Keemun: How China’s Most Famous Red Tea Lost Itself
Introduction
“Everyone has their own take on it. If you ask ten Qimen Masters you will hear ten different perspectives on what Keemun is and isn’t. That doesn’t mean the tea they make is bad, but it is different. I can only speak to my own understanding, which is of Keemun Gongfu red tea. There are those who now make try to recreate the earliest local Shaihong red tea, which I do not see the point in now. There are those who want to experiment here in Qimen with all sorts of new shapes and processing innovations, which is also fine. You cannot say that is wrong, what they are doing is great. What I have to offer is the knowledge passed down from the old factory, and that is hard to come by now.”
This summarizes the view of Bi Zhaochun, a second generation Keemun red tea producer who worked at the now defunct state-run factory. However humble, his understanding reflects the new reality of a red tea so famous it was nominated to be part of UNESCO’s official 2022 list of intangible culture red tea techniques along with Dianhong, Ninghong and Tanyang Gongfu. For many 20th Century consumers, it was perhaps the most famous style of Chinese red tea. This is the tea that Mao gifted Stalin when visiting the Soviet Union and Keemun was always premium option stocked by Western tea retailers. It would be Keemun that brought in a steady supply of foreign hard currency even when China was at its most isolated on the international stage. Whatever this tea meant to the consumers of that century, it bears has only a loose relationship to the variety of red teas produced in and around Qimen County.
Bi Zhaochun at Qimen Factory Museum.
In 1938, on the eve of Japanese occupation, the tiny county of Qimen alone produced 1/3rd of all the red tea China exported abroad. In 2024, Qimen County’s contribution to national total red tea exports had declined to just over 3%. Keemun went from being a national prestige product to a minor regional tea brand. So what happened?
There was something that was uniquely premium about the tea the world knew as Keemun. Something won it fame in the 19th Century and 20th Century and that something is now gone. This blog will attempt to piece together what exactly that was, and what the modern successors to Keemun look like today.
The Keemun That Was
Keemun’s historical success seems to stem from Qimen County's distinctly fragrant heirloom tea cultivar and relatively high level of standardization. Qimen County’s geography can be described as hilly lowlands straddling the Huangshan and Huashan mountain ranges. The largely forested, acidic soils that sit between 300-600 meters above sea level are not remarkably high in elevation, but they have been a site of tea cultivation for centuries. From the legacy of this earlier production, the cold-resistant, high-yield Chuyezhong cultivar (AKA Qimenzhong / Huacha #22) would emerge. It would be however the fragrance of this cultivar that set it apart from red tea in other growing areas. Unlike the “Caicha” heirloom cultivar in Wuyishan, Chuyezhong is down-heavy and naturally rich in compounds like linool and geraniol. When processed as a red tea, leaves of this cultivar would have offered consumers a lasting and complex fragrance they could not get anywhere else. Keemun red tea was prized for its florality and compared to the scent of apples, orchids, and even granular sugar. The first batch of Keemun red tea was made in 1875, and by 1893 some 147 private tea enterprises were operating in the area. In such a short amount of time, Qimen County had become China’s leading site for red tea production.
Chuyezhong Cultivar Sample
It is important to note that while the natural aroma of Qimen County’s red tea was unique, the processing style was initially nothing special. Indeed, it was a copy of a copy. Wu Juenong, the “modern sage of tea,” whose statue and likeness we ran into again and again on our journey to Qimen was well aware of that fact when he worked there a century ago. He reckoned that red tea production spread from Wuyishan’s Tongmuguan to Jiangxi’s Shangrao County sometime in the 18th Century, then north to Xiushui and Jingdezhen before finally coming to Qimen in Southern Anhui by 1875. The red tea production method was simultaneously moving West to Hubei and Hunan, and in all these places, the processing method traced a common lineage to the Gongfu red tea in Wuyishan. Another early name for Keemun was even “Qimen Wulong,” a testament both to its connection to Fujian and the historical lack of differentiation between Oolong and red tea. Like Lapsang Souchong and other Jiangxi derivatives, the earliest Keemun was sun withered, dried over a wood fire, and cut by hand into smaller strips for export.
Keemun would not retain this primordial form for long. Lu Ying, a well-connected Chinese tea merchant in the late 19th Century was inspired by his visit to Darjeeling to save the Chinese tea industry. After some initial efforts in Hubei, he turned his attention to Keemun. He later recalled “only Qimen black tea, with its unique and fragrant aroma, was worth focusing on. . . . as long as we hoped to revive the Chinese trade, we needed to start with Qimen black tea.” Lu Ying established a “improvement” site in Qimen County in 1911, and won the support of the fractious republican government. Inspired by colonial India’s plantation factories, Lu Ying wanted to produce a red tea that was stable and efficient enough to compete globally. By 1917, there was already a satellite ”Qimen emulation site” in Chizhou. However, the project would go dormant as warlord-era politics spun out of control. Wu Juenong revamped the project under a more stable Kuomingtang government of the 1930’s, launching grower cooperatives, and overseeing the standardization of picking, processing, and sorting to rival their Indian competitors. Learning from further study trips to Japan, India, and Sri Lanka, they established indoor aerated withering throughs, indoor fermentation rooms, and introduced smokeless charcoal ovens to replace the older wood-fire drying racks. Soon would come motorized kneading equipment and fan-powered sorting machines. No where else in China was red tea production so modern.
Qimen Factory Complex circa 1990.
