To me, the botanical taxonomy of the tea plant goes like this:
1. Genus: Camellia
1.1 Species: Camellia sinensis
1.1.1 Variety: Camellia sinensis var sinensis1.1.2 Variety: Camellia sinensis var assamica
1.1.1.1 Cultivar: Camellia sinensis var sinensis cv Qingxin1.1.1.2 Cultivar: Camellia sinensis var sinensis cv Qingxin Dawu1.1.1.3 Cultivar: Camellia sinensis var sinensis cv Qingxin Ganzietc, etc
To me, a clone is a “replica” of a cultivar. When a clone grows in a different environment it may result in leaves with different physical & chemical properties.
Clones and Qingxin
The way the word “clone” is used in the wine world is confusing to me and I have tried very much to avoid it.
Wulong is a collective term for many things in the Chinese tea world and one meaning refers to quite a large number of cultivars used particularly for oolong tealeaves production. For example, Qingxin is a wulong cultivar. So are many others in an average Taiwan tea garden: Jingxuan, Four season, #13, etc, etc. There are even more used in Mainland China. Many are forming every year in different research institutes and by tea farmers themselves.
Shuixian
There are many other cultivars used particularly for oolong production that are not in the group of wulongs. Such as the group we call shuixian.
I suspect (still much study needed) that shuixian is not only a group but rather a sub-variety (not sub-species), as I said before. And I suspect that those cultivars used in Wuyi and in Phoenix (Fenghuang) are of the same origin. However, there are many cultivars within this group. A cultivar is different from another sometimes only slightly, but sometimes quite dramatically, even within the same group. Physically and chemically. They give teas of different taste profiles. For example, the cultivar baiye gives Honey Orchid (milan xiang) and the cultivar zilan gives Zilan Xiang. The two tea are of almost opposing characters. They are both Shuixian. A baiye can have many variations due to sexual propagation, different natural mutation due to environment etc and the clones from different baiye individual plants do have different values. Therefore they do have names for different baiye plants. Maybe at that level, you’d like to apply the term clones for them. I am searching for a more suitable one.
There are many literature in Chinese documenting the physicality of different cultivars (though not enough yet) and I don’t want to get too explicit and technical here lest I bore the readers.
Let me know if you have other ideas.
