Here is a file of chinese tea terms that will help.

http://tinyurl.com/28utana

You will find references to 'before the rain' and 'hyson'. I dont
think there is any problem with the characters for hyson which can be
verified. If you look elsewhere you will find English references to
'before the rain' when they talk about hyson.

When you put the two together you get the pinyin:
Yǔqián xīchūn

Remember pidgin is a mimic of southern Cantonese not northern HanYu.
I can see the 'young' and 'hyson'. We are trying to account for the
English trade term. I think the Chinese just use 'hyson' and the
redundant 'young' became part of the parlance. Later flushes of hyson
change name altogether.

This is my research. I wasnt happy with what Wikipedia said on the
subject.

Jim

On May 9, 2:12 pm, Lewis Perin > wrote:
> Space Cowboy > writes:
> > Young Hyson is the pidgin for the chinese characters 雨前 熙春 yuqian
> > xichun. In the Chinese stores Ive seen 'Eastern Beauty' more than
> > 'Oriental Beauty' as an English description.
>
> 雨前 (before the rains) and 熙春 (something like "splendid springtime")
> both show up in Chinese tea parlance. But if you google for 雨前熙春 as
> a single entity, you'll basically come up empty.[1] So if Young Hyson
> really is a transliteration of those Chinese characters, then those
> early Western tea traders must have been more clueless than I imagined.
>
> /Lew
> ---
> Lew Perin /
> [1]You'll see some bogus hits with commas between the second and third
> characters.