Monkeys?

Not long after I started drinking Chinese tea, I came across a can of Monkey Picked Tea in the local Asian grocery store.
The marketing material skirted the issue, but made no claim that the contents had been picked by simians. I've since come across two versions of the legends behind the monkeys. One is that Buddhist monks trained monkeys to climb trees and pick wild tea leaves.
Another version is that there was a village where the locals would incite the monkeys in tea trees. The irate critters would throw handfuls of leaves at the people.
I tend to suspect that the tea historians are correct who say it's just a metaphor for tea picked on steep hills and mountain tops.
The interesting thing is that the most common references today are to "monkey picked tie guan yin." Since tie guan yin has since the beginning come from domestic plants, cultivated bushes, it seems like marketing hooey.
Someone's selling a cheap wholesale Monkey Picked Tea that's turning up on many websites with the claim that it's actually picked by monkeys.
For starters, given most monkeys' love for scratching their butts and picking lice from their girlfriends' heads, I wouldn't drink anything picked by a monkey. But I guess some people think it'll induce suckers to spend big on cheap tea. A lot of the claims sound like the telling of urban legends: It's true because it was my cousin's neighbor's grandmother.
Established site ThinkGeek.com offers this nonsense with their monkey-butt-picked tea:
"Nowadays the practice of monkeys picking tea has all but died out, except in one small remote village where they still continue this remarkable tradition."
Notice how they don't know the name of the village.