Gunpowder Tea

Gunpowder Tea (珠茶, zhūchá) is a Chinese green tea best known in the West by a nickname describing its shape: the finished leaf is rolled into small, round, compact granules that resemble old-fashioned gunpowder pellets — not a reference to flavor, processing method, or quality.

It has its own dedicated section within China’s national green tea standard, GB/T 14456.4-2016 (Part 4 of the national multi-part green tea standard series), produced mainly in Zhejiang Province. The standard describes top grade as round, compact, heavy granules with a frosted or misty surface sheen, grading down through progressively less compact, coarser granules at lower grades. Grading itself runs on an export numbering code system rather than the simple 特级/一级/二级 labels used by many other Chinese green teas: 特级 is coded 3505, with 一级 through 四级 numbered 9372 through 9375.

One detail worth flagging rather than repeating as settled fact: some sources mention that traditional processing occasionally used glutinous rice paste to help shape the granules. The standards material available for this page treats that as a historical or traditional detail, not something confirmed as universal current practice — worth knowing as background, not as a defining feature of the tea today.

The source material used for this page doesn’t document aroma, taste or liquor descriptors by grade the way it does for most other teas on this site — what’s shown here reflects the general character of pan-fired Chinese green tea rather than a Gunpowder-Tea-specific figure from the standard.

See the Green Tea guide for where Gunpowder Tea sits among China’s other green teas, and Green Gem Tea for a Guizhou green tea whose own standard explicitly compares itself to this one.

Look · Dry leaf

Top grade (特级) is described in the standard as round, compact, heavy granules with a frosted or misty surface sheen; lower grades are described as progressively less compact and coarser.

Smell & taste

Typical aroma: grassy. Flavor tendencies: brisk. Body: medium. These vary by batch, storage and brewing.

Brew · A starting point

Try 3 g in 150 ml water at 85–90°C for 60–90 seconds. Fully decant before tasting.

Read the wet leaves

Not documented in the source material reviewed for this page beyond the general pan-fired green tea process it shares with other zhāchá-style teas.

Sources & review status

• 中国绿茶标准研究资料库_ChinaTea101_Research_Master_File.md — Section 6.9 (珠茶/Gunpowder Tea material card, citing GB/T 14456.4-2016) — ChinaTea101 owner-supplied Source Library. Source-to-Site Expansion Mode, Batch VI — this file's Section 6.10 ("知识库中提及但完整信息不足的名茶") explicitly lists several teas the source library couldn't fully document (Xinyang Maojian, Taiping Houkui, etc. — all already covered on this site from other, fuller sources), but Sections 6.7-6.9, immediately above that list, contain three genuinely undocumented teas with real standard citations: Green Gem Tea, Xiangxi Huangjin Tea, and this one. Used for the national-standard profile, export grading codes, and shape-by-grade descriptions. No sensory (aroma/taste/liquor) descriptors were found in the source card for any grade — this page's sensory fields use general pan-fired-green-tea category descriptors rather than a Gunpowder-Tea-specific figure, and the body text says so directly.
• SCNet (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-Event) extraction pass over the same material card, used to draft initial English prose from the raw standard citations — SCNet API (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-Event). SCNet's draft correctly flagged that the source card provides no aroma, liquor or taste descriptors for any grade, and correctly treated the "glutinous rice paste shaping" detail as a traditional/historical note rather than confirmed current practice. Claude verified the draft against the source card directly before writing this file.

Imported from 中国绿茶标准研究资料库_ChinaTea101_Research_Master_File.md. Updated 2026-09-25. Last reviewed 2026-09-25