The year given is 1423. A monk called Eirin Shuzui, returning from Zen training in Ming China, gave tea seed to Matsuo Tarogoro Hisaie, the village head of Kanokoo in Chikugo, along with the method for making tea from it. With the village head's backing, the temple Reiganji was built, and that site is regarded as where Yame tea began.

A tea offering ceremony in Shuzui's memory is still held there every year on the second of May, the eighty-eighth night after the start of spring.

Cultivation became serious in the Edo period, when tea worked its way into ordinary households. In the Meiji years the region moved from pan-fired tea to steamed green tea, and the technique developed from there. It was around then that Yame's reputation for gyokuro was made.

The high-grade gyokuro comes from the hill villages: Kuroki, Joyo, Hoshino. For the traditional gyokuro the shade over the bushes is still built from rice straw rather than synthetic netting, which is more work and produces a different light. The traditional gyokuro of Yame has taken the agriculture minister's prize and the producing-region prize at the national tea competition for twenty consecutive years. Six hundred years from one handful of seed.