Lapsang Souchong: How Tongmu Started the Black Tea Trade

Lapsang Souchong was invented in Tongmu, a village in the Wuyi Mountains of Fujian, some time between the 1560s and the 1610s, and it is the first black tea in the world. The story usually told is that an army camped in the village, the pickers fled, and the leaf was left to oxidize and then dried over open pine fires to hide the damage. That story is folklore, but the essential claim is well documented: fully oxidized tea began at Tongmu, and it began as a smoked tea.

The Chinese name Zhengshan Xiaozhong carries the geography in two words. Zhengshan means the true mountain, distinguishing Tongmu from the surrounding area. Xiaozhong means small-leaf, the local bush type, distinguishing it from the large-leaf teas of other regions.

What actually happened, as far as the record goes

The earliest written references to a fully oxidized tea from northern Fujian appear in the late Ming and early Qing period. The trade records of the Dutch and English East India companies show Bohea, as the Wuyi teas were called, arriving in Europe from the early seventeenth century in steadily increasing volume.

The tea that reached Europe was smoked, dark and strong, and it was the standard black tea of the eighteenth century. What we now call lapsang was not a specialty then; it was what black tea was.

The oxidation was probably not an accident at all. The Wuyi region already made oolong, which is partly oxidized, and the step to a fully oxidized leaf is small. What Tongmu added was full oxidation plus pine smoke, and the smoke made the tea keep on a voyage of months.

Why smoke was not a flavor choice

In the seventeenth century, tea moved from Fujian to Canton by river, then to Europe by ship, a journey of six months to a year. Any tea that had absorbed moisture on the way was ruined by the time it sold.

Smoke carries antimicrobial phenols, and a heavily smoked leaf resists mold. A producer who smoked leaf in a qinglou was making a product that could survive a voyage, which is why the world’s first exported black tea was also a smoked one.

The trade route shaped the process. As steamships shortened the journey in the nineteenth century, unsmoked black teas became viable for export, and that is exactly when Keemun and the Indian estates became the standard and lapsang became a specialty.

The name and what it covers

The collapse of the names into one English word is a source of confusion. Lapsang Souchong is not a style of smoked tea; it is one village’s product, and the generic smoked teas sold under the name are recent imitations of it.

What the origin story means for a buyer

Two things. First, a lapsang that claims Tongmu should be smoked over pine in a traditional building, because that is what the village’s product is. A tea that was smoked for two hours in a modern chamber is a smoked tea and not this one.

Second, the tea’s age as a category is not a reason for it to cost more than the other Fujian black teas. It is the oldest black tea and it is not the rarest.

• Tongmu is the origin, and the name is protected at the village level.
• The invention is dated loosely to 1560s to 1610s.
• Smoke was a preservation method before it was a flavor.
• The tea was the standard export black tea of the 1700s.
• Unscented black teas displaced it once shipping got faster.
• Lapsang is one village’s tea, not a style of smoked tea.

The village now

Tongmu is a small valley with limited floor space and a protected boundary. The same village produces the smoke-free bud tea that became Jin Jun Mei in 2005, and the two products share a cultivar and a landscape.

That gives the village an odd position in the market: it makes both the oldest black tea in the world and one of the newest. The older product is now the smaller business.

For a visitor, the visible sign is the qinglou buildings, some of them a century old. Their wood holds decades of smoke, which is part of why the village’s tea is difficult to copy elsewhere.

How the trade actually ran

The route from Tongmu went by foot and boat down the Min River to Fuzhou, then by coastal junk to Canton, where the European companies were confined by the Canton system. From Canton it went by ship around the Cape, a voyage of five to eight months.

Every stage added moisture and risk. A tea that was not heavily fired and smoked arrived moldy, and a moldy cargo was a total loss. That is why the export teas of the period were darker, stronger and more heavily processed than the teas drunk in China.

When the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and steamships replaced sail, the voyage halved. That is the moment when unsmoked black teas became viable, and it is when Indian and Ceylon teas entered the European market at scale.

The naming confusion, in full

• Bohea was the general export name for Wuyi teas in the 1700s.
• Pekoe meant a leaf grade, and became a general trade word.
• Souchong meant a coarser grade, and became part of this tea’s name.
• Lapsang is a transliteration, not a Chinese word with a meaning.
• Zhengshan Xiaozhong is the protected Chinese name.
• A generic smoked tea uses the English name with no origin claim.

The result is a set of English words that once described grades and now describe a single tea. A buyer reading a nineteenth-century export list would find souchong and pekoe as classes, and neither would mean what it means on a modern packet.

What the Qinglou looked like inside

The building is two storeys with a slatted floor between them. Fires burn at ground level, and the leaf is spread on the upper floor on bamboo trays. The smoke rises through the slats and passes through the leaf, which is turned periodically so that the whole batch is exposed.

A batch takes eight to twelve hours per pass, and the leaf is smoked over several passes across days. The fire is kept low and smouldering rather than flaming, because flame burns the leaf and smoulder produces the resinous smoke.

The wood is Masson pine, which is high in resin. That is why the smoke smells of pine rather than of a generic campfire, and it is why the same process with a different wood gives a different tea.

The transition to a specialty

Through the eighteenth century lapsang was the standard black tea of Europe. Samuel Johnson’s famous description of tea as a liquor that cheers but does not inebriate refers to the Bohea of the period, which was this kind of tea.

By the late nineteenth century, Indian and Ceylon teas had taken most of the British market, and smoked tea had become one of several styles rather than the default. That is when the name became a specialty label.

The twentieth century kept it alive partly through the Russian and Dutch markets, where smoky teas remained popular, and partly through the British habit of drinking it at breakfast as a change from Assam.

One more piece of context belongs here because it explains the prices. Tongmu’s protected boundary is small, and the village cannot expand its gardens. Every increase in demand for Jin Jun Mei or for lapsang raises the price of a fixed supply.

That has made Tongmu one of the few Chinese tea villages where the oldest product and the newest compete for the same leaf. The price of a good lapsang has risen because the buds that once made it now make something more profitable.

For a drinker, the consequence is that the historical tea is now the harder one to buy well. It is worth seeking out from a producer who still smokes it properly, and it is worth paying for that.

One detail worth adding is the leaf standard. The traditional pick is a bud with two or three leaves, coarser than the bud-only picking that Jin Jun Mei now takes from the same village, which is one reason the old tea tastes stronger and the new one tastes sweeter.

That difference in picking is also why the two products can coexist without competing directly. They use different parts of the same bush, and the village earns from both.

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