Most tea experts and sellers agree that monkey-picked tea is just a myth.
There are two primary legends surrounding the supposedly monkey-picked tea.
One says that monks in Anxi tormented the monkeys who were hanging out in the upper levels of the camelia sinensis bushes, and that these annoyed monkeys tossed down the leaves at the monks in retribution.
The other commonly heard story says that since the camelia sinensis bushes were tall and could not support much weight and, moreover, grew inconveniently on cliffs, monkeys devoted to their human overlords willingly went up and retrieved the leaves and handed them over.
A more generally known, but no less fanciful, story is that monks very patiently have trained the monkeys to pick the tea leaves.
Back in the 17 and 1800s, when Chinese tea first became of interest to Westerners, monkey-picked tea may have been but a sly marketing ploy.
According to James Norwood Pratt, author of Tea Dictionary and Ultimate Tea Lover’s Treasury, English explorer Aeneas Anderson bought the myth that monkeys picked tea on his trip to China in 1793, and is responsible for spreading the story all over Europe.
In truth, monkey-picked tea was more of a hyperbolic way to state that the tea hails from a place that’s hard to reach. So out of reach that it would take money-like skills to pluck it.
As put by the Tea Trekker’s New York Times-dubbed “Professors of Tea” May Lou Heiss and Bob Heiss, the designation of monkey-picked is given to teas that meet the following criteria:
“1) That this particular batch of tea came from a tea garden located at a very high elevation (the higher the elevation, the finer the leaf and the finer the tea)
2) That the tea was plucked from tea bushes growing in difficult to reach places; ie. nearly inaccessible places that require the tea pluckers be ’as agile as a monkey.’”
The monkey-picked tea on the market today is almost certainly not picked by real monkeys, although one seller claims to have monkeys working to pluck the leaves.