Bergamot Oolong

[wyardley]

Another angle to consider is that vendors sometimes get told silly things. If you ask Brian from Shan Shui teas why he has a category for "Wulong" under "Oolong," he'll tell you that it's because the Taiwanese high-mountain oolong farmers told him that their tea is the only "wulong" and all the others are "oolong" - nevermind the fact that they're just two different Romanizations for the exact same word, and pronounced the same.

ps - This is really ridiculous... it amazes me that someone who believes this is selling tea, and specializing in Chinese tea.

I wonder if the farmers told him this just to make him look stupid to his customers. More likely a miscommunication of some sort.

Hehe, I know what you mean. I really suspect that they were saying "We [in Taiwan] call it "wulong" and the Chinese call it "oolong"" or something similar. In this case "call" meaning spell.

Were they saying this out loud, or writing it down? Maybe they were trying to highlight a major or minor difference in how the word is said in (spoken) Taiwanese Mandarin vs. standard Mandarin, or in another (spoken) language (e.g., Taiwanese / Hokkien, Hakka) vs. standard Mandarin. Or they could have been aluding to the difference between乌龙 (simplified characters) vs. 烏龍 (traditional characters)?

It seems odd that they'd be saying that it's "spelled" (i.e., romanized) wulong in Taiwan and oolong in mainland China, since both places romanize that word inconsistently, and if anything, I'd think "wulong" would be used more often in the mainland.

Anyway, I've already said about 50% more than I know.

[ABx]

Were they saying this out loud, or writing it down? Maybe they were trying to highlight a major or minor difference in how the word is said in (spoken) Taiwanese Mandarin vs. standard Mandarin, or in another (spoken) language (e.g., Taiwanese / Hokkien, Hakka) vs. standard Mandarin. Or they could have been aluding to the difference between乌龙 (simplified characters) vs. 烏龍 (traditional characters)?

It seems odd that they'd be saying that it's "spelled" (i.e., romanized) wulong in Taiwan and oolong in mainland China, since both places romanize that word inconsistently, and if anything, I'd think "wulong" would be used more often in the mainland.

Anyway, I've already said about 50% more than I know.

He didn't say. Looking back at the emails I actually have to assume that it's the farmers that told him that, as he just stated it as fact. I did assume that it was the farmers/distributors that he spoke to and he didn't correct me on that, though.

I think you're explanations are very likely, though with a language barrier I think it's probably likely that they use some simplified words like "we call it..." But yeah, I'm really just speculating, as something like that is about the only explanation I can really imagine.