Chinese quince
A hard, heavily scented East Asian fruit, and the plant behind Korean mogwa-cha. It is not the quince of European membrillo and marmalade: that is Cydonia oblonga, a different genus, which TeaHQ holds under its own record.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Pseudocydonia sinensis
- Family
- Rosaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Eastern China; cultivated in China, Korea and Japan
- Drunk in
- Korea, China, Japan
Character
Strongly aromatic — pear, apple, honey and a resinous floral note — and, once preserved, sweet with no astringency left. Raw fruit is inedible and the preserve is a different substance.
Notes: quince, pear, honey, resin
History
Long grown in China as an ornamental and for the fruit’s scent as much as for anything done with it — a ripe fruit left in a room perfumes it for weeks, and that was a recognised use before it was a drink. The Korean preserve tradition is where it became a beverage crop rather than a scented ornament.
How it is drunk
In Korea mogwa is sliced thin, layered with sugar or honey and left for weeks to make mogwa-cheong, which is spooned into hot water as mogwa-cha and drunk through the winter. In China mugua is candied and steeped. In Japan karin goes into syrups, liqueurs and boiled sweets. In all three it is preserved first and brewed second.
Production
Fruit is picked hard in autumn — it never softens usefully on the tree and is far too astringent to eat raw. Slicing and curing with sugar for several weeks draws out juice and removes the astringency entirely; the resulting syrup is the traded product and the fruit slices go with it.
Preparation
Infusion · Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
What gets confused
Three genera share the word quince and the confusion is genuine rather than pedantic. Cydonia oblonga is the European quince of membrillo and marmalade. Pseudocydonia sinensis is Chinese quince and is the Korean mogwa of mogwa-cha. Chaenomeles species are the flowering quinces of gardens, and Chaenomeles sinensis is an older name for this plant that still appears on labels and in nursery catalogues.
Common mistakes
- Trying to steep raw slices. The drink is a sugar preserve stirred into water, not an infusion of the fruit.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Chinese quince is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.