Chrysanthemum
Dried flower heads brewed across China, Korea and Vietnam, often alongside tea rather than instead of it. Several cultivars are used and they are graded and named separately, with Hangzhou’s hang bai ju and Anhui’s gong ju the two most recognised.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Chrysanthemum ×morifolium
- Family
- Asteraceae
- Part used
- Flower
- Origin
- A cultivated hybrid with no wild distribution; grown across China
- Drunk in
- Zhejiang, Anhui, Guangdong, Korea, Vietnam
Character
Sweet and mild with a slight bitterness at the edge, and a cooling quality in the finish. Whole flowers open in the glass and are traditionally watched as they do.
Notes: honey, hay, faint camphor
History
Cultivated in China for well over a thousand years as an ornamental before it was drunk, and recorded as a drink from the Song dynasty. Tongxiang in Zhejiang and Huangshan in Anhui became the two production centres and remain so.
How it is drunk
Drunk through the summer across southern China, often mixed with rock sugar or with goji berries. In Hong Kong and Guangdong it is a standard restaurant offering alongside pu-erh. Korean and Vietnamese traditions use it similarly.
Traditional use
The most-drunk flower infusion in China, taken within a classificatory system that sorts foods and drinks by warming and cooling character — a framework that has no direct English equivalent and is routinely mistranslated into the vocabulary of Western nutrition.
3 traditions recorded, with who practises each and what each says it is for →
Production
Flowers are picked at full bloom and either steamed then dried, or dried directly. Steaming sets the colour and keeps the head intact, which is why the best grades arrive as whole recognisable flowers rather than as loose petals.
Preparation
Infusion · Blended with tea
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 95–100 °C · 5 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Grades vary enormously and are sold under overlapping names. Whole undamaged heads that open cleanly in hot water are the visible signal; broken petals are the same flower handled badly.
Related botanicals
- Osmanthus — Two Chinese flowers, one drunk alone and one used mainly to scent tea.
- Snow chrysanthemum — Sold as a chrysanthemum and is a Coreopsis. It brews deep red-brown where true chrysanthemum brews pale gold, and three flowers make a cup.
- Honeysuckle — The two summer flower drinks of southern China, both lightly sweet on the nose and both bitter if brewed too hot.
- Calendula — Two Asteraceae flower heads dried for infusion, both pale gold in the cup, and the grades of one are far better documented than the other.
Teas this connects to
- Shou pu-erh (ripe) — Chrysanthemum and ripe pu-erh are served together across Guangdong and Hong Kong as a standard restaurant pairing.
Prepared drinks it goes into
Recipes in the catalogue that name this plant among their ingredients. The quantities and the method belong to each recipe rather than to this page.
- Po cha (Tibetan butter tea) — Compressed dark tea boiled hard and churned with butter and salt into a thick, savoury drink. It is a staple across the Tibetan plateau and the Himalaya, drunk in large quantities daily, and it is a soup-like preparation rather than anything a Western drinker would recognise as tea.
Comparisons
- Chrysanthemum vs honeysuckle — The two summer flower drinks of southern China, both lightly sweet on the nose, both bitter when brewed too hot, and one of them is graded like tea while the other is not.
- Snow chrysanthemum vs chrysanthemum — One is a Coreopsis grown in the Kunlun mountains and sold under a name it has no claim to. It brews deep red-brown from three flowers where true chrysanthemum brews pale gold from a spoonful.
Guides
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Chrysanthemum ×morifolium Ramat. — GRIN-Global Taxonomy record— retrieved and read, not countersigned by a named human. That source covers naming and distribution only. Everything else on this page — history, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice — is TeaHQ’s own synthesis with no external source behind it.
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 Chrysanthemum 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.