Introduction to Zhangping Shui Xian: A Unique Oolong Tea

In Spring 2025 we visited Zhangping in South Fujian to learn more about Zhangping Shui Xian, a unique compressed type of oolong tea. This blog documents our experience sourcing this tea.

What is Zhangping Shui Xian?

Despite its name, Zhangping Shui Xian is not the same as the Shui Xian rock tea found in Wuyishan. The name comes from the Shui Xian cultivar, which was introduced to Zhongcun Village north of Zhangping in the early 20th century. To cater to local taste, the farmers used processing techniques similar to Tie Guan Yin, a famous tea from the neighbouring Anxi city. This makes Zhangping Shui Xian a combination of the Shui Xian cultivar from Minbei (North Fujian), and the processing style of Minnan (South Fujian). It is unique in being the only compressed type of oolong tea.

Apart from the unique moulding and wrapping step, the processing is similar to other oolong teas. After picking the leaves undergo withering, either indoors or under the sun, depending on the weather. 

After withering, the leaves are periodically shaken on a bamboo mat which helps stimulate aroma compounds. The shaking process is taxing manual work. During the tea season, a farmer will be working from 6am to midnight. 

After withering and shaking, the leaves should develop a ‘red edge, green leaf’ appearance like in the photo above. This means the leaves have reached the right amount of oxidation. The next step is to fix that level of oxidation by frying the leaves at a high enough temperature. As with other types of oolong, this is usually done today with kill-green tumbler machines.

After kill-green, the leaves can be rolled. As a couple of farmers told us in our documentary, rolling used to be done by feet. Nowadays more hygienic rolling machines are used like the one below. After rolling, the leaves are pressed into 8g-10g cakes, and immediately wrapped in rice paper.

The cakes are dried after being wrapped in paper. There are multiple drying methods, ranging from traditional charcoal baking to the latest innovations like infrared ovens. After drying, they can be further roasted or left unroasted. The unroasted variety (qing xiang) is the most traditional, nicknamed 'Princess' in Chinese. The roasted variety (nong xiang) is nicknamed 'Prince.' At tea competitions in Zhangping, the winning teas are crowned 'Tea Queen' and 'Tea King' for the unroasted and roasted types respectively. The photo below shows two Zhangping Shui Xian cakes with different roasting levels.

The classic unroasted type, such as our Traditional Zhangping Shui Xian, has a strong mixed floral and fruity aroma, and buttery taste. Nowadays, Zhangping Shui Xian can also be fully oxidised to be made into red (black) tea. Our Zhangping Red has a light lychee sweetness and is quite resistant to brewing for a red tea.

Sourcing these teas 

We went to Zhangping in early May 2025, just at the end of the Spring tea season. This was a perfect time to taste a lot of the freshly made teas, and to witness some final processing on others.

We had a number of contacts we wanted to meet in Zhangping, starting with Ms Feng, a local tea expert. You can see her in our documentary as the first person we interviewed. Not only is Ms Feng extremely knowledgeable about Zhangping Shui Xian, she is also an excellent communicator. Many of the farmers we met are highly skilled at making great tea, but are comparatively less skilled when it comes to talking about how they make it. These farmers transmit their knowledge to the next generation by training apprentices, not by writing textbooks. After we asked a farmer a question, Ms Feng would often supplement the farmer's basic answer with lengthy elaborations that taught us a great deal. Ms Feng knows all the famous farmers in the area, and is passionate about promoting Zhangping Shui Xian in China. She regularly appears on livestreams to promote Zhangping Shui Xian in the domestic market. She was so generous with her time because she was excited about the opportunity to share this type of tea with overseas tea-drinkers.

It was thanks to Ms Feng that we sourced the first of our three teas from Zhangping: our High Mountain Zhangping Shui Xian. This tea comes from one of the highest elevation farms in Zhangping. It is made by Chen Zongqin, an intangible cultural heritage inheritor. Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritor is a government designated role granted to individuals who have a responsibility to pass on their skills to apprentices. Only award-winning tea producers with more than 15 years of experience can achieve this rank. There are currently 41 inheritors in Zhangping. We interviewed three of them in our documentary. Our High Mountain Zhangping Shui Xian and Traditional Zhangping Shui Xian are both made by inheritor-ranked producers.

Ms Feng presented us with a number of samples from Chen Zongqin's higher elevation farm. 'High Mountain' is a relative term. Situated in Southern Fujian, Zhangping is relatively lower elevation than other tea areas in China. Chen Zongqin's tea is from a farm at about 800m elevation, which is deemed 'high mountain' (gaoshan) in Zhangping. Comparatively, our Traditional Zhangping Shui Xian is from Zhongcun Village, which sits at around 500m elevation, while our Zhangping Red is from Nanyang Town, which sits at 300m. The higher elevation teas had a stronger milk fragrance. Among the teas made by Chen Zongqin, we selected the one with the best aftertaste: a quick, refreshing hui gan which complements the milk fragrance.

