked pu’er

Tuocha (To-ch’a): 100 g cone-shaped tea nugget; “bird’s nest tea”

Wodui (Wo-tuei): Wet piling

Xiao tuocha (Hsiao to-ch’a): “Small tuocha;” 3–5 g cone-shaped compressed tea nugget

Xishuangbanna (Hsi-shuang-pan-na): Sipsongpanna (Dai Autonomous Region; Yunnan)

Yesheng (Yeh-shêng): Wild (tea)

Yunnan (Yün-nan): Yunnan

Zhuancha (Chuan-ch’a): Brick tea