I am often bombarded with bunch of emails regarding wulong tea. Many customers seem to be confused what is the difference between wulong tea and oolong tea, or is there a difference at all? For those who don't have time to read the whole article, the answer is No. Wulong and oolong is the exatly the same tea.

Some people like to call wulong tea wu long, others prefer wu lung, some finds woo long, while the rest will call it simply oolong. Although the tea have many different spelling, most of them are correct and can be used interchangeably. You, as a reader, might know that Chinese language doesn't contain alphabet and foreigners find it hard to recognize what means by putting few strokes together . Therefore, China and other countries using Chinese characters decided to develop system not only to help foreigners learn their language with easy, but also help their own children master Chinese without much trouble.

So what kind of systems are these? Well, it's a simple romanization process of Chinese language. Below I demonstrate one Chinese character that you will commonly see while buying tea from Asia:

This character stands for tea, but how to pronounce it? Well, the hardest method is to listen and try to memorize it. Of course there are thousand of characters that need to be learn for a foreigner to be able to read and write Chinese, so as I mentioned before, different systems were developed as an aid for learning. The most popular system is Pying and it is adopted widely in China, Singapore, Malesia as well as slowly in Taiwan. Now foreigner doesn't need to memorize the stroke order for character to be able to read it, he or she will need to memorize 3 letters from Roman alphabet: CHA. Tea in Chinese means cha, same as the character above.

Now let me demonstrate Chinese characters for wulong tea:

The last one we already know - cha, or tea. Now The first two are "wu" and "long." This is used from the romanization system called pying, as I mentioned, the most widely accepted system across Asia.
Are there any others systems that try to romanize Chinese? Of course! Another system is called "Hale" and it was used in Taiwan before. The "wu" sound is more like "oo" in English, and therefore, oo long or oolong cha. While wulong tea is a standard in writing in China and Singapore and Malesia, Taiwan still use the old fassioned system and hence oolong on the tea covers. There are of course other romanization systems, but they not differ much from pying and Hale.

I hope that this guide helped you to understand this topic better. You can go ahead and do a search for oolong tea as well as wulong tea. You will see that many sellers use two spellings in their titles - and they can, it's the same tea.
Feel free to send me any questions via email - I will be happy to share what I know.
Mac

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