If you’ve ever browsed a tea menu for premium Oolong, you might have stumbled upon a tea with a rather curious name: "Monkey Picked Tea." It sounds like something straight out of a folklore book – highly trained monkeys scaling treacherous mountain cliffs to pluck the finest, most unreachable leaves.
But what is it really?
Today, "Monkey Picked" is a prestigious marketing label reserved for high-quality Anxi Tie Guan Yin (安溪铁观音).
The name doesn't actually come from an ancient primate harvesting practice, but rather from mid-20th-century Hong Kong tea merchants. They coined the Cantonese term Ma Liu Mie (马骝搣), where "Ma Liu" means monkey and "Mie" means to pinch or pluck.
The merchants used this colorful slang to signify a tea of such rare quality that it must have been harvested from the most inaccessible, high-altitude peaks. The name implies that the leaves required the agility and meticulous skill of a monkey to pick.
So, are Monkey Picked Oolongs actually harvested by actual monkeys? No, they aren't. It is simply a grading term for top-tier tea.
But the imagery is so captivating that it has given life to a whole world of tea mythology. Long before Hong Kong merchants coined the modern label, whimsical tales of monkeys harvesting tea leaves echoed through the mountains.
Let's take a look at the five most famous legends behind the name!
The Legends Of Tea Picked By Monkeys
- One popular legend about "Monkey Picked Tea" originates in Fujian Province, China. It was said that the ancient tea bushes that grow high up on pointy mountain cliffs produce the best tea. Naturally, these tea bushes were almost impossible for tea farmers to reach. Thus, the legend tells of tea farmers training pet monkeys to climb the steep cliffs and pick the delicate tea leaves.
- There is a legend of a monk making a pilgrimage together with his pet monkey. The pet monkey would run off the road and into the mountains picking the most delicate tea leaves – a cute story, but without a grain of truth:)
- Yet again, a legend with monks and monkeys. Monks who wanted to savor only the best high-mountain oolong tea would purposefully anger the monkeys living on the mountain peaks. This caused the monkeys to rip branches from nearby bushes and hurl them at the monks in rage. Kind of sounds like it could be true. But once again, just a marketing ploy.
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Some suggest merchants used the name to protect the tea, comparing it to Duck Shit Oolong (鸭屎香 – Ya Shi Xiang). However, this is a false equivalence. The Duck Shit name was chosen to sound unappealing and deter thieves, whereas "Monkey Picked" was designed to sound exotic and highly skilled, thereby increasing its allure and price.
- And yet another, perhaps more plausible legend. Long ago, tea farmers would tie ropes around their waist to safely climb up the top peaks of the Wuyi Mountains to harvest the precious tea leaves. The farmers would resemble monkeys, thus the tea's name.
The myth of monkeys harvesting tea was published by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in his famous 1667 book "China Illustrata". Also, in the late 1700s, a traveler named Aeneas Anderson traveled to China. There, he met with the tea merchants and was told the story of the enraged monkeys throwing tea leaves from high above, which were then picked by Chinese farmers to make tea. While Anderson visited tea plantations and never saw the monkeys himself, he conveyed the story in his book, which Europeans read for many years to follow. It became a well-established European "Orientalist" tall tale long before it intersected with modern tea marketing.
Without prior knowledge of any other tea picking practices (let alone never even seeing a tea bush), Europeans adopted the legend as truth. Furthermore, this version of tea harvest was even published in textbooks and taught to kids in schools for more than a century!
While monkeys can be successfully trained to pick other crops, such as coconuts, it is unlikely they can be trained to pick tea leaves to the standard required by the tea industry.
Tea leaves have very specific plucking standards that vary by season. Furthermore, after harvest, the tea leaves must be handled quickly to avoid the wrong amount of oxidation.
Nowadays, the term "Monkey Picked" is mostly used for high-quality oolongs (Tie Guan Yin in particular) grown at high altitudes.
Are Monkey Picked Oolong teas really picked by monkeys? No, they're not. Are Monkey Picked Oolongs teas actually rare and delicious? Most certainly! But don't just take our word for it – try for yourself!
