Two Villages, One Goddess: How Tieguanyin Got Its Name

茶史與文化｜Author：祥興茶行｜Published：2026-08-05

In Anxi's Xiping township, two villages tell rival origin stories for Tieguanyin — one begins in a dream, the other beside the Qianlong emperor's tea bowl. Guanyin appears in both.

Two villages in Xiping, Anxi County, each pass down their own story of how this tea got its name. One unfolds in a dream; the other beside the Qianlong emperor's tea bowl. Guanyin is present in both.

The Night in Songyan Village

The story goes that around the third year of the Yongzheng reign (1725), an old tea farmer named Wei Yin (魏蔭) lived at Songlintou in Xiping — this is the version recorded on the Anxi County People's Government "Discover Anxi" pages. He was a diligent grower and a devout follower of Guanyin, "offering a cup of fresh tea before the bodhisattva's image every morning and evening, for decades without fail"[1].

One night he dreamed that he shouldered his hoe and walked out the door. Down by a mountain stream, he saw a tea bush growing from a crack in the rock. At daybreak he retraced the path from his dream, and the bush was there. He dug it up, carried it home, planted it in a broken iron cauldron, and tended it for several years. When he finally picked the leaves and made tea, the aroma and flavor were unlike anything else he grew[1].

A 2024 feature from the Fujian Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs renders that night in sharper detail: the golden figure of the bodhisattva Guanyin appeared on the cliff behind his house. Once he had the bush, Wei Yin multiplied it by layering and planted it out in his own tea fields. Because he was the one who found and cultivated it, his neighbors named the variety after him — "Weiyin zhong," Wei Yin's cultivar[2].

Layering: bend a branch of the mother bush down and bury a section of it in the soil. Once that section strikes roots of its own, cut it free and transplant it — you have a new bush. The result is a clone of the mother tree, true to her aroma and appearance. Sow seed instead and, because tea cross-pollinates, every seedling grows up different. To turn "one exceptional bush" into "a whole field of identical tea," this is the move that does it.

The name came later. Wei Yin wanted to call his tea "Tie Luohan" — Iron Arhat — but the village schoolmaster talked him out of it: some arhats look ferocious, hardly a name for a fine tea. Since this one had come through a dream sent by Guanyin, "better the elegance of Tieguanyin" — Iron Guanyin. Wei Yin applauded the choice[1].

The Abandoned Garden in Nanyan Village

The same Anxi County government page carries a second passage about a different household. In Nanyan, Xiping, so the story goes, lived a scholar named Wang Shirang (王士讓). In the spring of the first year of the Qianlong reign (1736), he often met friends for literary gatherings at his Nanxuan studio, "pacing beside it as the sun sank in the west." One day, among the tumbled rocks of an abandoned garden, he noticed a tea bush unlike any other variety, dug it up, and planted it on its own[1].

In the sixth year of Qianlong (1741), Wang Shirang was summoned to the capital, where he called on Fang Wangxi, vice minister of the Board of Rites — better known as Fang Bao, author of the celebrated "Anecdotes of Zuo Zhongyi." Wang presented tea of his own making; Fang Bao found it remarkable and passed it onward into the palace[1].

The Qianlong emperor liked what he tasted. He received Wang Shirang and asked about the tea history of the Yaoyang district. The county page records the reasoning behind the imperial name: the tea was "dark, lustrous and tightly knotted, heavy as iron, fragrant in taste and beautiful in form, like Guanyin herself"[1].

"Like Guanyin" — even in the version where an emperor bestows the name, Guanyin is still in the room. She no longer arrives in a dream; she has become a simile. The color and heft of the dry leaves call to mind a small statue of the bodhisattva[1].

The provincial version joins the two tales end to end: what Wang Shirang recounted before the throne included Wei Yin's dream of Guanyin and the layering that propagated the bush, and only after hearing that history did the emperor bestow the name[2]. In that document, the two stories are not rivals — they are the earlier and later halves of a single account.

