Longan
The dried fruit of a southern Chinese and South-East Asian tree, simmered with jujube and goji into one of the most ordinary domestic drinks in China. It also supplies one of the most-used tasting notes in TeaHQ’s tea catalogue, which is why a reader is as likely to arrive here from a Wuyi oolong page as from a botanical one.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Dimocarpus longan
- Family
- Sapindaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Southern China and mainland South-East Asia; grown in Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Thailand and Vietnam
- Drunk in
- Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Thailand, Vietnam
Character
Intensely sweet and smoky-raisin, with a musky note that separates it from date or fig. It is the reference material for the “dried longan” note used across the tea catalogue, and smelling it is the fastest way to learn what that note means.
Notes: dried longan, raisin, smoke, musk
History
Long cultivated in southern China, where the Fujian and Guangdong crops are old and the drying trade is older than refrigeration. Thailand became the largest exporter in the modern period, and a great deal of the dried longan sold in Chinese shops worldwide is Thai fruit dried for a Chinese market.
How it is drunk
In China dried longan flesh is simmered with red dates and goji into a sweet household drink, and goes into congee and dessert soups. In Thailand and Vietnam dried longan is steeped with sugar and drunk cold. It is a domestic staple across southern China rather than a speciality item.
Production
Fruit is dried whole in the shell, giving the hard brown spheres sold by weight and cracked at home, or shelled and pitted and dried as soft amber flesh. The shelled flesh is the material for drinks; whole dried fruit has to be broken open and is cheaper for that reason.
Preparation
Decoction · Infusion
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 15 min
What gets confused
Longan and lychee (Litchi chinensis) are related and are constantly swapped in translation; longan is smaller, browner and far more musky. Fresh, canned and dried longan taste so different from one another that a reader who knows one will not recognise the others.
Common mistakes
- Buying whole dried fruit and steeping it unbroken. The shell keeps the water out.
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 Longan 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.