Oolong, Wulong or Wu-long, what is the difference?

"Oolong tea", "wulong tea","Wu-long" etc are all the same category of tea.

The different spellings originate because the chinese (Mandarin) language when writen uses symbles to represent syllables, rather then built up from an alphabet like English.

The process of transcribing spoken chinese to the western alphabet is known as "Romanising". Several different systems exist. The Tiawanise dialect uses a different system from Mandarin for translating sounds ( or "romanising") to english.

To complicate things further, the province in mainland China famous for Oolong tea is Fujian province - which being opposite Tiawan, uses this dialect natively - translating their tea to Oolong, whereas the mandarin system would more readily translate the sound to Wulong. The US english literature seems to have more readily adpated the wulong variations then some other english speaking countries.

Here is the official site from Fujian talking about their Oolong!

Welcome to the world of Oolong tea: http://www.oolongtea.org/e/index.html