Wuyutai

Wuyutai was founded in 1887 in Beijing by Wu Xiqing, a tea merchant from Anhui province, during the final decades of the Qing dynasty. The house built its reputation on jasmine tea, and China's Ministry of Commerce later named it one of the country's official Time-Honored Brands in recognition of that history.

What sets Wuyutai's jasmine tea apart is a three-stage process the company calls self-harvesting, self-scenting and self-blending: green tea leaves are picked in tea-growing regions such as Anhui and Zhejiang, then carried to jasmine-growing areas of Fujian to be scented with fresh flowers, before returning to Beijing for final blending. That technique was added to China's National Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2011 and, in 2022, to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. Beyond the original jasmine blend, the brand has grown into a citywide retail network of shops across Beijing and has extended the same jasmine flavor into products like tea-scented mooncakes and ice cream. For a shop rooted in a single 19th-century recipe, the National and UNESCO recognitions mark a rare case of a commercial jasmine tea blend being treated as intangible cultural heritage in its own right, rather than simply an old product line.