Sha qing (殺青, shāqīng)
Sha qing (殺青, shāqīng) — "kill-green": heating fresh tea leaf to halt the work of oxidation enzymes. The key stage in producing green tea, and also oolongs and pu-erh.
Sha qing is the moment when a human stops time inside the tea leaf. A plucked leaf is alive: its enzymes keep working, and in the air it begins to oxidize and brown like a cut apple. To obtain green tea, this chemistry must be interrupted — by a short, intense heating that destroys the enzymes. The name is brutal and precise: to "kill the green" is to fix it.
There are several methods, and each leaves its own signature. The Chinese classic is firing in a scorching wok: the master's hands continuously toss and press the leaf against the metal; this is how Longjing is made, whose nutty notes owe much to the wok, and Biluochun. The Japanese way is steaming, which yields a grassy-marine profile. In oolong production sha qing comes later, after partial oxidation, and fixes the degree it has reached. For future sheng pu-erh the firing is gentler and shorter: some of the enzymes must survive, or the tea will have nothing left to age with — therein lies the quiet difference between the pu-erh wok and the green-tea wok.
For the practitioner, sha qing explains why green tea is the most "handmade" of the seemingly simple ones: underfiring leaves grassy rawness and reddened stems, overfiring gives a burnt tone and kills the freshness. The even, clean, springlike taste of a good green tea — the graceful Zhu Ye Qing, for example — is above all a flawlessly executed "killing of the green."
Teas where this appears
Chinese tea glossary