Green Tea Making (Biluochun)

Biluochun comes from the eastern and western Dongting hills by Lake Tai in Suzhou; tradition holds that the Kangxi Emperor, touring the lake, named it for its jade colour, spiral shape and early-spring harvest.

The tea is fired entirely by hand through seven stages of picking, sorting, withering, high-heat fixing, rolling and shaping, hand-balling to raise the down, and gentle drying, the craft summed up as 'hands never leave the tea, the tea never leaves the wok', yielding slender, curled leaves cloaked in fine white down.

In 2011 green-tea making (Biluochun) entered the national list of intangible cultural heritage, and in 2022 it joined UNESCO's representative list as part of traditional Chinese tea processing and its associated customs.

The Dongting hills of Wuzhong district in Suzhou are the heartland, where tea-culture halls and training bases keep the hand-firing craft alive.