01 / 08
茶類地圖 · Tea Atlas
Green, white, yellow, oolong, black and dark tea all come from Camellia sinensis. Nothing is added and nothing is bred in. What separates them is 氧化 — how long the picked leaf is allowed to breathe before heat stops it — and what the maker does either side of that moment.
The seventh, 花茶, is not a family at all. It is a finishing method applied to one of the six, and it is here because half of China drinks it.
02 / 08
氧化 · The Oxidation Scale
Bruise a tea leaf and its enzymes begin turning it brown, the way a cut apple does. Every family is a decision about when to stop that. Green tea stops it almost immediately; black tea lets it run to the end.
Left is stopped early and tastes fresher. Right ran longer and tastes deeper.
A wide bar is a wide family. Oolong covers more ground than the rest combined.
Broadly, the further left, the cooler the water. Boiling flattens a green tea.
Every rule here has a maker somewhere breaking it deliberately and well.
黑茶 is drawn as a hatched band rather than a value because it does not belong on this axis. Its character comes from microbial fermentation after the leaf has already been fixed, which is a different process from enzymatic oxidation. 花茶 repeats 綠茶's colour and range because it is a green tea underneath. Percentages elsewhere are the conventional teaching ranges; they are approximate, sources disagree, and no figure here is a measurement of any particular lot.
03 / 08
概覽 · At a Glance
Unoxidised. Fixed by heat within hours of picking.
Barely processed. Withered and dried, nothing else.
The rarest family. A smothering step rounds the green edge.
Partly oxidised, 10% to 80%. The widest range in tea.
Fully oxidised. Named red for the liquor, not the leaf.
Post-fermented. The only family that keeps changing in the tin.
A method, not a family — green tea laid with jasmine.
04 / 08
六道工序 · The Workshop
A tea's identity is the subset it goes through and the order it goes through them in. White tea uses two. Green tea skips oxidation entirely by doing 殺青 first. Dark tea adds a stage the others do not have.
白茶兩道，烏龍五道。烏龍是唯一先氧化、後殺青者；黑茶是唯一出坊之後仍在變化者。「悶黃」與「窨製」不在六道之列，故以空框標示。 Two stages for white, five for oolong. Oolong is the only run where 氧化 comes before 殺青; dark is the only one that keeps going after the workshop. The two outlined chips — 悶黃 and 窨製 — are not among the six, which is why they are drawn as additions rather than as stages. These are the conventional teaching outlines; real workshops split, repeat and reorder them.
萎凋
Wither — the picked leaf loses water and softens.
殺青
Fix — heat kills the enzymes and freezes the leaf where it stands.
揉捻
Roll — the cells are broken so the leaf will give up its liquor.
氧化
Oxidise — the browning stage, held for minutes or for hours.
乾燥
Dry — the last moisture out, often over charcoal.
陳化
Age — dark tea only, and it can run for decades.
05 / 08
七大茶類 · In Depth
一 · 不發酵 Unoxidised
The leaf is heated within hours of picking — pan-fired in a wok or steamed — which kills the enzymes before they can brown it. Everything after that is shaping and drying. It is the largest category in China by volume and the least forgiving in the cup: too hot a kettle and it turns bitter and flat.
二 · 微發酵 Barely processed
The least handled tea there is. Buds and young leaves are withered — often in shade, sometimes in sun — and then dried. No fixing, no rolling. A small amount of natural oxidation happens anyway during the wither, which is why it does not sit at zero. Silver Needle is the top picking grade, all bud and no leaf, and it is quietly one of the more expensive things in tea.
三 · 輕發酵 Lightly smothered
The rarest of the six, and the one most people never meet. It begins as green tea, then adds a stage called 悶黃 — the warm damp leaf is wrapped in cloth or paper and left to yellow slowly. That step is slow, easy to ruin, and commercially unattractive, so very little is made. What it buys is the removal of the grassy edge: the same freshness, rounded off.
四 · 半發酵 Partly oxidised
Not one tea but a continent. The leaf is withered, then shaken and tumbled so its edges bruise while its centre stays green, and oxidation is halted wherever the maker wants it — anywhere from a tenth to four fifths of the way. A light Tieguanyin is floral and almost green; a heavily roasted Wuyi oolong is dark, mineral and closer to black tea. Both are oolong. This is also the family built for repeated short steepings, where the fifth pour is often better than the first.
五 · 全發酵 Fully oxidised
Withered, rolled hard, and then left to oxidise all the way before drying. Chinese calls it 紅茶, red tea, after the colour of the liquor; the English name describes the leaf instead, which is why the two never quite line up. It is the most forgiving family — boiling water is correct, a long steep is survivable, and it is the one that takes milk without falling apart.
六 · 後發酵 Post-fermented
The odd one out. After the leaf is fixed and dried, it is deliberately exposed to moisture, warmth and microbial activity — piled in 渥堆 for the ripe style, or simply pressed into cakes and left for years in the raw style. That is fermentation, not oxidation, and it is the only family that keeps developing after it leaves the workshop. A twenty-year-old cake is not the tea it was when it was pressed.
七 · 窨製 A method, not a family
Finished green tea is layered with jasmine blossom picked that afternoon and left overnight while the flowers open and the dry leaf drinks the scent. The spent flowers are removed and the process repeated — good jasmine tea is scented several times over, and the blossom you sometimes see in the tin is decoration rather than the source of the aroma. It belongs in the atlas because it is the everyday cup across northern China, not because it is a seventh kind of leaf.
06 / 08
三個變數 · Three Variables
Two oolongs from the same village, made the same week, can taste nothing alike. Oxidation sets the family; these three set the tea.
品種Cultivar
—無標尺 · Named, not measured
產地Place
50–2,600 m八個產區 · Across the eight regions below
工序Process
2–5六道中取幾道 · Of the six stages
07 / 09
岩韻 · Rock Character
岩韻 — literally rock rhyme — is the term used for oolongs grown among the cliffs and ravines of the Wuyi mountains in Fujian. The bushes sit in thin, weathered, mineral-heavy soil in narrow gorges that hold mist and limit direct sun. Tasters describe what comes out of that as a cool mineral undertone that sits beneath the roast and lingers after the fruit and flower have gone.
It is worth being straight about what the term is. 岩韻 is a tasting vocabulary, not a measurement. There is no test for it, no threshold, and no agreement on where the boundary of the growing area should fall — which is exactly why it is argued about, and why the word appears on packaging far more often than the geography justifies.
08 / 09
產區 · The growing regions
A family tells you how the leaf was handled. A region tells you what it was before anyone touched it — the altitude it grew at, the earth under it, and the processing that grew up around both.
此圖按海拔低高排列，非按下表編號。左側數字即下表之列號。色為該產區所出茶類之湯色；黃山／祁門兼出二類，故其條兼二色。 Sorted by altitude, not by the list's numbering — the number at the left is the row to open below. Three of the eight start at 600 m and end somewhere different, which is the part a paragraph cannot show. Figures are the ones written in the rows underneath.
09 / 09
延伸閱讀 · Read next
Everything on this page is process, geography and flavour. Chazen makes no medical or therapeutic claim for any tea, and no grade, price or product specification is stated here — where one would be needed, it is marked Requires verification.