How Tieguanyin Reached Taiwan

The Wei family's thread stretches to Taiwan as well. According to Wei Cheng, a descendant of Wei Yin, the family brought Tieguanyin from Anxi to Taiwan very early on, but in quantities too small to leave a trace in the record. The first person documented to carry Tieguanyin seedlings to Taiwan was Zhang Naimiao (張迺妙)[8].

After retiring from public office, Zhang Naimiao served as factory director of the Wenshan Tea Company. Backed by the investors Zhang Futang and Zheng Zailai, he traveled to Anxi himself and formally imported three thousand seedlings, planting them on the hill behind Zhang Futang's home — the area around today's Taipei Zoo[8].

A tree and a technique are two different things. In 1937, the 26th year of the Republic, Zhang Naimiao made his fourth trip to Anxi. His younger brother Zhang Naisheng arranged for him to talk tea with local tea masters and gentry, and only on that visit did he get close to the processing side of the craft[8].

The technique had yet another route. In 1939, Wang Taiyou of the Anxi-rooted Fuji tea firm in Dadaocheng, together with Wang De, another Anxi native, carried Tieguanyin's cloth-rolling technique to Mingjian township in Nantou and taught cloth-ball tea making there[8]. Cloth-ball rolling means bundling the leaves in a cloth and kneading the bundle tight and round — the beaded shape of Taiwanese oolong descends from exactly this line. To meet Taiwan's tea bushes themselves, see [Taiwan's oolong cultivars](/articles?slug=taiwan-oolong-cultivars).

As for Tieguanyin becoming "the pride of Muzha," that came only after the 1970s. Muzha's competition teas originally had just two categories, pengfeng tea and baozhong; in 1972, at the suggestion of local growers, the categories were changed to baozhong and Tieguanyin. The researcher Liao Tzu-chun is blunt about it: "The tight equation of Muzha with Tieguanyin is, without question, a product of later commercial promotion"[8].

How growers recognize "zhengcong" (true-bush) Tieguanyin: "drum-waist chopstick" stems left on the leaf; a "frog-skin" surface, as if misted with frost; a "sweet-potato air," a faint edge of fruit acid; and leaves "heavy to the drop" — knotted so tight they sound when they hit the table. Then rub your palms warm and smell them: only if you catch a roasted-rice aroma is it true-bush. Other growers insist the real marks are a pear flavor and a pear aroma[8]. This is consensus within the farming community, not an official standard, and the details differ from house to house[8]. For how to brew Tieguanyin, see Chaoshan gongfu tea.

The Years the Legends Claim, and the Years You Can Verify

The two stories are precise about their dates: 1725, 1736, 1741. Set them on a single axis alongside the dates that can actually be traced to sources —

〔圖〕Tieguanyin timeline: verifiable dates versus dates set by legend

How to read the timeline: top to bottom runs chronologically, not to scale. Solid green = verifiable dates; dashed russet = dates set by legend; dashed gold = sourced, but the document itself supplies conflicting eras (only the 1640 entry on this axis). The 1640 entry needs its caveat spelled out: the source is the FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems page (adapted from China's nomination materials), and the same page offers two mutually exclusive chronologies — that the tea was only born in the 18th century, and that it had already spread abroad along the Maritime Silk Road in the Song and Yuan dynasties[4]. 1734 is the publication year of the Xu Cha Jing, which is verifiable. The Cha Shuo it quotes is traditionally dated to 1717, but the Xu Cha Jing itself does not record that date, and this article could not verify it — so it is not plotted as a point.

The earliest explicit written record of the semi-oxidized craft appears in the Xu Cha Jing — the "Sequel to the Classic of Tea," published in 1734, the twelfth year of Yongzheng — in its quotation of Wang Caotang's Cha Shuo[7]. That is earlier than, or contemporary with, the years the legends claim, so nothing in the chronology makes these stories impossible. (It is, though, a record of Wuyi in northern Fujian; it cannot be used to date the craft of Anxi in the south.)

