Is it Oolong Tea or Wulong Tea?
February 21st, 2007 by Mark(For those of you who can’t wait for the answer, it’s wulong tea.)
Today, I stumbled across a page called Tea From Taiwan, via Angelica’s blog. At first glance it seemed to be suffering from a serious case of over optimizing for search engines. Search engines from 1997, that is. On the home page, I saw the word “oolong” fifteen times, “wulong” 17 times, including the title, and a couple of “wu longs” and an “wulung”. If only search engines still rewarded web masters for this sort of thing!
Fortunately, there’s a page to clear up any confusion that comes from being alternately bombarded with “oolong” and “wulong”. Unfortunately, the page is about as misinformative as is possible in such a small space.
Oolong or Wulong – What’s the big diff?
There are several different systems for romanizing the Mandarin language. Romananization is the process of transcribing the sounds of spoken Chinese so that Western speakers can learn the language without having to learn thousands of different Chinese characters.
Actually, the primary use of romanization isn’t to help foreigners learn Chinese. It’s to help Chinese children learn Chinese.
It is these competing systems of Romanization that causes the confusion over the Western spelling of Chinese words. Romanization systems include Wade Giles, Pinyin, Yale, and Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
Fair enough. There really isn’t that much “competition” outside of Taiwan, though. The worldwide standard is pinyin. You guys sure aren’t helping the confusion with this page.
China has adopted the Pinyin system, but Taiwan and Singapore still use Wade Giles. “Oolong” is an example of Wade Giles, and “Wulong” (or more properly “Wu Long”) is the Pinyin spelling.
Well.. ahm… no, no and no! Taiwan may have used a bastardized form of Wade-Giles decades ago, but Taiwan and Singapore don’t “use” Wade-Giles. The Singaporean government is currently promoting pinyin, and romanization in Taiwan is a hopeless mess, with some areas using standard pinyin, some using Tongyong Pinyin, and others using no systematic approach at all. Furthermore, “Wu Long” is not more proper pinyin than “Wulong”. Actually, “wulong” would be correct, since 烏龍 is a single word, not two. Finally, the Wade-Guiles equivalent of “wulong” isn’t “oolong”. It’s “wulung”.
What’s the point of even having an explanatory page if nearly everything in it is wrong?
(That said, they have good tea and it’s good for you.)
Update: The problems with the help page are no more. The Tea From Taiwan webmaster followed every one of my suggestions and updated the page very quickly.
:
February 21st, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Damn, you owned them! I agree with you 100% on everything you said.
February 21st, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I guess these guys drank too much tea before writing their clarification page. Thanks for clearing things out
February 22nd, 2007 at 2:25 am
well, yes and no yourself:
For pinyin, yes you are correct. Wade-Giles and Yale were created to help Westerners learn to pronounce Chinese (first the missionaries if I’m not mistaken).
I don’t know if anyone can explain why Tongyong pinyin was created…
February 22nd, 2007 at 3:49 am
I suppose I should have said, “the primary current use”. Then again, pinyin is probably used by more Chinese children in a single week than to total number of missionaries that have ever learned Wade-Giles or Yale.
February 22nd, 2007 at 5:29 am
Update: The webmaster of Tea from Taiwan has asked if I could help him with the text of the page, and I’ve decided to offer a helping hand. Once it’s updated, I could use help from Prince Roy, Mark S., and others with keen eyes to check it.
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:53 am
He asked for help because of me. I sent a link to your article to his email. Glad it worked.
February 22nd, 2007 at 8:28 am
You know… I looked at his site a little more closely, and I think I may even have met the guy in Jiayi, when I first came to Taiwan. The foreigners there used to have an ultimate frisbee game every weekend and I remember meeting a Ross there. It’s a small world.
I kind of feel bad about singling out his page, now. On the plus side, I raised his page rank a little bit and will probably send a customer or two there. And it’s not like any former customer would abandon their favorite tea over an inaccurate web page.
February 22nd, 2007 at 11:41 am
This is one of the things I had to adjust to when I moved to Taiwan. I studied Chinese in North East China for three years. My Chinese teacher used pinyin a lot when we first started studying together. In fact, I began with lessons from her son’s primary reader, which was written in pinyin and simplied Chinese. Most of my beginner textbooks are also written in pinyin and simplified Chinese characters. Whoa! Double whammy! Or should I say triple whammy? It’s been a total pain in the butt ’switching over’ and while I’m up for the challenge, it still makes things a little complicated and confusing. You’ve done a great job clarifying!
By the way, I use your pinyin converter a lot. It’s fantastic.
My only question is this. One of the Chinese teachers I work with actually scoffed at the idea of learning Chinese through pinyin. Why? It worked for me.
February 22nd, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Some teachers in Taiwan feel that learning zhuyin (bopomofo) enables a learner to acquire better pronunciation, because there’s no link to one’s own language (debatable point). Then again, others are simply uneducated about pinyin and believe it can’t fully represent the range of sounds in Mandarin (which is nonsense, of course).
February 22nd, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Unfortunately, there seems to be quite a bit of ignorance on both sides. A lot of Taiwanese feel that people can’t learn to pronounce Chinese properly by using pinyin (without even realizing that mainland Chinese children all use it while learning to read). On the other hand, when I showed my Taiwanese children’s books to people in Shanghai, they didn’t have any idea what they zhuyin was. Most of them guessed it was some sort of Japanese script.
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Taffy, I like how you linked your name to all those PDFs!
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:10 pm
While wulong might be the correct Hanyu Pinyin, I wouldn’t necessarily say it wrong to write oolong. It is a word that has come into common use. A few other words borrowed from Chinese that are in common use are kung fu, tai chi and Taoism and nobody is suggesting that their spelling be changed.
