Bi Luo Chun Green Tea

Biluochun means green snail spring: a fine, downy green tea from the Dongting mountains on Lake Tai, near Suzhou in Jiangsu, picked as one bud with one unfurling leaf in early spring. The cup is light and fragrant, with floral and fruity notes, fresh greens and a sweet aftertaste. Brewed in a tall glass at 78°C by the top-putting method.

Origin & Story

The mountain and its orchards

Dongting Mountain rises from Lake Tai in Wuzhong District, Suzhou, in two parts: Dongshan, the East Mountain, a peninsula, and Xishan, the West Mountain, an island in the lake. The climate is temperate, with an average temperature of about 15.5 to 16.5°C and 1,200 to 1,500 millimeters of rain a year, and the soil is loose, sandy and slightly acidic.

What sets the place apart is the planting. Tea is intercropped with other trees, which cover 25 to 35 percent of the garden, and China's national intellectual property office describes this as the characteristic way of growing Biluochun. Peach, plum, apricot, persimmon, loquat and citrus are the fruit trees named most often. Sellers say the tea takes on the fragrance of the fruit, and that is the usual explanation for its floral, fruity aroma. One detailed guide adds a caution: research on the chemistry of the leaf has not shown that orchard fragrance passes directly into the tea. The orchards clearly shape the place. Whether they flavor the cup is still a claim rather than a measurement.

A name with two stories

The name means green snail spring, a reference to the jade-green color, the snail-shell curl of the leaf and the spring picking. The story of how it got that name is a legend. The tea was first called Xia Sha Ren Xiang, usually translated as scary or shocking fragrance, and the Kangxi Emperor, touring the south in 1699, is said to have found that name inelegant and renamed it. Origins in the Ming dynasty and tribute status under the Qianlong Emperor are also part of the tea's tradition. Treat all of it as tradition.

A harvest measured in days

Picking runs from the spring equinox, around 20 March, to Grain Rain, around 20 April, and the best tea is picked early. The finest lots are harvested before Qingming, about 5 April. The standard for good leaf is one bud and one unfurling leaf, roughly 1.5 to 2 centimeters long.

It takes a very large number of buds. A half kilogram of first-grade tea is about 65,000 buds and second grade about 55,000, according to one guide, and another says 60,000 to 90,000 buds for 500 grams of top-grade tea. The figure sometimes quoted of 14,000 to 15,000 shoots per kilogram is much lower than either, so it should not be relied on.

The tea is made by hand in a wok on the day of picking. The steps are sorting and spreading, high-temperature fixation, rolling, kneading into tight clusters until the white hairs show, and gentle drying. The spiral and the down are the work of the last stages. China's national standard grades the result by how much of the tea is covered in down, from special first and second grades at the top to third grade, which one guide describes as a yellow-green tone.

Dongting, or just Biluochun?

Biluochun is made well beyond Dongting. Zhejiang and Sichuan make it too, and the cheaper Biluochun from there tends to have a stronger, less delicate cup. Some mainland producers use improved cultivars chosen for early sales, such as Xiaoshan, Longjing 43 and Cailin, while one guide describes the Dongting bush as an old seed-grown local population. Taiwan has its own version, covered on our page for Sanxia Biluochun from Taiwan.

If you buy tea sold as Dongting, one seller of the real thing compared samples and found the authentic leaf thinner, slimmer and tighter and less covered in white hairs than a lookalike, with a floral, fruity aroma, a clearer liquor and a bitterness that fades into sweetness, where the lookalike tasted grassy and stayed bitter. It is one seller's test, so treat it as a clue. A very low price for tea sold as Dongting deserves a second look, although a high price proves nothing. Cheaper Biluochun from elsewhere can be a fine tea. It just should not be sold under the Dongting name.

In the cup

The cup is light. Guides list orchid-like florals and peach or apricot, followed by chestnut and a quiet savory note, in a clear emerald or jade-green liquor with a sweet finish and little astringency. It is fresh, mellow and brisk with a lingering aftertaste, and some guides add a slightly nutty edge. The aroma is the main event, and the body stays light.

Brewing it the traditional way

The top-putting method means pouring the water into a clear glass first and placing the leaf on the surface afterward. Let the water cool to 75 to 80°C, fill the glass about three-quarters full, and scatter about 3 g of leaf on top. This suits very tender, downy leaves because no stream of water knocks off the fuzz or clouds the liquor, and the leaves are less likely to scorch even if the water is slightly hot.

Watch the leaves sink and unfurl, then start sipping once most have settled. Plan on two or three infusions, topping up when a third of the tea is left. Water that is too hot brings bitterness. A clear vessel matters, because the opening leaves are half the reason to drink it. One seller suggests discarding the first infusion as a rinse to remove some of the hairs and savoring the second. The tall-glass method above simply drinks from the first pour. Let an unopened pack warm to room temperature before opening it so condensation does not form, and finish an opened pack within about a month, as one guide advises.

Reading the Flavor Profile

These values are comparative editorial positions within our own catalog, calibrated so entries can be ranked against each other. They are not laboratory measurements.