Lishui White Tea Craft

Name and what it denotes

The public notice of January 2024 lists the Lishui White Tea Craft under traditional crafts among the newly included projects of the recommended list for the fourth batch of district-level representative items of intangible cultural heritage; the applying area or unit is Hefeng Town and the recommended guardian unit is the Hefeng Town Culture and Sports Centre. Among the items held in this library, Hefeng Town applied for four items in the fourth batch, and this is the only tea item among them.

The notice does not say what "white tea" denotes here. In the sources used, the tea of the Hefeng area is known for the "Yueyahu" white tea and for the Yuhua tea; the reply of the district Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau of November 2022 to a proposal of the district committee records the "Yueyahu" white tea, and states that among the tea varieties of the district "there are also white tea series and Longjing series", the main processed products being "Bilouchun, Yuhua tea, chaqing, white tea and black tea". It follows that white tea exists as a category of tea in Lishui, but whether in the title of this project it refers to a variety of the tea plant, to a whitening character of the fresh leaf or to a processing method for the finished tea is not settled by any source used here, and no claim is made.

Vehicles for transmission

The reply of the district Culture and Tourism Bureau of November 2025 to a proposal of the district committee records that the bureau, with the district human resources bureau and the rural revitalisation bureau, published and recognised fourteen district-level intangible cultural heritage workshops on two occasions, in 2023 and 2025; and it mentions the "Yueyahu white tea making intangible cultural heritage workshop", described as a window of rural culture that can be touched and experienced.

It should be noted that the reply gives only the name of that workshop and does not state which project it corresponds to. Whether the workshop and this project are the same thing has not been verified here and is entered among the uncertainties.

A report of the Hefeng Town People's Government of May 2024 places the Lishui White Tea Craft alongside the black-rice festival, the Yiqidun legend, the Laba Lantern and the deity-carving craft as the town's items of intangible cultural heritage, and the same event presented plaques to five of them. This corroborates the locality of the project, but presenting a plaque in May 2024 and entering an item in the list are not the same thing.

The process

No source describing the process of this project has been found in this library. The reply of the district Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau of November 2022 records the composition of the tea industry of the district as a whole, with 26,650 mu of tea gardens mainly in Baima Town, Hefeng Town, Honglan Subdistrict and Jingqiao Town, the Huangshan small-leaf variety accounting for eighty per cent, and a 2021 output of 367 tons valued at 183.5 million yuan. That is an overall district figure and cannot be used here to write the picking standard, withering, fixation or roasting of this project.

Uncertainties

First, what "white tea" denotes is undecided. The notice does not state whether it refers to a variety of the tea plant, to a whitening character of the leaf or to a process for the finished tea; the sources show only that white tea exists as a category in Lishui.

Second, the correspondence between the "Yueyahu white tea making intangible cultural heritage workshop" and this project has not been verified. The name of the workshop appears in the reply of the district Culture and Tourism Bureau without a project title attached, and the two must not simply be equated.

Third, almost nothing is available on the process. The reply of the district Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau gives district-wide figures for the tea industry and cannot be used to write the process of this project; picking, withering, fixation and roasting all remain to be added.

Fourth, presenting a plaque is not publication. The presentation reported by Hefeng Town in May 2024 and the public notice of January 2024 are not the same procedure, and the entry continues to follow the wording of the public notice and does not state that the list has been formally published.

Fifth, the recommended guardian unit is the Hefeng Town Culture and Sports Centre and the applying area or unit is Hefeng Town. These are two different columns of the notice's table and must not be used interchangeably.