The Tea That's Harvested by Monkeys: Myth or Reality?

The story is irresistible. In remote Chinese mountains, where the cliff-side tea trees are too tall and too dangerous for human pickers to reach, Buddhist monks have trained troops of monkeys to climb up, pluck the choicest tender leaves, and drop them into baskets below. The resulting tea — sometimes labelled *Ma Liu Mie* or 'Monkey-Picked' — is supposedly one of the rarest and most valuable on Earth.

It is also almost entirely fictional.

**The origin of the myth.** Versions of the monkey-picked story appear in Chinese poetry as early as the Tang dynasty, but always as poetic exaggeration — a way of saying 'this tea is so special it must come from the most inaccessible places.' By the Ming dynasty, the legend had become attached to specific Wuyi cliff teas, where bushes really did grow on essentially un-climbable rock faces.

**The 19th-century revival.** When 19th-century European traders began commercial imports, they encountered the legend and either misunderstood it or chose to popularise it. 'Monkey-picked' became a marketing label, applied somewhat indiscriminately to high-grade Tieguanyin oolong from Anxi.

**What 'Monkey-Picked Tieguanyin' actually is.** The label, where it's used legitimately, refers to one of the highest grades of Anxi Tieguanyin oolong — typically harvested from older bushes, by very experienced pluckers, during the optimal narrow window of the spring season. The 'monkey' name is purely marketing. It is not, and has never been, picked by actual monkeys.

**The Buddhist-monkey romance.** A handful of small Buddhist monasteries in southern China have, historically, kept tame macaques as temple animals — and there are rare anecdotal reports of monkeys retrieving fallen tea branches or fruit. There is no evidence that any monastery has ever systematically trained monkeys to harvest commercial tea.

**The honest summary.** If you see a tea labelled 'Monkey Picked' for £200 a tin, you are paying for the legend. The tea inside may be perfectly good Tieguanyin, but no monkey has touched it. A more reliable label is the simple Anxi grading: *Te Ji* (top grade), *Yi Ji* (first grade), and so on. Skip the monkey marketing and buy by grade.

Sometimes the boring answer is the right one.