Brewing black tea

No, it's correct. Wu = Black, Long = Dragon.

No matter whether these stories are true or false, in Chinese WuLong translates literally as Black Dragon.

Then you might have trouble getting your meaning across to others. There are Wuyi green teas, you know.

Best known where?

/Lew

My Mandarin-speaking wife tells me Hei is black, Wu is dark. But it sounds like a subtle distinction to me.

Okay okay. For years I've known that the two Chinese islands use one set of characters for oolong and the mainland another. Kuri in recent posts used the island characters for oolong. That's the easy way on tea labeling to tell where it came from. Years ago I took a course to look up Chinese characters in a dictionary independent of any pinyin translation. Essentially you guess the radical and the number of strokes in the character. So I made a trip too my downtown library an ediface supported by a city wide cultural tax with enough security guards to make sure the transients still eliminate their bodily wastes outside in the adjacent ally and you still pay for commercial parking even on Sundays. So I found a Chinese dictionary that gave me the translation for the two mainland characters which was 'wū lòng' where wū(high tonal u) is an occasional adjective for black and lòng(decending tonal o) the noun for dragon. Just using a pinyin only dictionary wulong with exactly the same tonal characters can also mean 'dirt deaf' for example. I couldn't translate the island characters for oolong. The Chinese use the red character hóng(ascending tonal o) on labeling. You'll never see the Chinese black character used for tea. Damn you Google because I know my tonal Utf-8 characters for u and o will show as numerical gibberish so I indicated their tonals as such.

Jim

Do you simply mean the traditional and simplified variants? The below links show both versions, the simplified in brackets:

That site is worth it's weight in gold. I've been looking for years for something like that. You don't need any special character sets. Each character gets it's own English and Chinese radical tree! You're right and I forgot the difference between traditional and simplified. I still use it to tell where my oolongs come from especially Taiwan. I thought I was making much to do about nothing on the source of wulong. For years I never saw a dictionary with the wu long black dragon characters. You'd think every Chinese dictionary would have the dragon character. It doesn't hurt to walk a plank and enticed back with with a fantastic resource like this.

Jim