Is white tea unprocessed?
White tea is sold as the natural one, the tea that is only picked and dried, and you will see it called unprocessed or non-oxidised. It is genuinely the least handled of the six types. Does that make it raw leaf?
Short answer
No, and the reason is the part that gets left out. White tea gets one very long wither, twelve to twenty-four hours of it, and a wither is not a wait. As the leaf loses water its cell walls fail, its own enzymes reach compounds they were kept apart from, and slow oxidation starts. Nothing halts that until the tea is dried. So white tea is lightly oxidised, and that long wither is the technique rather than the absence of one. It is also why a Bai Mu Dan tastes soft and sweet instead of green and grassy. Least processed is fair. Unprocessed is not, and non-oxidised is the word to drop.