The tone register contrast in Wu Chinese was developed from the consonant voicing contrast of the syllable onsets, and different contrasts in segmental features still co-occur with tone register in various prosodic positions. In general, the low register tones are related to voiced onsets and/or breathy vowels, while the high register tones occur in syllables with voiceless onsets and/or modal vowels. This study aims to investigate the perceptual cues of the tone register contrast in Wenzhou Wu Chinese between syllables with onsets of different manners of articulation. A generational change of the main perception cue from pitch to vowel phonation was observed, while the change was asynchronous between syllables with onsets of different manners of articulation. The perceptual role of pitch remained more robust in sonorant-onset syllables than in plosive-onset syllables. The perceptual importance of phonetic consonant voicing was found to be especially prominent in fricative-onset syllables, due to the equivalent phonetic realisation of tone register contrast in fricative-onset syllables, and possibly also cross-linguistic perceptual cue weighting strategies for perceiving consonant voicing.