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The Origin, Development and History of Zhengshan Race Black Tea A short story about Jin Junmei's origin

Published: 2026-02-27 Author: World Gafei

Last Updated: 2026/02/27, The colorful history of black tea there is still a lot of debate among tea scholars about when black tea was invented. What we can be sure is that by the 16th century, black tea began to appear in China's tea market.

The colorful History of Black Tea

There is still a lot of debate among tea scholars about when black tea was invented. We can be sure that by the 16th century, black tea began to appear in the Chinese tea market. Obviously, if you want to find the true origin of black tea production, you have to go back a little further.

Some people may say that the story of black tea began in the period of Emperor Hongwu in the early Ming Dynasty (1391). At this point, the custom of drinking tea has spread to all levels of Chinese society, spread to China's border areas, and formed a unique tea culture in South Korea and Japan. From one end of the map of China to the other, tea is made into a portable, pressed cake, which we now think of as green tea. In their day, these tea cakes were worth more than the same weight of gold and could easily replace hard currency. From tea trees to the tea market, every step of their production is controlled by the government. By the end of the Song Dynasty, the tea trade was famous for its wealth and corruption, but all this changed with the arrival of the new regime.

The Dark Age of Tea

Zhu Yuanzhang, the newly ascended emperor of the Ming Dynasty, made a creative political effort to crack down on corruption in the tea trade, ordering the production of compressed tea cakes to be stopped. At that time, it was stipulated that tea must be in a simpler and less convenient form: bulk tea. The emergence of bulk tea is a key development, which lays the foundation for further innovation of tea technology, one of which is black tea.

Until the Ming emperor stopped producing compressed tea, some of the best tea cakes came from Wuyi Mountain. Wuyishan has been a famous tribute tea area since the Song Dynasty (960-1279), but when the mode of production in the Ming Dynasty changed fundamentally, the tea factory in Wuyishan fell into a dormant state, and the equipment for producing this new form of tea was insufficient. Nearly 150 years later, there is hardly any tea in the factory in Wuyishan. However, tea remains in the area, planted and processed on a small scale by monks from many of Wu Yi's temples.

To avoid this dark age, temples in Wuyishan began producing bulk tea for market sale, trying to replicate Anhui's famous technique of frying loose green tea in bulk. The tea merchants in Wuyi Mountain have never made this kind of tea, so they will naturally make some mistakes. It was mentioned in the journal at the time that the color of the tea had turned red-a clear sign that the producers of the tea had failed to prevent cell oxidation from happening in the tea. Severe cell oxidation is a typical feature of black tea. It is worth mentioning that Chinese people have always called black tea "black tea" because the color of the oxidized tea is obvious. Therefore, black tea (or black tea) was finally born in these erroneous attempts in Wuyi Mountain at the end of the 16th century.

The legend of black tea production

There is a perhaps more colorful story about the origin of black tea, which comes from the local legend of Tongmu Village in Wuyi Mountain. The Jiang family, the producer of seven cups of Zhengshan race, has a history of 24 generations in Tongmu Village and claims to have tactfully invented black tea after the disaster hit the village's tea crops.

Tongmu Village in Wuyi Mountain is located in the geographical gateway connecting the southeast coast of China and the interior of central China. One spring in the mid-16th century, Tongmu Village found itself on the path of an army. As the soldiers occupied their houses, the farmers in the village were unable to process the tea that had just been picked. For soldiers, a pile of soft tea can make a good bed when they are stationed. Over the course of a week, the army moved on, leaving piles of black tea twisted and blackened by bruises. The soldier's weight and body heat, coupled with naturally fermented calories caused by pressure, heat and water, lead to changes in tea. Had it not been for a moment of perseverance, the harvest of green tea would have been ruined.