Bi Zhaochun was born into this world of Keemun ascendance. His parents fled famine in Anqing during the 1930’s, and came to Qimen to find work in the booming tea industry. After Communist victory in 1949, they would join thousands in the work of building an industrial fortress in the damp sleepy hills of Southern Anhui. They themselves cleared the land, laid the foundation and fired the bricks of what would be their home for the remainder of their lives. At a time where many neighbors had still not escaped the spartan drudgery and food insecurity which defined rural China for centuries, they would have the pleasure of modern Soviet-style apartments, ample food, an uninterrupted supply of electricity, and access to a long list of recreational and health facilities. Master Bi himself spent time in the factory daycare while his parents worked and later attended classes at the same factory school where many of his parents’ generation were first taught to read and write. When his father died in 1982, he inherited his father’s post, which he was entitled to pass on to his own children should the factory have survived. The international success of Keemun meant massive government support and exalted social status of the workers who made it all possible. The tea they made would be exchanged for hard currency that in turn would help Chinese firms buy the international equipment they needed to turbo-charge the nation’s development.
For all their special privileges, Bi Zhaochun and other’s had to pour their life into making a tea that would always deliver the promised flavor to consumers, literally rain or shine. He had to begin his apprenticeship with two years at the withering troughs, filling out time tables, checking airflow, and moving countless trays of tea. Only after all that then could he graduate to his preferred specialization: sorting. He spent the next twenty years of his life perfecting the skills needed to quickly separate different grades of teas and crush the Keemun tea down to its intended final shape. Although he could not be fired, Bi and other workers dreaded a visit from the professional tasters, who assessed every batch of tea from the previous day and sent down reprimands to whoever it was who deviated from the established rules. The most fatal errors that Bi recalls include letting the tea oxidize too long or bake too hot. A careful balancing act was made so that the best grades would always give consumers a tea that was strong but not too bitter, floral but not vegetal, fully baked but never toasty. Only in Qimen County have we met a tea maker who measures tea leaves in millimeters and is fiercely emotional about the oxidization rack design.
The Keemuns That Be
Today, if Lu Ying were to pick again the singular red tea with the best hope of representing China, he would probably not pick Keemun. That same robustness, florality, and sweetness which were then exclusively associated with the tea have been reproduced elsewhere. Some of Wu Juenong’s colleagues at the Qimen experimental side who fled the Japanese Invasion would participate in the invention of Yunnan’s Dianhong a decade later. In more recent decades, experiments with Oolong-specialized cultivar and wild(ish) trees have meant that abundant fragrance and sweetness can be found thousands of miles away from Qimen County. At the same time, high-yield and early-maturing cultivars have also begun to replace the very heirloom Chuyezhong that defined Keemun to begin with. Following all the same production protocols, researchers at Anhui’s Agricultural Sciences Institute note how found that most of these new cultivars brew up flatly sweet, departing from the characteristic “Qimen aroma.” Keemun’s flavor profile is thus relatively less special, and internally less consistent.
Master Zheng and Master Bi at Guixi Village.
Gone also is the old factory system. In the late 1990’s the government canceled the unified purchasing from Qimen and Chizhou County factories for export, leading to the eventual shut-down of both sites by 2005. One skill that was not perfected under the old factory system was independent marketing. The now explicitly private and profit-seeking Shanghai merchants had all the leverage in setting the price for international export, and the old factories simply did not survive long enough to see the boom in domestic consumer demand for red tea. Today, the factory-standard Keemun of the past century, Gongfu Keemun, is now competing with a variety of new products bearing the same name, made from a variety of cultivars. Over 400 private companies and 150 brands have taken on the task of inventing a Keemun that Chinese people can be excited about. Among these, one can find curled Xiangluo Keemun, straightened Keemun Maofeng, and a variety of locally-produced red teas infused with flower or fruit scents. Master Zheng and his wife live-stream every night to sell such products in a range of attractive packaging. Through their creativity and passion, they are making ends meet, but what does Keemun as a brand or style mean if the original form and fragrance is lost?
Master Bi’s Student & His Organic Tea Plot
Keemun’s official terroir is also murky. In an era of geographic indication and cultural heritage protection, one may think that Keemun, like Napa Valley Wine has to be produced in the geographic area that bears the same name, i.e. Qimen County, but alas they would be wrong. Between 2004 and 2022, a legal battle between Chizhou’s City’s Anhui Guorun Tea Company and the Qimen Red Tea Industrial Association made it all the way to the supreme court in Beijing. Qimen County producers wanted to see a geo-indication labeling that restricted official production to within the county’s administrative boundaries. Interestingly, the company in Chizhou won this lawsuit. Qimen County producers lost the final appeal in 2018, and in 2022 Anhui Province announced that Chizhou City and Qimen County market actors had agreed to work towards a new geo-indexed labelling that accommodates both growing areas. After all, Chizhou was producing the tea as early as 1917 and was the site of the central blending facility after 1985. If they have similar geography and the same cultivar, why can’t the tea they have called Keemun for generations be labeled as such?
For now at least, there is a lot of fairly “meh” and random teas being sold as Keemun. This is the reality that a new generation of producers face as they take over. Confronting this problem, there are now a range of new commercial, academic, and political efforts to reclaim Qimen’s heritage. All tea production in the county is supposed to move towards pesticide-free production over the next few years, a task both Master Zheng and Master Bi’s students have all undertaken. There is simultaneously a deep interest in preserving the traditional Gongfu tea such that they can attract the same bus loads of students who go out to nearby Anji or Longjing every Summer for “cultural learning.” If the powers that be can similarly enforce producter compliance in using only the Chuyezhong cultivar, Keemun may well make a come-back. But, in a country where fragrant red teas and modernized production equipment are now so widely dispersed, it seems more likely to me that Keemun will remain just Anhui Province’s favorite red tea, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Sources Consulted
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