Place · in Fujian
Anxi
Anxi is a county of green hills inland from Xiamen that turned one cultivar into an industry. Tie Guan Yin is grown far outside it now, but Anxi is where the bush was found, where the rolled half-ball shape was worked out and where the trade's vocabulary comes from. It is also the place that changed its own famous tea most drastically in living memory, swapping a roasted oolong for a jade-green one inside roughly a decade.
What grows here
Four named oolongs from four cultivars, all made in the same rolled half-ball shape and all easy to confuse by eye: Tie Guan Yin, Ben Shan, Huang Jin Gui and Mao Xie. Jin Guan Yin, a cross of the first and the third, is planted here too. Because the shape and the process are shared, the cultivar is the whole difference, which is why an honest Anxi seller names it and a careless one lets everything read as Tie Guan Yin.
The ground
Anxi sits in the hills inland from the coast, on the iron-rich red soils the county is known for, and it splits in practice into two halves along a line of ridges through the middle of the county. Inner Anxi (nei An Xi), the western townships including Xiping, Gande, Xianghua and Changkeng, averages roughly 600 to 700 m, cooler and more often under cloud, and it makes the great majority of the county's tea. Outer Anxi (wai An Xi), toward the coast, sits nearer 300 to 400 m and is warmer. Shop copy almost never states which half a lot came from.
The bushes
Tie Guan Yin the bush is the difficult one, lower yielding and fussier than its neighbours, which is exactly why the other three were planted alongside it and why they end up in the same bags. Huang Jin Gui buds earliest of the four, so the first Anxi oolong of the year is often not Tie Guan Yin at all. Mao Xie is recognisable by the down on its buds. Ben Shan is the closest look-alike and the usual stand-in, and it is a decent tea sold under its own name.
Harvest seasons
Anxi picks four or five times a year and prices each separately. The local saying is chun shui qiu xiang, spring water and autumn aroma: the spring lot has the body, the autumn lot has the fragrance the county is known for, and the summer pickings are cheap. A thin late-winter picking, dong pian, is sold on novelty. This is one of the few Chinese origins where autumn is not automatically second best, so a lot with no season stated is withholding something a buyer would want to know.
How it is made here
Two steps here are local rather than generic. Anxi finishes by hand-picking the stems off, so a finished Anxi oolong is loose single leaves snapped from the stalk after drying, which is why the pellets look the way they do. The second is air conditioning, brought over from Taiwan in the 1990s. Working zuo qing in a room held near 20 degrees is what let makers cut the number of tossing cycles, stretch the timing and stop the oxidation far lower than the old roasted style permitted. The tea changed because the workshop did.
What to look for
Decide first whether you want the modern jade-green style or the traditional roasted one, then ask two questions the label will not answer: which half of the county, and when the leaf was fixed. Zheng wei, also called zheng chao, means the kill-green went in around midday on the day after picking, on the old schedule. Xiao qing runs it later that day and tuo suan drags it into the next, both greener and more fragrant, both leaning on the air conditioning. Unroasted Anxi oolong is perishable in a way roasted Wuyi is not, so a shop selling loose jade Tie Guan Yin from an open jar is selling you last year.
How it got here
Two rival stories put the original bush in Xiping township in the eighteenth century: one credits a farmer named Wei, the other an official named Wang. Both are legends and the county keeps both. The modern arc is better attested. Anxi built an enormous industry on the jade-green style through the 1990s and 2000s and overplanted on the back of it. From about 2012 a run of pesticide and rare-earth residue findings in national testing hit the name hard, the market fell away, and the county has spent the years since pulling back toward higher ground and, in some workshops, back toward the roast it had abandoned.
Styles from Anxi
Tea styles tied to Anxi or to somewhere inside it.