Later, we tried Zhangping red tea. Ms Feng explained the processing of Zhangping Red in our documentary. Historically, it started as an experiment by a few farmers who were inspired by red tea production in Fuding and elsewhere in Fujian. Once they realised it tasted good, they started producing more Zhangping Shui Xian into red tea. Our Zhangping Red is made by Huang Tingyong in Nanyang Town, one of the core production areas in Zhangping.

The transformation of the leaves into red tea instead of oolong exemplifies two things that stood out to us on our sourcing trip: the innovative spirit among Zhangping Shui Xian farmers, and the resilience of the Shui Xian cultivar. On the former, we encountered farmers who were willing to produce Zhangping red tea, white tea, and even green tea, sometimes on Ms Feng's request. Apart from experimenting with tea types, there is also a wide range of processing options for a farmer when producing Zhangping Shui Xian. The degrees of roasting are perhaps the most important. Nowadays, you can find Zhangping Shui Xian in light roasts and heavy roasts. The roasting amount is determined not by temperature but by time. The temperature cannot be too high because the tea is wrapped in paper before roasting. At a too high temperature the paper would burn, so instead Zhangping Shui Xian is roasted at lower temperatures for a number of hours.

Since the tea is already wrapped in paper, part of the tea farmer's skill involves selecting the right amount of roasting without relying on the visual appearance of the leaves. Occasionally they will pick out one cake from the roasting oven or charcoal mat and taste it. Sometimes farmers would walk into Ms Feng's warehouse with a sample of their roasted tea, asking Ms Feng if she felt it was sufficiently roasted or needed more time. It's a testament to Ms Feng's knowledge that experienced farmers were willing to listen to her opinion on roasting levels, despite not being a farmer herself.

Apart from roasting parameters, there is even an option to immediately refrigerate unroasted tea before it has dried, which is sold locally as dong cha (wet tea). The dong cha, as you would expect, is very refreshing. Wet tea is hard to find outside of Zhangping city, because it's too difficult to keep refrigerated during shipping. Below is a photo of a cake just taken out of the fridge. 

The scope for experimentation and fine-tweaking in this type of tea is made possible by the Shui Xian cultivar. Not only is the Shui Xian cultivar naturally highly aromatic, it also produces very tough leaves that can withstand the strenuous processing that Zhangping Shui Xian requires.

This resilience makes the cultivar adaptable to being made into other tea types, such as red tea, and allows the leaves to be roasted at different levels even after the leaves have been rigourously moulded into cakes. The combination of the resilient Shui Xian cultivar with the skilled processing of Zhangping farmers explains why Zhangping Shui Xian is so forgiving and easy to brew.

Speaking of brewing, the go-to method for locals is to brew entire 10g cakes gongfu style in 100ml-120ml gaiwans. Despite the high leaf to water ratio and often long steeping times, good Zhangping Shui Xian seldom gets too bitter.

In one memorable tasting, we tried a full 20g cake packed into a gaiwan. This tea was made by Wang Longbiao, an Inheritor from Zhongcun Village, and it was so well-made that despite the absurd amount of leaf it never got too bitter. Wang joked to us that this tea was just 'strong and powerful' like himself.

20 gram cakes is in fact an older and more traditional size of Zhangping Shui Xian. In the beginning, farmers tried rolling the leaves into strips, like yan cha from Wuyi, but they found it difficult to transport, so they attempted other shapes. They tried rolling the tea into little balls like they do in Anxi for Tie Guan Yin, but this shape was not suitable to the locals. Later, they attempted large balls, commonly known as 'dragon balls.' The problem with these however was that the size of the balls were too inconsistent from batch to batch. It was at this point that they settled on the cake shape, which could better accommodate inconsistent leaf sizes. Originally the cakes were these larger 20 gram ones that would either be broken up and shared among a family, or be brewed in a large vessel to make one big pot of tea. The photo below is of two 20 gram cakes from the 1950s. 

Eventually, to suit the growing popularity of gong fu cha as a brewing method, and the gaiwan as the brewing vessel of choice, the smaller 8g-10g cakes were developed. 

Energised by this 20g cake of tea, we headed up to the tea mountains in Zhongcun Village (pictured below), which is the birthplace of Zhangping Shui Xian. It was here that the Shui Xian bushes were first planted after being brought down from North Fujian. We saw three of these mother bushes, including the one pictured below, and visited the old house of Wang's family which can be seen at the end of our documentary. The tea mountains around Zhongcun are clean and biodiverse. Shui Xian bushes grow on slopes that are surrounded by bamboo forest and various flower trees. Here in Zhongcun we sourced our Traditional Zhangping Shui Xian, made by Chen Qiguang, another intangible cultural heritage inheritor. This tea is a higher end reference for what a traditional, unroasted Zhangping Shui Xian should be. It has a mixed floral and fruity aroma reminding of orchid and osmanthus, a creamy texture, and a refreshing aftertaste.