The Legend of Longjing: An Emperor, 18 Tea Trees, and a Sleeve Full of Leaves
Pick up a pinch of Longjing — China’s most famous green tea — and the first thing you notice is the shape. The leaves are flat. Perfectly, deliberately flat, like little jade spearheads.
Every other famous green tea is twisted, curled, or rolled into needles. Longjing alone is pressed flat. There’s a practical reason for that, which I’ll get to.
But there’s also a legend. It involves an emperor, a sick mother, and one very uncomfortable ride home. When a tea seller in Hangzhou tells it to you — and eventually one will — this is the version you’ll hear.
The Emperor Who Kept Sneaking South
The year is roughly 1751. The emperor is Qianlong, fourth emperor of the Qing dynasty, one of the most powerful men who has ever lived.
And Qianlong has a habit: he keeps leaving.
Six times in his life he made the Grand Tour to the south — months-long processions down the Grand Canal to Hangzhou and Suzhou. Officially, these tours inspected flood control and administration. Unofficially, the emperor loved the south: its lakes, its gardens, its food, its tea.
On one of these tours, the story goes, Qianlong visited Hugong Temple, a small monastery tucked under Lion Peak Mountain (Shi Feng Shan) just west of West Lake. The monks served him their local tea, brewed from the bushes growing on the hillside behind the temple.
The emperor was charmed. The next morning, he decided to try picking the leaves himself.
Eighteen Bushes
Now picture it: the Son of Heaven, in his silks, crouched among the tea rows on a spring morning, pinching buds off the bushes while monks pretend not to panic.
He had been picking for a while — the story says he gathered a good handful — when a courier arrived with urgent news from Beijing.
His mother, the Empress Dowager, had fallen seriously ill.
An emperor does not linger when his mother is dying. Qianlong dropped everything. In his rush, he stuffed the fresh tea leaves — the whole handful — into his sleeve, and rode through the night toward the capital.
By the time he arrived, the leaves had been crushed flat inside his sleeve, pressed by his arm through hundreds of miles of hard riding.
The Cup That Named a Tea
The Empress Dowager, as it turned out, was not dying — the story generously suggests she had smelled the tea leaves through her son’s sleeve and wanted to know what the marvelous fragrance was.
Qianlong brewed the flattened leaves for her. She was delighted — refreshed, comforted, recovered. The emperor, relieved and impressed, declared that this would henceforth be his mother’s tea, and his tea.
And then he did the imperial thing: he issued a decree. The eighteen bushes he had picked from, on the hillside below Hugong Temple, were designated imperial tea trees. Every spring, their leaves would be sent to the palace as tribute. Ordinary people were forbidden to touch them.
You Can Still Visit Them
Here is the part that makes this legend different from most: the eighteen trees are real, and they’re still there.
At Hugong Temple in Hangzhou, below Lion Peak Mountain, a small fenced enclosure holds a group of ancient, gnarled, oddly small tea bushes. The sign identifies them as the Eighteen Imperial Tea Trees — the ones Qianlong is said to have honored. They’re one of the city’s odder tourist attractions: people file past a fence and photograph bushes.
Are they literally the trees Qianlong picked from in 1751? Almost certainly not — tea bushes don’t live that long, and these are more likely successors, replanted to keep the tradition alive. But the site is real, the temple is real, and Qianlong’s tours — and his documented love of Longjing, including poems he wrote about it — are thoroughly real history.
The sick mother, the sleeve, the overnight ride: embellishment. Very good embellishment.
So Why Is Longjing Actually Flat?
The legend says: an emperor’s sleeve. The real answer is nearly as charming: a hot wok.
Longjing is finished by hand in a heated pan — leaves are pressed, flipped, and flattened against the metal by a tea master’s bare palm. This pan-firing stage (bian qing) fixes the jade-green color, toasts the chestnut-like aroma, and gives Longjing its signature flat, smooth shape.
The skill is genuinely physical — masters press their hands against 80°C+ metal for hours — and the best Longjing is still finished this way, by hand, in Hangzhou.
One nice detail: the flattening isn’t just cosmetic. It speeds up drying and gives the tea its toasty, nutty character that steeps so cleanly in a glass. A legend decided a shape; the shape decided a flavor.
Drinking Longjing Without an Empire’s Budget
Because Longjing is China’s most famous green tea, it’s also the most counterfeited. “West Lake Longjing” from the original protected region sells for extraordinary prices, and a great deal of tea labeled Longjing is neither from West Lake nor worth your money.
You don’t need the imperial-grade stuff to enjoy it. Good Longjing — even from the broader Zhejiang region — should taste clean and sweet, with fresh chestnut and a gentle grassiness, and no bitterness to speak of when brewed gently.
Two tips before you buy:
- Read how to choose green tea — the quality-checking method there works especially well on Longjing.
- Brew it soft: around 80–85°C water, a glass or gaiwan, short steeps. Boiling water is how empires ruin good leaves. The details are in my loose leaf green tea brewing guide.
Then do what the Empress Dowager never needed to be told: smell the leaves first, dry, then wet. That fragrance — the one that supposedly reached her from inside a sleeve — is half of what you’re paying for.