What the Documents Actually Contain

Start with how the tellers label their tales. The Anxi County government page opens both passages with "legend has it"[1]. The Fujian provincial feature titles its two sections plainly "the Guanyin-dream account" and "the Qianlong-naming account"[2]. And when the Ministry of Agriculture inscribed the Anxi Tieguanyin tea culture system as one of China's important agricultural heritage systems in 2014, it gave the name a single sentence: "Two legends account for its origin: the Wei account — Guanyin appearing in a dream — and the Wang account — a name bestowed by Qianlong"[3].

The Wang account has a family document of its own: the Wang side maintains that their genealogy preserves an essay by Wang Shirang, "A Brief Account of Nanyan, Yaoyang," recording the discovery of the bush and the presentation of the tea — like the Wei account, a tradition handed down within the family.

What can be traced to sources is a different set of facts. In November 1984, Tieguanyin passed certification by the national tea cultivar committee as an elite cultivar of national rank[1]; the following year it entered the International Camellia Register under the number GS13007-1985[6]. On processing: the oolongs of southern Fujian add one step that northern Fujian and Guangdong lack — cloth-wrapped rolling, the key to their tightly knotted leaf[3][5]. On propagation: Anxi learned early to keep a good bush going by layering[2][4].

One more name survives in the cultivar registry. The International Camellia Register lists the synonym as "魏饮种" (Weiyin zhong); Fujian's official text writes it "魏蔭種"[2][6] — one folk name, two spellings. And in that entire synonym list, not a single name carries the character Wang[6]. The Wei family's telling spread wider through the growing region, and the breeders took it up as the common name.

Those Two Characters

Look back and you find Guanyin changing identity in every version: the golden figure appearing on the cliff in Wei Yin's dream; the emperor weighing the leaves in his hand and pronouncing them "like Guanyin"; the schoolmaster rejecting "Iron Arhat" as too fierce and choosing her name in its place[1][2]. A miracle, a simile, a judgment of taste — three entirely different roads.

Across three hundred years, who found the tea, in what year, and who named it have all been rewritten. Those two characters never have been.

References

1. 安溪縣人民政府（2017-03-29）。〈安溪鐵觀音〉，「走進安溪」專欄。https://www.fjax.gov.cn/zjax/zty/201703/t20170329_795735.htm
2. 福建省農業農村廳（2024-03-21）。〈帶你讀懂安溪鐵觀音〉，「福山福水 福農優品」專題。http://nynct.fujian.gov.cn/ztzl/fsfsfnyp/202403/t20240321_6417971.htm
3. 中華人民共和國農業部（2014-06-24）。〈第二批中國重要農業文化遺產：福建安溪鐵觀音茶文化系統〉。http://www.moa.gov.cn/ztzl/zywhycsl/depzgzywhyc/201406/t20140624_3948705.htm
4. FAO（GIAHS since 2022）。_Anxi Tea Culture System, China_。https://www.fao.org/giahs/giahs-around-the-world/china-anxi-tea-culture-system/en
5. 安溪縣茶業管理委員會辦公室等（2024-01）。《地理標誌產品質量要求 安溪鐵觀音》國家標準修訂（徵求意見稿）編制說明，項目編號 20221453-T-463，中國標準化研究院掛出。https://www.cnis.ac.cn/ynbm/spynyzlyjs/bzyjzq/gbyjzq/202402/P020240207354561838784.pdf
6. International Camellia Society／中國科學院昆明植物研究所。_Camellia sinensis_ 'Tieguanyin'，International Camellia Register，ID: ICR-23093，登錄年 1985。https://camellia.iflora.cn/Cutivars/Detail?latin=Tieguanyin
7. 陸廷燦（雍正十二年，1734）。《續茶經》卷上之三「三茶之造」所引王草堂《茶說》，四庫全書本。（《茶說》成書年傳統繫於 1717 年，《續茶經》未載，本文未能核實。）
8. 廖紫均（2013）。〈木柵鐵觀音的茶味傳承與變遷〉，收於《2013「茶與藝—坪林街角故事」學術論壇論文集》，頁 53–68，國立臺灣藝術大學。https://cart.ntua.edu.tw/uploads/root/成果發表/出版刊物/論文集/茶與藝%20坪林街角故事論文集/05.廖紫均-木柵鐵觀音的茶味傳承與變遷.pdf