Written By Junhong Ma

Image credit: Jinxuan tea at Zhao Zhao Tea Lounge, Taichung, January 2026. Photo by Junhong Ma.

Jinxuan entered my life long before I understood it.

Around 2009, in a Shanghai shopping mall, a sales assistant in an elegant qipao offered me a small cup of premium Jinxuan, an oolong tea from Taiwan. I took a sip and kept walking.

When I began anthropological fieldwork in Fujian and Taiwan in 2015, the name seemed everywhere: in Starbucks’ loose-leaf teas, on bubble-tea menus, in heavily roasted Wuyi-style teas, and in conversations about farmers and technicians from Taiwan testing the cultivar elsewhere.

These labels suggested quality, altitude, and Taiwan but carried little sensory meaning. I was still learning to distinguish cultivar, process, region, and commercial name. Why did Jinxuan appear almost everywhere?

I was born in Tangshan, Hebei, where I grew up mainly with green tea. The oolong world linking southern Fujian and Taiwan—its cultivars, oxidation, roasting, and repeated infusions—was not an inherited body of knowledge. Jinxuan remained an elegant but elusive name: I tasted it without understanding it.

Image credit: Jinxuan across commercial settings: Starbucks full-leaf oolong in Xiamen (2015); a COMEBUY fresh-brewed Jinxuan menu in Taipei (2015); and Jinxuan Oolong Tea by Tianli Mingcha in Tenren Tea in Vancouver (2026). Photos by Junhong Ma.

From Jinxuan to “Milky Oolong”

Another part of the puzzle began after I arrived in Canada in 2013. In non-Chinese North American tea shops, I often encountered “Milky Oolong”. To many Chinese-community tea drinkers, the category seemed puzzling. Some versions smelt intensely creamy, at odds with the emphasis on pure, unblended whole-leaf tea familiar in East Asia.

The tea made little sense to me until I investigated the category more carefully recently. Similar doubts appeared among North American drinkers in online discussions. I eventually realised that Jinxuan was often the original—or at least the historical reference—behind the English label, even when sellers did not name it. Only specialist tea shops were more likely to identify the cultivar alongside its naixiang (奶香, milk-fragrant) quality.

Thousands of miles from Taiwan, however, Milky Oolong and Jinxuan were no longer necessarily the same commodity. The category could include naturally creamy Jinxuan, scented oolong, and other teas marketed through a general promise of milkiness. Through linguistic and sensory translation, the cultivar’s breeding history in Taiwan, processing methods, and place of origin receded from view. “Milky Oolong” did not simply rename Jinxuan; it reorganised it, shifting attention from plant and history to sweetness, creaminess, and comfort.

Was milkiness an aroma, a texture, a metaphor, or an added flavour? Long-distance trade changed not only the tea’s name, but also what consumers expected in the cup.

Learning to Taste Jinxuan in Taichung

Earlier in 2026, at Zhao Zhao Tea Lounge (兆兆茶苑) in Taichung, I chose one of the least conspicuous teas on the menu: Jinxuan.

Hearing my non-local accent, the staff member explained its plucking standard, environmentally friendly cultivation, in-house roasting, and changes across repeated infusions.

For more than an hour and a half, I repeatedly added hot water. The tightly rolled leaves opened; bright floral and fruit notes softened into a rounder liquor. The “butter” was neither added dairy nor a single aroma but a creamy fullness emerging among sweetness, flowers, and the bowl’s warmth.

The menu listed this tea not as Milky Oolong but as Butter Osmanthus Jinxuan (奶油桂花金萱). The linguistic difference mattered. Rather than offering one immediate sensory image, the name opened the tea up to possibilities: a buttery texture, an osmanthus-like fragrance, and Jinxuan’s identity as a cultivar.

Only then did I understand why Jinxuan became associated with milkiness—what the North American market compressed into “milky” unfolded through aroma, texture, temperature, processing, and time.

Before visiting Zhao Zhao, I had encountered it in magazines, on websites, and on social media. During the pandemic, screens allowed me to follow tea culture in Taiwan when travel was impossible. Yet, at that moment, the physical space exceeded any two-dimensional representation. I experienced the tea bodily, through sight, smell, taste, touch, and duration.

The field was not the opposite of the screen—the screen had led me there—but the visit exceeded it. Repeated pouring, changing fragrance, the warm bowl, and the tea’s gradual unfolding washed away my confusion about Milky Oolong.

Afterwards, the owner invited me to join him for another cup. He first brought out Da Yu Ling (大禹嶺) high-mountain oolong, a gesture I read as signalling particular respect for a guest within the conventions of tea hospitality in Taiwan. Soon, he spoke candidly, expressing that he was less interested in the scarcity of high-mountain oolong and more committed to everyday teas, believing that making ordinary varieties carefully and consistently was where his true passion lay. He also showed me restaurant collaboration teas with pandan-like and locally inspired mushroom notes. These experiments revealed tea’s movement among gardens, roasting spaces, culinary culture, local ingredients, and changing consumer expectations.

The conversation returned me to the bowl: how had an experimental tea cultivar bred in Taiwan become Jinxuan high-mountain oolong, North American Milky Oolong, and Butter Osmanthus Jinxuan? To be honest, I did not begin to connect all these scattered clues until summer, after the rest of winter and spring had passed.

Image credit: Scott Chen (陳宗均), founder of Zhao Zhao Tea Lounge, with the author at the tea space in Taichung, January 2026.

