White

Yunnan white

Yunnan whites use broad-leaf assamica cultivars related to puerh material, which gives them a noticeably different and bolder character from Fujian white. Moonlight White (Yue Guang Bai) is processed partly in darkness, resulting in a distinctive two-toned leaf with a dark face and silver underside, and a sweet, floral-melon character unlike any Fujian style. Ya Bao wild buds are harvested from wild-tree material for a delicate, grape-like sweetness; Xue Ya snow buds occupy a similar bud-heavy tier. For a collector already familiar with Fujian white, Yunnan white is the direct comparison that shows how much cultivar drives white tea character.

teabert, the tealytics teapot, keeper of the kettle

Yunnan whites drink bolder and rounder than Fujian whites, and Moonlight White beside a Fujian white shows how much the cultivar is doing. The leaf is the same broad leaf that usually gets pressed into puerh cakes, and this is what it does when nobody presses it.

Styles in this family

Moonlight White (Yue Guang Bai)

Moonlight White is a Yunnan tea, not a Fujian white, and this is where most descriptions get it wrong. The shared white-tea classification points at processing…

Ya Bao (Wild Tea Buds)

Ya Bao is one of the genuine oddballs of the white tea world: the dormant winter buds of wild and old Yunnan tea trees, picked in late winter or very early…

Yunnan Snow Buds (Xue Ya)

Yunnan Snow Buds, Xue Ya, is a bud-forward white tea made from the downy spring buds of Yunnan's large-leaf trees, named for the snow-white pekoe that coats…

How it's made

The steps overlap in practice; this is a reading order, not a set of separate stages.