Pearl-formed green tea (zhu cha)
A Chinese pan-fired green in which the shaping and the drying are one operation: the leaf is worked against a heated pan until each piece closes into a hard pellet.
What makes this route what it is
Every other route in this catalogue shapes wet leaf and dries it afterwards. Here the shaping IS the drying, performed hot in an open pan, and the pellet is finished the moment it stops being turned. That single collapse of two operations into one is what gives the tea its keeping quality, its toasted edge and its reputation for surviving treatment that would ruin any other green.
The route, in order
Each note describes what the step is doing in this route. The same operation does a different job in a different chain.
A more mature pluck than a famous-green route would take. The pellet has to survive shipping and hard brewing, and a bud-heavy leaf would break up in the pans.
A short spread to soften the leaf before it meets heat. Brief by comparison with a black tea and easy to skip in mechanised production.
Factory production often goes straight from reception to the fixation drum.
Chinese fixation, in the pan. Position three, before any rupture — which is what makes this a green tea rather than an oolong, and is the one thing this route shares with every other Chinese green.
An ordinary rolling that ruptures the leaf and starts the twist. It does not make the pellet; it makes the material that the pans will close.
The operation the tea is named for. Successive pans — reported as chao er qing, chao san qing, then the shaping pair dui guo and da guo — turn the leaf against a heated wall until each piece is a dry sphere. Shaping and drying are the same act here, which is why a gunpowder pellet is hard rather than pliable.
Screened by pellet size, and the grade IS the size: pinhead is the finest and took the most pan time to reach. This is the one route in the catalogue where sorting decides the price rather than merely tidying the batch.
How it differs from its neighbours
A route described on its own teaches very little. The useful fact is always which other route it is nearly identical to, and where it leaves it.
One position in the route is filled by a different named method. The shape of the route is unchanged.
The same Chinese pan-fired construction with one position filled differently. Where Longjing's route flat-shapes the leaf against the pan wall, this one rounds it — the flat and the round members of the same division, differing at exactly one step.
One position in the route is filled by a different named method. The shape of the route is unchanged.
Both routes finish with a sphere and nothing else about the operation is shared. An oolong pellet is kneaded cold inside a cloth and dried afterwards; this one is worked hot in an open pan and is dry when it comes out.
Where it goes wrong
Under-firing in the shaping pans leaves pellets that look right and have not sealed, and they stale at the speed of an ordinary green while being sold on the promise that they will not. Over-firing scorches the outside of the pellet before the inside is dry, which shows up as a burnt edge that brewing cannot remove.
In full
Chinese classification divides pan-fired green tea by the shape it finishes in — long, flat, or round — and this is the round one. The front of the route is ordinary: a wither, a fixation in the pan, a rolling. What is unusual is what replaces the drying. Instead of going to a basket or a drier, the rolled leaf enters a succession of pans and is turned continuously against the hot metal, and as it loses water each piece tightens on itself until it has closed into a sphere. It comes out dry and hard, and the pellets are then graded by size, the smallest being the most valuable. The consequence is a tea built for endurance rather than for delicacy: sealed inside its own pellet, gunpowder keeps for far longer than an open-leafed green, which is why it dominated the nineteenth-century export trade and why it became the base of North African mint tea rather than a drink anyone in Zhejiang regards as precious.