Wu Zhenduo and the Quiet Workhorse of Taiwan’s Oolong Industry

Jinxuan is among the most adaptable and mobile cultivars in Taiwan’s modern oolong industry. It is not an ancient local variety but a product of agricultural research, institutional support, and farmers’ work.

Its development is closely associated with Wu Zhenduo (吳振鐸), a leading figure in post-1945 tea research in Taiwan. Wu worked across cultivar selection, hybrid breeding, cultivation, processing, sensory evaluation, and industrial extension. Often remembered as a foundational figure in postwar tea research in Taiwan, he helped connect research stations, tea gardens, processing, evaluation, and markets. Building on research initiated during Japanese colonial rule, Wu and colleagues selected promising plants from thousands of seedlings and tested them for decades. Jinxuan emerged through a relay of researchers, technicians, and farmers, not one experiment or individual.

Modern tea production in Taiwan has never been sustained by romantic tradition alone. It has depended on agricultural institutions, technical extension, farmer training, market guidance, and local commercial networks. Before formal naming, it was experimental line 2027. Its maternal parent was Tainung No. 8 (臺農8號), and its paternal parent was Yingzhi Hongxin (硬枝紅心). In 1981, it was officially named Taiwan Tea No. 12 (臺茶12號). Farmers gave it a cute name, Ji-chhit-á (二七仔), “the twenty-seven one”, after its experimental number.

The movement from “2027” to Ji-chhit-á and then “Jinxuan” was more than terminology. “2027” belonged to research institutions; Ji-chhit-á to farmers’ working language; and “Jinxuan” to menus, packaging, and consumer memory. According to a story circulated by tea research institutions in Taiwan, Jinxuan and Cuiyu (翠玉) were named after Wu’s grandmother and mother. A technical number thus acquired affection and family history.

Image credit: Statue of Wu Zhenduo holding the Jinxuan and Cuiyu cultivars at the Tenfu Tea Museum in Zhangpu, Fujian. Image courtesy of the Archives of Ningde Vocational and Technical College. Source: Ningde Vocational and Technical College. 

Jinxuan’s success did not depend only on its elegant name or milk-like aroma. The official cultivar description emphasises vigorous growth, high yield, tolerance of pruning, and suitability for partially and fully oxidised teas. It can become lightly oxidised oolong, pouchong (包種茶), roasted tea, or black tea.

Before Jinxuan seduced drinkers, it had already attracted breeders, farmers, technicians, and businesses. Released as export tea declined and domestic premium markets expanded, it offered productivity and stability alongside recognisable fragrance and a gentle mouthfeel.

By the early 2000s, Jinxuan was among Taiwan’s most widely planted cultivars—a quiet workhorse. Qingxin Oolong (青心烏龍) may remain the classical oolong cultivar in Taiwan for many drinkers, but Jinxuan’s adaptability and processing diversity make it a botanical infrastructure across gardens, factories, competitions, tea houses, and regional brands.

A Travelling Cultivar

From the 1980s, Jinxuan travelled with seedlings, farmers, technicians, machinery, capital, and commercial networks. It spread across Taiwan and appeared in the discussions of Fujian, Guangdong, Vietnam, and Thailand, becoming green tea, lightly oxidised oolong, heavily roasted tea, black tea, or a local product.

Taiwan’s official tea research institute notes that cultivars such as Jinxuan, together with machinery and processing knowledge, have been introduced into mainland China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand to produce “Taiwan-style oolong”. Because cultivars and processing methods may be similar, sensory evaluation or cultivar DNA alone cannot necessarily establish where a tea was grown.

This is not simply “real” versus “fake”. Cultivar, terroir, technique, labour, naming, and claims of provenance move at different speeds. Vietnam-grown tea may be botanically Jinxuan and processed using techniques introduced from Taiwan while remaining a product of Vietnamese land and labour.

Jinxuan is therefore more than a successful cultivar. It is a modern platform cultivar—a form of botanical infrastructure adaptable to different places as plants, techniques, flavours, and names move.

In Taiwan, it is Taiwan Tea No. 12, Ji-chhit-á, and Jinxuan. In North America, it becomes Milky Oolong, often without a cultivar name. Elsewhere, it may be local oolong, black tea, roasted tea, or a product sold for creamy fragrance.

Its ubiquity can make Jinxuan invisible. Consumers remember milkiness, high mountains, and Taiwan but not the cultivar sustaining those images. Its lure operates not only in the cup but also in gardens, markets, and cross-regional exchange through yield, stability, adaptability, and processing flexibility, as much as through fragrance.

Following Jinxuan has changed how I understand ethnographic research. Digital images first led me to Zhao Zhao, but they could not show how the tea changed after the fourth infusion, how a name travelled without its cultivar, or how farmers, scientists, merchants, and drinkers assigned different values to the same plant.

Neither the screen nor translation was itself the problem; each offered only a partial view. Ethnography reconnects what circulation separates: plant and flavour, name and history, image and labour, Taiwan and the many places in which a cultivar bred in Taiwan takes root.

Junhong Ma (马俊红) is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at Xiamen University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Alberta. Her interdisciplinary background in economics, classical Chinese literature, and textual scholarship informs an anthropological approach connecting markets, institutions, historical narratives, and everyday practice. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese tea culture, sensory knowledge, branding, service labour, cross-Strait tea circulation, and the bubble tea industry, particularly its overseas expansion, cultural adaptation, and supply chains.