Screen dump of Chinese tea names

Space Cowboy wrote: [...]

Jim,

Nice job!

I can certainly appreciate the time and effort that such a compilation requires and I applaud you for it, but I don't understand the desire to "protect" the language sets? While the JPEG is useful to a degree, it would be MUCH more useful if it were in some (any) sort of text format that was searchable. Imagine if you couldnt search it yourself. I hardly think anyone here is going to republish your work without your permission.

Anyway, thanks, it is nice to have and I look forward to future installments....

Mike

This looks really useful, particularly as it can be printed out and taken to the store.

One comment: the second character in 'oolong' (wulong) is 鞍, pronounced an, saddle. It should be 龙, long, dragon (just discovered that I don't have complex characters on my computer here).

Hi Mike,

Since I show the character you can use Zhongwen or Babelcarp and look up more information using the English or PinYin. I will publish an index of the translation with each post so that might help. Please note that for any Chinese character there might be a corresponding Traditional or Simplified alternate which I don't show. So since I stumbled out of the gate with the incorrect LONG character I corrected it with the Traditional character and show the index:

Tea Green Red Black White Yellow PuEr WuLong LapsangSouchong BaoZhong Pekoe SowMee GunPowder DanCong OrientalBeauty LyChee Flower Osmanthus Chrysanthemum Ginseng ALiShan LongJing BiLuoChun TieGuanYin YinZhen KeeMun DaHongPao LuAnGuaPian MaoFengHuang BaiMuDan DongDing ShuiHsien YunWu MaoJian Jasmine JadeDew HouKui Tapioca BoBa RoseHip Lotus RockCliff HySon KuDing ChinaNationalNativeProduce

Jim

PS Zh> Space Cowboy wrote:

...I delete me...

May I suggest something? For certain words it may be useful to post both simplified and traditional characters. Dancong, for example, is different for both words in traditional.

Is Baihao really pekoe?

One last thing -- Oriental Beauty is missing a word at the end, the word missing is the same as the first character of Ginseng.

Noticed one more thing -- shoumei (or sowmee in your romanization) has the wrong character for the first one. Right now it is 珍, zhen, which means precious, but it should be 壽, longevity. I presume you're referring to the white tea.

I believe it is. 'Bai' (white) is, if memory serves, 'pek' in Minnan / Taiwanese, and 'hao' (good) is 'ho' so I would expect that 'hao' (hair) would be pronounced similarly. So baihao => pek ho => pekoe for the English traders. Also Lew Perin has it as such on babelcarp.

The English word 'tea' is also from Minnan. In Minnan tea is 'te' (pronounced more like 'day' - the t is unvoiced and unaspirated so it sounds like a d to English speakers) whereas in most Chinese dialects (and in many other languages, eg. Russian, Japanese, Indian) it's some variation of 'cha', which is the Cantonese pronounciation. There is a good exhibit on this in the Macau history museum.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary in its entry for "Pekoe" gives the etymology "Chinese dialect _pek_ white, _ho_ down), leaves being picked young with down on them" so confrims the origin. But I wonder about that explanation, for it might be correct if we were talking about white tea, but does not correspond to the leaves usually picked in July for Oriental Beauty. In Korea we usually translate the _ho_ in "paiho" as "hair" and refer to the presence of occasional white leaves in the dried tea, that look like white hairs amidst the brownish-black. I think (if I understood correctly, not certain) I have heard in Taiwan that the leaves that turn white are those whose color has been affected by little hoppers (insects) on the bushes (see some photos in my home page:

Would anyone care to comment on the claim often heard in these parts that the name "Oriental Beauty" was bestowed on this tea by the Queen of England, presumably during a visit to Taiwan?

Nice link. I added the Chinese characters for Pao-Chung and PonFeng to my Rosetta Stone. In the Western sense Pekoe today indicates the young leaf on the bush. Souchong for example is the oldest leaf. I heard the story of Oriental Beauty and Queen Elizabeth:

Jim

An S> The Concise Oxford Dictionary in its entry for "Pekoe" gives the