China's famous teas are tied to specific places the way wines are tied to their vineyards. Here are six of the most celebrated, the towns that make them, and why each tea grows where it does: it is one plant, Camellia sinensis, turned by climate, rock, cultivar and craft into green, white, oolong, black and aged dark tea.
Look at the map and the teas cluster in a band across the warm, wet, hilly south and southwest, and that is not an accident. The tea plant wants mild temperatures, heavy rainfall, acidic well-drained slopes and, above all, mist: cloud and fog diffuse the sunlight and slow the leaf’s growth, which concentrates the amino acids and aromatics that make a tea worth naming. Flat, sunny, fertile plains grow rice; misty hillsides grow famous tea.
But terroir is never only climate. It is the rock, the cultivar and the craft as well. Wuyi’s mineral cliffs lend Da Hong Pao its “rock rhyme”; Yunnan’s ancient large-leaf trees and a caravan road to Tibet made Pu’er a tea built to age; Fuding’s downy Da Bai bud makes a tea barely processed at all; Anxi’s hills and a single lucky cultivar make Tieguanyin; and a misty green-tea county in Anhui became a black-tea one the year a disgraced official carried the method home. Same plant, six places, six completely different teas.
These six are a starting map, not the whole of it, and between them they already cover almost the entire spectrum of Chinese tea, from unoxidised green and barely-touched white, through two faces of oolong, to black and to fermented, aged pu’er. The leaf is only half the story, of course: the cup it is brewed in comes from this atlas too, the purple-clay teapots of Yixing and the porcelain of Jingdezhen.