Region · in China
Anhui
Anhui is small in tea volume and enormous in reputation, because several of the teas on China's famous-tea lists come from a handful of its mountains. It also produced the one Chinese black tea the West genuinely built a habit around: Keemun, which appeared here in the 1870s, is the Chinese leaf in the classic English breakfast blend.
What grows here
The Huangshan area carries most of it: Keemun black from Qimen county, Taiping Houkui with its extraordinary long flat blades, and Huangshan Maofeng. Qimen also makes An Cha, the basket-packed dark tea long sold in Guangdong and Hong Kong as Liu An, which despite that name is not from Lu'an. Westward in the Dabie mountains, Lu'an makes Liu An Gua Pian, the leaf-only green, while neighbouring Huoshan makes Huo Shan Huang Ya, one of the few yellow teas still produced at any scale. Xiuning's Songluo, historically the model for exported Chinese green, is also from here.
The ground
Two ranges do the work. Huangshan is granite, steep and famously cloud-wrapped, with tea sitting in the valleys and on the lower slopes where the fog sits longest. The Dabie mountains in the west are gentler and lower, cool enough around Huoshan and Lu'an to slow spring growth without the extremes of the south. Neither is a large planting area, which is a large part of why these teas stayed famous rather than becoming commodities.
The bushes
Anhui is a good argument for cultivar mattering visibly. Qimen's local seed-grown stock, the zhuye zhong, is credited with the floral aroma that made Keemun distinctive rather than merely strong. Taiping Houkui is made from a variety with unusually long leaves, which is the only reason its two-finger flat blades are physically possible; the same processing on ordinary leaf gives nothing like it. Most of the province still works from local populations rather than imported clones.
Harvest seasons
The greens follow the standard Chinese calendar and want the pre-Qingming and immediately post-Qingming windows in early April. Keemun is different and is picked a little later, since a black tea wants slightly more developed leaf than a bud-driven green does. Taiping Houkui is picked to a specific two-leaf-and-a-bud standard rather than to a date, because the shape depends on getting leaves of the right length.
How it is made here
Three distinct signatures live in one province. Keemun is a gongfu black, oxidised slowly and then sorted obsessively into fine, even, tight strips, which is where much of the labour goes. Taiping Houkui is pressed flat between mesh screens, leaving a faint grid imprint on the leaf and a red central vein when it is done properly. Liu An Gua Pian is the odd one: bud and stem are discarded and only single leaves are used, then pan-fired and charcoal-baked, which no other famous Chinese green does.
What to look for
Keemun grade names, Mao Feng and Hao Ya among them, describe leaf style and sorting rather than origin, and plenty of tea sold as Keemun is made outside Qimen to the same recipe. For Taiping Houkui, imitation is easy to spot once you know what to look for: the real thing uses the long-leafed local variety and shows the screen pattern and the red vein, while cheap versions are ordinary leaf machine-pressed flat. For any of the greens, insist on the current year.
How it got here
Keemun is a young tea with a contested birth. Qimen made green tea until the 1870s, when a collapse in green prices pushed local makers to copy Fujian's black tea method. Two names attach to the switch: Yu Ganchen, a dismissed official who had served in Fujian, and Hu Yuanlong, a Qimen man who built a factory to do it at scale. The export market took it almost immediately. Anhui's greens are far older, and Songluo from Xiuning was one of the first Chinese greens exported in quantity, which is why early European accounts of green tea describe something made in these hills.
Places in Anhui
Named places inside Anhui. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Anhui
Tea styles tied to Anhui or to somewhere inside it.