The Family Tree Behind Taiwan's Teas

Varieties & Types｜Author：祥興茶行｜Published：2026-07-10

Jin Xuan and Tsui Yu taste like different worlds, yet they share a parent. Trace the pedigree of Taiwan's tea cultivars and meet the two mother trees that hold the whole chart together.

The cup of Jin Xuan in your hand is all milky fragrance; the Tsui Yu at the next table sings with lifted floral aromatics. They taste like two different worlds. Open the breeding records, though, and you find they are close kin — half-siblings, or more precisely, cultivars that share a parent. Both carry the blood of one old tea tree called Yingzhi Hongxin (硬枝紅心) [5][12]. Taiwan's teas look like a riot of variety, but a single family tree can lay out where they all come from. This article walks you through that chart — and introduces the two busiest ancestors in Taiwanese tea.

Two Bloodlines in Taiwanese Tea

Taiwan's tea cultivars fall roughly into two generations. First come the landraces selected during the Japanese colonial era — not bred in any laboratory, but picked out by earlier generations of farmers from thousands of field-grown trees. The best performers were multiplied by cuttings (clonal propagation — genetically, copy-and-paste of a single tree) and planted widely [14]. Second come the postwar hybrids bred by the Tea Research and Extension Station and released under sequential "TTES" numbers: Jin Xuan is TTES No. 12, Hong Yu (Ruby) is TTES No. 18 [12][1].

Put these two generations side by side and the lines between parents and offspring snap into focus. Start with the older generation.

The four great landraces (selected around 1918, under Japanese rule) ・Qingxin Oolong (青心烏龍, also called soft-stem oolong or zhengcong) — introduced from China and now Taiwan's most widely planted cultivar; late-budding, ideally suited to baozhong tea — and the pollen parent the TTES breeding program would return to again and again [14] ・Qingxin Dapang (青心大冇) — grown mainly across Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli; its purple-red young buds are densely downy; widely considered the finest cultivar for Oriental Beauty (pengfeng tea) [14] ・Yingzhi Hongxin (硬枝紅心, "hard-branch red heart") — stiff branches, reddish young buds; the shared parent of Jin Xuan and Tsui Yu, and the crossing point of the family tree [5][12] ・Daye Oolong (大葉烏龍, "large-leaf oolong") — early-budding, big-leaved, vigorous; once counted among the four famous landraces, now surviving only in scattered plantings in New Taipei and the east coast [6][14]

The First Hub: Yingzhi Hongxin

In the early 1980s, the Tea Research and Extension Station released two new cultivars at once, and the naming story is a tender one: the station director of the day, Wu Zhen-duo, named TTES No. 12 "Jin Xuan" after his grandmother's given name, and TTES No. 13 "Tsui Yu" after his mother's — a breeder's gesture of filial devotion [10][5].

The parents are the key. Jin Xuan = seed parent Tainong No. 8 × pollen parent Yingzhi Hongxin, named in 1981 [12][10]; Tsui Yu = seed parent Yingzhi Hongxin × pollen parent Tainong No. 80, named in 1981 [5][12]. See it? Yingzhi Hongxin stands on the father's side of Jin Xuan's pedigree and the mother's side of Tsui Yu's. One old tree appears in both new cultivars' family charts — the most elegant crossing point in the whole diagram. By the official suitability ratings, both cultivars aim at the same styles, oolong and baozhong [12].

Two details people get backwards ① Marketing copy often swaps the parents. The official record: Jin Xuan's seed parent is Tainong No. 8 and its pollen parent is Yingzhi Hongxin. Reversed is wrong [12]. ② Tsui Yu's "1938" is the year of the cross; 1981 is the year it was officially named. It was selected from the progeny of a 1938 hand cross and took more than forty years to finalize — it was not "bred in 1938" [5][12].

How to read the chart: gold nodes are the two hubs (Yingzhi Hongxin and Qingxin Oolong); russet nodes are the large-leaf black-tea bloodline. Solid lines mark parentage confirmed in official records; dashed lines mark reputed or unknown ancestry (Si Ji Chun's folk origins, Hong Yun's unidentified open-pollination father). Notice how the single Qingxin Oolong node sends solid lines out to Biyu, Yingxiang, and Qinyu — visual proof of its place at the heart of the pedigree [12][9].

The Black-Tea Branch: A Change of Blood

Every cultivar so far makes oolong or baozhong — partially oxidized teas. Follow the family tree downward, though, and the blood abruptly changes: two cultivars appear with large-leaf ancestry, bred squarely for fully oxidized black tea.

Hong Yu (TTES No. 18), named in 1999, is seed parent Burmese large-leaf B-729 × pollen parent Taiwan native wild mountain tea B-607 [1][11]. An imported large-leaf variety crossed with Taiwan's own wild species yielded a black tea with natural cinnamon and a whisper of mint — a character Japanese black-tea experts hailed as unique to the island, dubbing it the "Taiwan flavor" [1][2].

