When European tea clippers first raced home with their precious cargoes in the early 1600s, the dark, tightly-twisted leaves that...

If you trace the family tree of every bold, malty black tea on earth, you will arrive at one mist-shrouded corner of northern Fuj...

Lapsong Souchong is the tea that startled the seventeenth-century Dutch and British merchants when they first tasted it in the po...

Lapsang Souchong—known in China as Zhengshan Xiaozhong—occupies a singular throne in the pantheon of black teas. It is simultaneo...

Lapsang Souchong—often written as Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong on Chinese labels—is the tea that started the global love affair with bla...

Long before Assam, Ceylon or Earl Grey ever existed, the first fully oxidised leaf that Europe would later call “black tea” was b...

Ask most tea lovers to name a Chinese black tea and they will answer Keemun or Dian Hong; ask a historian which black tea came fi...

Long before English merchants coined the term “black tea,” Chinese hill folk in the Wuyi range of northern Fujian were already ch...

Long before Assam, Ceylon or Earl Grey entered the English lexicon, the words “bohea” and “souchong” were whispered in London cof...

Ask most tea lovers to name China’s gift to the world of fully oxidized leaf and they will answer “black tea.” Few realize that t...