How Enshi Yulu Got Its Name: The Versions I Found, and Where Each One Comes From

There isn't one story about how Enshi Yulu got its name. There are at least two, and they don't agree with each other. I went looking for a single true version and couldn't find one, so instead, here's every version I found, and where each one actually comes from.

Version One: The Emperor Story

This is the one you'll find almost everywhere. Search for Enshi Yulu's history and you'll get some form of this: in 1680, a tea maker in Bajiao named Lan got the idea to steam his leaf instead of pan firing it, inspired by a rice steamer in his own kitchen. The tea came out pale jade green, so it was called Yu Lü, jade green. A few years later, a local official sent some up to the Kangxi Emperor, who loved it so much he said it was better than nectar, better than jade dew, and that's where the name Yu Lu comes from.

It's a clean story, and it shows up, in slightly different wordings, on nearly every tea site and news article I could find that mentions this tea's history. I could not find a single one of them citing an actual document, a genealogy, a court record, anything. Every version just repeats the last one.

Version Two: The Family Story

This one comes from a different place, a genealogy kept by the Lan family itself, and from records collected by people who've spent years tracing this history directly with the family's descendants.

In this version, there's no emperor at the start. There's a young man named Lan Yaoshang, engaged to a woman named Wen Xiaoyan, whose family fell on hard times sometime as the Kangxi Emperor's reign was giving way to the Qianlong Emperor's, in the early 1700s. The Wens moved into the mountains and settled in Bajiao. Yaoshang wasn't married to Xiaoyan yet, and his own family told him not to follow her. He went anyway, tracked them down, and built a hut next to their house.

Tea was already his family's trade, so that's what he did. He built a stove, wove bamboo trays, and steamed leaf the way his family always had. It sold well. People called it Yu Lü, jade green, and that name held for close to two hundred years.

There is a version of the emperor story here too, but a smaller one. Family lore says a local official liked the tea enough to send some up the chain, and that's supposedly why Yaoshang's two sons were granted honorary court titles. I can't verify that either. But this version doesn't credit the emperor with the name change, because in this telling, the name didn't change for another two hundred years.

By the sixth generation, a descendant named Lan Shujian built the family's tea trade into an actual company, partnering with merchants from Xiangyang and opening branches as far as Yueyang and Yunyang. That's the part I trust most in this whole story, because it's the most specific and the least flattering to anyone involved. It's just business history.

How "Jade Green" Actually Became "Jade Dew"

Here the two versions I found for this specific detail disagree with each other too.

One account says that in 1938, war had pushed Hubei's provincial government out of Wuhan and into Enshi. A tea official named Yang Runzhi moved a processing operation to Wufeng Mountain, just east of Enshi city. Years earlier, as a young man, Yang Runzhi had gone to Japan hoping to learn how they made their prized steamed green tea, and been turned away. In Enshi, he found local tea makers still steaming leaf the same way. He studied it properly, and because Enshi's dialect blends western Hubei speech with river dialect from further down the Yangtze, where "lü," green, and "lu," dew, sound close enough to blur, he's the one who made the call to rename it. Jade green became jade dew.

Another account, the one I see most often outside the family record, says the change came a couple of years earlier, in 1936, and credits it to a process improvement rather than a dialect. Yang Runzhi's tea came out with more visible white down on the leaf, which read as dew rather than plain green, and the tea itself tasted cleaner. Under that name, the tea started getting noticed outside the region, including buyers in Japan by the mid 1940s.

Both versions agree on the person and roughly the decade. They disagree on whether it was his ear or his eye that decided the name.

Why I'm Giving You All of It

I could have picked the cleanest story and told you that one. Most sites do. But the emperor version has been repeated so many times that it's started to sound true just from repetition, and I couldn't find where it actually started.

What I can tell you is this. There's a family with a real name, a real genealogy, and descendants still making tea today. There's a tea official whose name and decade both check out, even if the two accounts of exactly why he changed one vowel sound don't agree with each other. And there's a tea that's been steamed the same way, in the same mountains, for something close to three hundred years, no matter which version of the name story you believe.

The Noble Side of Enshi

To me, Enshi Yulu is the noble side of Enshi. The history behind it, and how careful and complicated the craft is, show off Enshi's traditional, noble side. Vine tea is the opposite. It's the tea ordinary people around here actually drink every day.

That's part of why I ended up going with the local landrace tea trees and the most traditional processing for this one. It's the only way to show the full flavor and the full environment of this place. Most Yulu you buy on the market is made from clonal cultivars, Longjing 43, Zhenong 117, Zhongcha 108, and those don't carry the flavor that's naturally grown here. Some of those trees come from Zhejiang, some from other areas entirely.

The price reflects that too. Because it takes a long and complicated method to process, it costs more than what you probably drink day to day, and if you want the noble side of Enshi, this is the whole experience. I'd pair it with vine tea if I were you. Vine tea is cheaper, it's what people in the village actually drink, and it grows wild out in the hills long-term. Read here to see the two side by side, which is really two sides of the same place.

The noble and the humble.

This article is part of the Enshi Tea Knowledge Series by FlowInverseTea.