Place · in Anhui
Huangshan
Huangshan is a mountain, a city and a prefecture, and the three do not cover the same ground. The city was created in 1987 out of the old Huizhou prefecture, so Qimen, Taiping, Shexian and Xiuning all sit inside Huangshan today, which is why an unexpected number of famous teas share the name. The mountain itself is granite, steep and cloud-bound, and the gardens sit below its scenic core rather than on it.
What grows here
Keemun black from Qimen, Taiping Houkui from Taiping and Huangshan Maofeng from the slopes around the mountain, plus Songluo from Xiuning, the green the East India trade shipped as Singlo. Qimen also makes Liu An, the basket-packed dark tea, out of two townships in the county's west, Luxi and Rongkou. It is named for Lu'an, on the far side of the province, and it has not been made there for a long time. That is not an error in the label. It is an error in the name.
The ground
Granite, and a great deal of cloud. The massif holds fog in the valleys for much of the year, and the gardens sit in those valleys and on the lower slopes rather than up on the peaks, which are bare rock. Huangshan Maofeng is commonly given as growing between about 300 and 800 m, modest by famous-mountain standards; the argument here is fog and shade, not altitude. Qimen, on the southwestern extension of the massif, is cooler and wetter than the tourist mountain and works as a separate growing area.
What to look for
The name is the trap. Huangshan is a prefecture-level city, so a Huangshan address can mean the mountain, or Qimen in the far southwest of the same prefecture, or anywhere else in the old Huizhou counties. Ask for the county. Maofeng is the loosest name of the three, because mao feng is a plucking standard used across China rather than a place, so Huangshan Maofeng is only as good as its Huangshan part. For Taiping Houkui the core villages are Hou Keng, Hou Gang and Yan Jia, and real lots are named for them.
How it got here
The tea followed the merchants. Huizhou, the old prefecture, produced the merchant houses that dominated Chinese long-distance trade for centuries, and tea moved out of these hills down the Xin'an river toward Hangzhou and on to the export ports on their accounts. That commercial reach, rather than the mountain, is why a small area of steep valleys ended up supplying Europe first with Songluo and later with Keemun. In November 1987 the State Council abolished Huizhou prefecture outright and put a prefecture-level Huangshan city in its place, seated at Tunxi, for the tourist name. The tea names stayed attached to the old counties, which is the source of most of the confusion since.
Places in Huangshan
Named places inside Huangshan. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Huangshan
Tea styles tied to Huangshan or to somewhere inside it.