February 23rd, 2007 at 9:36 am
Yes it has. The majority of misromanized Chinese words common in English either came from Taiwan, or else they are old enough to pre-date pinyin. That said, I wouldn’t bet against pinyin. The US Library of Congress is in the process of a massive re-romanization effort, and words such as “Taoism” are being updated to “Daoism” more and more frequently. Much like the long, slow replacement of the term “Peking” with “Beijing”, the older spellings are slowly loosing ground to the new.
Some of the words you mentioned are deeply entrenched and will probably remain more popular than their pinyin spellings for decades. “Oolong” on the other hand, is loosing ground rapidly.
February 23rd, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Mark – The revised page is up at http://www.teafromtaiwan.com/Oolong_Wulong_Wu_Long.htm. Thanks again for spending time on this – I was aware of the innacuracies but correcting this page was not high on my list.
Oh – and Frostfox – Mark contacted me by email before I received your anonymous note. His generosity has nothing to do with you.
And as for “oolong” losing ground – I keep up on the spellings because it’s my business, but the recent popularity of “wu long” is due to Oprah or someone like that saying that “wu long tea” (the spelling they used) is a miraculous weight loss product. Since that time (late 2005) Google searches for “wu long” have have come close to “oolong”, but “oolong” is still the #1 spelling. Most tea vendors sell “oolong”.
February 23rd, 2007 at 3:01 pm
It was no problem at all, Ross. Actually, I’m flattered that you paid attention to my email at all!
More and more mainland Chinese companies are starting to sell to the west, and more and more westerners are going to China, as well. That may be where Oprah or whoever got the pinyin spelling from. Obviously, you want your page to show up in searches for any spelling people are likely to use, so it’s good to have wulong, wulung and oolong all in the meta data and somewhere on the page (which you do).
Everyone, here’s the Google trends graph Ross is talking about.
February 23rd, 2007 at 4:06 pm
the new page is much better, but I would strongly encourage changing the description of written Chinese as
It is more accurate to say that each Chinese character represents a morpheme. The syllable is secondary, so the most accurate description may be ‘morphemo-syllabic’.
Also, it should be wūlóng, not wúlóng.
February 23rd, 2007 at 4:29 pm
You know, this page was intended for people with NO knowledge of Chinese, and were simply confused over the various spellings of oolong tea. I’m sure that the linguistic subtleties of the language – especially the words related to tea, would appeal to some of my readers, but that’s better left to another article.
If anyone is interested in writing such an article…
February 23rd, 2007 at 4:49 pm
hey, just trying to help-I think when native speakers of English see ’syllables’, they will come away with an inaccurate understanding of Chinese characters. But fair enough, you could describe Chinese as being ‘pictographic’ for all it matters to most people. Actually scholars have written entire volumes about this topic, not just articles.
You should at least correct the tone marks, though…
February 23rd, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Tone marks are corrected – thanks for pointing that out. I also said “written Chinese uses characters which represent entire syllables (more accurately each character is morphemo-syllabic)”
Is that OK?
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:24 pm
looks great! best of luck in the tea trade…do you have a shop to visit or are you entirely mail order?
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:41 pm
We are mostly wholesale, so the website is our only retail outlet.
You’re in Taiwan, right? Anyone who is here is fortunate to be in the land of tea… I think tea is one of the treasures of Taiwan, and I encourage everyone to become acquainted with their local tea vendor and explore this great beverage. The high-end tea of Taiwan is very special and most of it never leaves Taiwan…
February 23rd, 2007 at 10:13 pm
The tone marks were my fault.
February 23rd, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Ross:
yes in Taipei. Actually, the Wisteria Teahouse is one of my most frequent haunts. That is interesting: I didn’t know that the Taiwan tea industry doesn’t export their highest quality. The exact opposite is the case in India and Sri Lanka. I would have guessed that Taiwan sold its best stuff to the Japanese.
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:21 pm
I suspect that the BEST tea never leaves the tea farm. I’ve had a few extraordinary oolong teas when visiting tea farmers. But it’s not for sale.
February 24th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Well, the average Taiwanese consumes 1.6kg of tea leaves annually. I assume a good chunk of that is Oolong. We produce 20,000 tons of tea (mostly Oolong I think) annually and 4,000 of that is exported. The domestic market gobbles up the rest and still buys more cheap Oolong from other countries. I think Vietnam has some farms up and running that are Taiwanese-owned?
February 24th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Really? I didn’t know Vietnam was a major tea producer. I do know that Taiwanese tea concerns have invested heavily in Yunnan province.
February 24th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Yep. But according to people in the know, the fragrance is not there yet. Taiwanese farmers were heavily concerned about cheap Chinese Oolong flooding the market in Taiwan, but the burgeoning domestic market there have sucked it all down for the most part. In fact, Taiwan exports high-end teas like 鐵觀音to China.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:24 am
[...] to shuo started the ball rolling by writing a great article about the difference between Wulong and Oolong Tea and he also put me onto Tea From Taiwan, a great website that provides plenty of information [...]
March 3rd, 2007 at 2:49 am
I just found this blog and enjoyed reading it. Ross says that this page is for those with NO knowledge of Chinese, so may I request some advice from the participants? I have a little knowledge of Chinese language; from the past. I have been asked to give a talk about Chinese language at a local USA high school. Should I focus on pinyin, mainland Chinese, Taiwan Chinese? I personally prefer the chu yin fu hao method of pronunciation. Any suggestions? I thought I’d mention that one perception of Chinese speech was to speak it in pidgin form, but that is because of the absence of the “to be” verb and its variants. Thanks for reading this!