EusTea

What is Tuo Cha?

The back of Twinings’ Golden Rose Hearts has the following description to describe the tea:

 “Handmade using a traditional Chinese technique known as ‘Tuocha’, a single rosebud is placed into black tea leaves and compressed into a heart shape. When infused in hot water, the rosebud delicately scents the strong, brisk black tea.”

I was pretty intrigued by the description because from my extremely limited knowledge, tuocha (沱茶) is a form of puer. So I decided to look into it.

From what I understand on Baidu [1], tuocha is a subset of a type of tea called Jin Ya Cha (紧压茶) or pressed tea. Also known as 谷茶 (Gucha), tuocha is made primarily in Yunnan and can be further subdivided into two types:

  1. Yunnan Tuocha (云南沱茶), which is made of green maocha
  2. Yunnan Puer Tuocha (云南普洱沱茶) or Puer Tuocha (普洱沱茶), which is made by compressing loose puer leaves.

In all the Chinese pages I could find, tuocha is described as being shaped like a nest – basically, a hollowed-out half sphere. I even looked through Taobao [2] and the tea was pretty uniform. The only non-nest shaped teas I saw were the Golden Rose Hearts and this flower-shaped tea [3] from a tea shop in Japan [4].

History-wise, tuocha is thought to have derived its name from the Tuojiang (沱江 – Tuo River) in Sichuan. But to get to that point, we have to start in 1900, with a tea shop by Li Wenxiang from Jinggu who started making moon-shaped teas. These were known as gucha, which you’ll recognise as an alternative name for tuocha. Two years later, merchants copied this tea into a bowl-shaped tea which was shipped around and eventually, the tuojiang tea got its name. This commerce also gave the tea another name – Xufu tea (叙府茶).

One interesting thing I realised is that when searching in Chinese, the sources are pretty clear that tuocha is made either with maocha or loose puer. And even though maocha is technically a green tea, I’d say that it can also be classified as puer – raw puer. So far, I’ve not seen anything that says tuocha can consist of non-puer tea[5].

Looking back at the Golden Rose Hearts description I started this post off with, I think it’s pretty clear that tuocha may not be the best thing to call the tea, given that it’s shaped in a heart rather than a nest. Perhaps Jin Ya Cha would be a better term, since that seems like a slightly broader definition.

Notes

[1] 沱茶 page

[2] Which is surprisingly good for tea if you know how to look

[3] It’s described as a ‘small rose tuocha‘ on its product page – another rose one, but this time for tea.

[4] A Japanese definition for tuocha is also the only other place where I saw shapes like “pumpkin” and “mushroom” mentioned. I’m not sure how this came about, since Chinese sources overwhelmingly show it as a bowl/nest shape – any ideas?

[5] To be fair, my search terms were mainly on the definition of tuocha and its difference from puer but I think that if no one mentions that tuocha doesn’t have to be made from puer in the difference, then it’s probably made mainly using either raw or ripe puer.

What do you think?