Shou Cha or Shu Cha?

Worker covering a pile of pu'er tea for post-fermentation proces

A worker covering a pile of tealeaves with hemp blankets to subject them to post fermentation for about 60 to 90 days. This is the piled post-fermentation method developed only in the recent half century for producing pu’er shu cha. Menghai, Yunnan

In the recent couple of decades, pu’er dark teas that are produced with the piled post-fermentation method have come to be known as “cooked” pu’er, a direct transliteration of the Chinese term “shu cha“.

Somehow, the proper romanisation has been replaced with the term “shou cha”. This article aims at clarifying this misuse.

As in English, sometimes words that spell the same do not sound the same in different usage, the same situation does happen in certain Chinese characters. This is the case of 熟 — shou / shu.

In its solitary form, the character can be “pronounced” as either shou or shu.

In daily use, when it appears after certain characters of the Chinese “qù” tone*, it sometimes is “shou”. Example:

飯煮熟了沒？

Fan zhu shou le mei? — Is the rice cooked yet?

However, in most usage cases it is “shu”. Example:

生米煮成熟飯

Sheng mi zhu cheng shu fan — The raw rice has become cooked rice ( an expression saying the conditions for a case have already developed into an irreversible state )

Younger people tend to ignore even the first usage habit and say shu in any phrase anyways. Some people whose mother tongues are not Mandarin Chinese may easily get confused and use shou and shu interchangeably.

To conclude, piled-post-fermented pu’er tea is shu cha, not shou cha.

When a tea is described as shou rather than shu, it sounds as if it is a tea that has gone stale.

For extended reference, check out the Chinese thesaurus of the Taiwan Ministry of Education:
http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/cgi-bin/cbdic/gsweb.cgi?ccd=Umebav&o=e0&sec=sec1&index=1

The term shu cha also appears in the following articles in this site