Hong Yun (TTES No. 21), named in 2008, shares the large-leaf black-tea lineage, but its origins are more tangled than any other cultivar's: it is a naturally crossed selection that knows its mother but not its father. Its seed parent is confirmed as the breeding line FKK-1 (itself a combination of the Indian large-leaf Kyang and Keemun/Kimen); its pollen parent was whatever pollen drifted in during open pollination — origin unknown, and even the official records cannot name it. That is why the chart draws its mother in a solid line and its unknown father in a dashed one [13]. It carries a floral note reminiscent of citrus trees in bloom; pomelo-blossom honey is its signature [3].

The Second Hub: Qingxin Oolong, the Pollen Parent on Repeat

If Yingzhi Hongxin is the hub of the older generation, Qingxin Oolong is the hub of the new — and the evidence is even harder. It is not only Taiwan's most widely planted cultivar [14]; it is the pollen parent the breeding station has gone back to again and again.

Three cultivars tell the story. Biyu (TTES No. 19) = seed parent Jin Xuan × pollen parent Qingxin Oolong, named in 2004, suited to baozhong [12]. Yingxiang (TTES No. 20) = seed parent Line 2022 × pollen parent Qingxin Oolong, named in 2004, suited to baozhong and high-mountain tea [12]. Qinyu (TTES No. 22) = seed parent Jin Xuan × pollen parent Qingxin Oolong, hand-crossed in 1996, named in 2014 — and only in 2020 did the Agriculture and Food Agency formally gazette the name "Qinyu" [12][4]. Three separately numbered cultivars, one shared father. In breeding terms this is using Qingxin Oolong as a "common pollen parent" — borrowing its excellent, stable traits as a foundation, cross after cross — and it makes Qingxin Oolong the most connected node in the entire tree. (Strictly speaking, this is not backcrossing: a backcross mates a hybrid back to its own parent, and neither Jin Xuan nor Line 2022 descends from Qingxin Oolong. They merely share it as a father.)

So "Qingxin Oolong is the core of the TTES family tree" is no figure of speech. Biyu, Yingxiang, and Qinyu all have it as their direct pollen parent — that is the breeding record, in black and white [12]. And since Qinyu's mother, Jin Xuan, carries Yingzhi Hongxin's blood, one tea manages to link both hubs at once [12].

Then there is Si Ji Chun, another fixture of the tea table, which took the folk route instead. Tradition holds that it originated in Muzha, Taipei, where a farmer noticed an unusual seedling growing in his own garden and selected it into a cultivar. Because it was never an official release, it carries no TTES number [9][14]. Its parentage has only ever been recorded as "reputed" — folk accounts suggest some natural cross involving Wuyi stock, Qingxin Oolong, and Qingxin Dapang, all of it speculation rather than settled fact, which is why the chart can only reach it with dashed lines [9]. Intriguingly, harder molecular evidence also places it genetically close to Qingxin Oolong [7].

How DNA Backs Up the Family Tree

Identifying cultivars by appearance alone is easy to get wrong, so researchers turned to molecular markers — think of them as each tea tree's genetic fingerprint. Hu Chih-yi and colleagues (2011) analyzed twelve major Taiwanese cultivars with EST-SSR markers and found that just two primer pairs were enough to tell all twelve completely apart — and the markers could also be used to trace parental origins [8]. In other words, the family tree no longer rests on documents and word of mouth alone; DNA can cross-check it.

Hu's 2013 master's thesis at National Taiwan University went a step further, placing Qingxin Oolong at the core of the molecular kinship network of Taiwan's cultivated varieties [7]. That is one research team's molecular inference, to be cited with that caveat — but it dovetails neatly with the breeding records above, where three TTES cultivars all take Qingxin Oolong as their pollen parent. One line of evidence from DNA, one from the pedigree, and both point to the same old tree [7][12].

What This Cup Comes Down To

・Two hubs hold up the whole tree: Yingzhi Hongxin is where Jin Xuan and Tsui Yu meet; Qingxin Oolong is the shared pollen parent of Biyu, Yingxiang, and Qinyu [5][12]. ・The black-tea branch changed blood: Hong Yu and Hong Yun run on large-leaf lineage; Hong Yun knows its mother — the FKK-1 line — but not its open-pollination father [1][13]. ・Qingxin Oolong's central place rests on two kinds of evidence: three TTES cultivars have it as their direct pollen parent (the pedigree), and molecular research places it at the core of the kinship network (the DNA) [12][7].

To see why Qingxin Oolong came to dominate Taiwan's high-mountain oolongs, read on in our [buyer's guide to Taiwan high-mountain tea](/articles?slug=taiwan-high-mountain-tea-buying-guide).

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Note: Cultivar parentage and dates in this article are checked against the official pages of Taiwan's Tea and Beverage Research Station. The station's website materials are academic research results and may not be reproduced, or used in product labeling or promotion, without permission.