Tea is deeply woven into the history and culture of China - in fact it is considered one of the seven necessities of Chinese life, along with firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar. Chinese tea can be classified into six distinctive categories: white, green, yellow, oolong, black and post-fermented.

All of these teas are made from varieties of the Camellia sinensis plant - it is the different processing methods rather than the ingredients which make these teas so distinctive.