Place · in Huangshan
Qimen
Qimen sits in the far southwest of Huangshan prefecture, over the ridge from the tourist mountain and hard against the Jiangxi border. It is the origin of Keemun, the one Chinese black tea the West built a habit around, and the county name is what the word Keemun is. Less well known is that Qimen also makes a basket-packed dark tea under another county's name, which is why two unrelated famous teas both point here.
What grows here
Keemun, in the sorted styles the export trade named: Hao Ya in its A and B grades, Mao Feng and Xin Ya, all of them Qi Hong, Qimen red. The county's second tea is An Cha, the basket-packed dark tea sold for a century as Liu An, made in the western townships of Luxi and Rongkou. Qimen still makes green tea as well, which is what it made before the switch, but nothing with a name.
The ground
Qimen's valleys drain south toward Jiangxi rather than east into the Xin'an, which is the physical reason a county on the same massif behaves as its own growing area rather than as an annex of the tourist mountain. It sits wetter and milder than the peaks above it, with an annual mean around 15 C and rainfall near 1,700 mm. Growers credit the near-permanent low cloud and the long slow spring for aroma rather than for strength, which is the right way round for this tea: Keemun is bought for its scent, not its body.
The bushes
Zhuye Zhong, the local seed-grown population named for a leaf resembling the chinquapin's, is what the reputation rests on. It was a green tea bush before the 1870s and nobody replaced it: the switch to black tea was a change of method on the same plants. The floral, honeyed note the trade calls Qimen xiang is credited to the bush rather than to the processing.
Harvest seasons
Picking runs from around Qingming into May, later than the county's green tea would take and to a bud with one or two leaves rather than to a bud alone. Spring lots carry the aroma and are what a Hao Ya is sorted out of. Later pickings go into the bulk grades that end up in breakfast blends, where the tea is doing a job rather than being tasted.
How it is made here
Keemun's labour is in the sorting rather than in the oxidation. After withering, rolling, oxidation and firing, the tea goes through a long refining stage of screening, cutting, winnowing and grading, historically by hand and in successive passes, so a finished grade is a fraction pulled out of a batch rather than the batch itself. An Cha is a different craft entirely: pile-fermented leaf, steamed and packed into small bamboo baskets lined with bamboo leaf, then dried over charcoal and stacked to age.
What to look for
Where Keemun may legally be made is contested, and not settled. A Qimen county association registered a certification mark for the name that drew the production area at the county line; after thirteen years of litigation the Beijing High People's Court invalidated it in 2018, on the argument that the historic Keemun district also took in Shitai, Dongzhi, Guichi and Yi county. So tea made to the recipe just outside Qimen is not straightforwardly a fake and there is no clean boundary to appeal to. The grade names help less than they look either: Hao Ya, Mao Feng and Xin Ya describe leaf size and sorting, not origin or altitude.
How it got here
The switch to black tea came in the 1870s, when green prices collapsed and local makers copied the Fujian method onto their own bushes. An Cha ran the other way, from famous to forgotten and back. Sun Yishun, the best known of the basket-tea houses, made its last batch around 1943 and county production then stopped for four decades. It returned the long way round: in 1983 an overseas Chinese tea foundation posted an old basket to the Anhui tea company and asked for the tea to be reproduced, and technicians sent into Luxi the following year worked the method back out from the surviving makers.
Styles from Qimen
Tea styles tied to Qimen or to somewhere inside it.
Other places in Huangshan
- Xiuning
- Shexian
- Taiping