In the supermarket or your local teashop, you probably have come
across a name on the tea tin: Orange Pekoe. Maybe you have bought one and tried
it. There is no orange in it. Nor is the colour of that name. So why the name?
If you Google it, there may be various answers. The fact is, it
is a grade name for black tea. Indeed, the whole set of names with
which the West grades black tea begins with it. Here are some of the most
commonly used grade names in the trade, in ascending order of traditional
Western quality definition:
Orange Pekoe ( OP )
Flowery Orange Pekoe
( FOP )
Golden Flowery Orange
Pekoe ( GFOP )
Tippy Golden Flowery
Orange Pekoe ( TGFOP )
Finest Tippy Golden
Flowery Orange Pekoe ( FTGFOP )
Super Finest Tippy Golden
Flowery Orange Pekoe ( SFTGFOP )
The concept of this grading system is largely based on leaf
appearance — whether there are tips, hairy tips, or a lot of hairy tips, or if
the leaves are finely rolled/curled.
Other quality parameters are examined by the tasters. These
specialists determine what the tea actually should cost, and whether it is a
product they want.
A key thing to understand is that although this system was
originally devised to describe hand-crafted tealeaves, it is now mostly
employed for mechanically made products.
Perhaps you should also be aware that while the name Orange
Pekoe is on a tin, many such labelled products is actually Broken Orange Pekoe
( BOP ), i.e. a grade of larger debris sieved from the conveyor belt carrying
mechanically produced tea leaf products.
so why orange? and what does pekoe mean?
Let’s look at the easier term “pekoe” first.
white down — is a term commonly used amongst tea growers and tea
traders to describe young leaf shoots bearing white down ( fine hair ). Plucking
for tea production, particularly that for green and black tea, usually involves
the first two to three leaves and the shoot. When a shoot is still very young
and covered with down , it means the plucking is relatively early. There has
been a prevalent perception that the younger the pluck, the better the tea.
Although you will find in modern pinyin dictionaries that the
Chinese expression should be romanised as “bai hao”, tea trading with the West
began long before the Mandarin language invaded major South China coastal
ports. At that time, local dialects and languages prevailed.
pekoe — south china origin
It is unclear exactly when the term was romanised and from which
particular port. However, there were only a few major ports that exported tea
in the old days: Macao, Amoy ( now romanised as Xiamen ), and Canton ( now
romanised as Guangzhou ). The official local Chinese language spoken in Macao
and Canton was Cantonese and that in Amoy was Minnan. Dozen of dialects
prevailed in all three ports. Hakka was the prevailing dialect in the tea trade
in both Amoy and Canton.
So that gives us three final candidates: Cantonese, Minnan, and
Hakka.
The term “white down” when properly romanised in these three
are:
Cantonese: baak-ho
Minnan: biak-hou
Hakka: pak-hau
When in 18th or 19th century this romanised term pekoe came about,
there was really no systematic approach for turning Chinese into alphabets. The
first people who first alphabetized the expression were likely to be Portuguese
or Dutch, but not English. The spoken words might even have been first
interpreted by Indonesian or Sri Lankan sailors who were active in this part of the world and
been working with European ships. Considering that, “pekoe” is not a bad
romanization at all.
So if pekoe tells of the quality of the pluck, what does the
term orange do? Does it tell of the colour of the leaves or the infusion
liquor, as one theory holds?
I think this is highly unlikely. The name of the first black tea
was Jiangxi Wu, meaning the black from Jiangxi Province. It was initially
popular amongst the trade to refer to black tea — a category that was a
derivative from the more labour and skill intensive oolong, i.e. wu-long (
black dragon ) — with the term ‘wu’. The term red tea, i.e. hong cha, came
later, referring to the colour of the juice during oxidation processing
and that of the infusion.
If the person who first gave the name Orange Pekoe had in mind
the reference of colour, s/he would have linked to the colour red or
black, which the same Chinese used for referring the term pekoe.
orange the dynasty
Though we are unable to find any documentation as evidence, we
agree with the only logical theory about the term: that it refers to
the House of Orange-Nassau, the monarch family of the Netherlands since
mid-sixteenth century.
Why pull the Dutch royal family into this? Well the Dutch was
the single most important importer and wholesaler of tea throughout the
18th century and a pioneer in producing their own tea in the next, only to be followed by the Russian
and the British.
It was perhaps after the British relaxed its importation tax in
1784 trying to break the near monopoly of the Dutch,
or perhaps right when tea production was being experimented in the Dutch colony
of Java in the early 19th century, traders in the Netherland understood
the need for a labelling system. Under the intense competition in commerce (
and politics in those days ), it would be logical to put their signature on it.
Quality disputes had long been an issue in the trade and a simple way of communicating quality in an
environment of growing trade volume and lowering profit margin was imminent.
A Japanese painting of a Dutch East India Company ( VOC )
merchant ship. The Dutch was the first European to establish systematic trading
with the Far East.
Although it is a rather simplistic way of grading and quite
absurd in the world of fine tea, Orange Pekoe is still instrumental in
preliminary evaluation of mass produced products. Such is the largest volume
traded across borders and seas as of today.
the meaning of orange pekoe
Orange Pekoe, therefore, is a world-adapted black tea grading
system that has a Dutch signature on it. It also clearly carries the mark of
the very origin of the commodity: South China.
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