Country
Bhutan
Bhutan barely grows tea, and the little it grows is odd enough to be worth knowing about. The country's own tradition is suja, salted butter tea churned from imported Chinese brick tea, and the plant was never farmed here at any scale. What exists now is essentially one village: Samcholing, in Trongsa in the centre of the country, where a stand of bushes planted by a king in the 1950s and then forgotten was turned into a working garden this century.
What grows here
Hand-made green tea, at a scale measured in hundreds of kilograms a year between the producers at Samcholing. Small amounts of black and lightly oxidised tea have been added more recently. There are scattered plots in the southern districts making tea for local sale, but nothing there is an industry. Most of the output is drunk inside Bhutan and the fraction that leaves goes to a handful of specialist importers in Europe and North America.
The ground
Samcholing sits at roughly 1,800 to 2,000 m in central Bhutan, high for tea, with the slow growth that high-altitude origins everywhere trade on. This is the eastern Himalaya, the same ridge system that carries Darjeeling and Sikkim to the west, so the ground was never the constraint: Bhutan has the altitude, the rainfall and the acid soil, and simply never built anything on them.
The bushes
Chinese small-leaf sinensis of Darjeeling descent. The original bushes came from Darjeeling seed given to the second king and planted at a royal palace at Samcholing in the 1950s, where they were left to grow into trees rather than farmed. Everything in the garden today is seed-grown from that stock, so the planting is a genetically mixed population rather than rows of one clone, which is now unusual in the eastern Himalaya.
How it is made here
The tea is a hybrid of three places. The plants are Indian, the ground is Bhutanese and the method is Korean: hand-plucked to two leaves and a bud, withered, pan-fired to stop oxidation, rolled, then fired again and dried. Korean expertise came in when the garden was commercialised, and pan-firing rather than steaming is why the result reads closer to a Korean green than to anything made in Darjeeling or Assam.
What to look for
Bhutanese tea means Samcholing in practice, and at this volume the useful question is who imported it rather than which estate it came from. Most tea sold and drunk inside Bhutan is Indian, from Assam and Darjeeling, so a packet bought in Thimphu is not automatically Bhutanese, and neither is the butter tea.
How it got here
The tea land Bhutan had, it lost. Under the Treaty of Sinchula in 1865, at the end of the Duar War, Bhutan ceded the Bengal and Assam duars to British India, and the plantation belt that grew up in those foothills over the following decades stands on ground that had been Bhutanese a few years earlier. Inside the kingdom nothing followed. The second king's Darjeeling seed went in at Samcholing in the 1950s and was then left alone; an American tea merchant found the overgrown trees in the mid 1990s, and the garden was built out from them with the agriculture ministry over the two decades after that.