Region · in China
Guangxi
Guangxi is a dark tea province with one internationally significant tea: Liu Bao, a post-fermented heicha from Wuzhou that went down the Xi river to Guangzhou and out to Southeast Asia, where it became the everyday tea of overseas Chinese communities and especially of the tin miners in Malaya. It is also, less romantically, where most of China's jasmine flowers are now grown, concentrated around Hengzhou near Nanning.
What grows here
Liu Bao heicha above all, packed into large woven baskets and aged, in both modern factory production and a smaller farmhouse tradition. The province is also the country's main jasmine-scenting base now, growing the flowers and doing the scenting that used to be concentrated in Fuzhou, and it makes green and black teas for the domestic market that rarely leave the region.
The ground
Subtropical, humid and hilly, with the karst landscape the province is famous for and a river system that drains eastward toward Guangdong. That humidity matters twice over: it suits the pile fermentation Liu Bao depends on, and it makes the traditional ageing warehouses and cellars around Wuzhou work as they do. The tea gardens themselves sit in the hills of the eastern counties rather than in the tourist karst country.
The bushes
Local seed-grown populations, generally mid to large-leaved, selected over time around the Liu Bao area rather than bred elsewhere and imported. Cultivar is not how this tea is sold or discussed, and the variables buyers actually argue about are the fermentation, the basket, the warehouse and the years, which is typical of dark tea everywhere.
How it is made here
Liu Bao is made by killing the green, rolling, then pile-fermenting the damp leaf, and then steaming and packing it into large woven baskets where it continues to change for years. Wuzhou ages it in cellars and in tunnels cut under the city, and the aroma that classic Liu Bao is judged on, described as betel nut, is credited to that fermentation and storage rather than to the leaf. The farmhouse version is processed more lightly and behaves differently in age.
What to look for
First, do not confuse Liu Bao from Guangxi with Liu An from Anhui: the names are close, both are basket-packed dark teas and they are not the same thing. Second, distinguish the modern factory style from the farmhouse teas, which are made to a different process and are not simply an older version of the same product. Age claims on dark tea are as unverifiable here as anywhere, so treat the storage story and the seller's reputation as the actual product.
How it got here
Liu Bao was a Qing-era river-trade tea, moved down the Xi river to Guangzhou and then shipped to Southeast Asia, and the trade grew enormously with Chinese emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its role as the daily tea of Malayan tin mines is why the strongest surviving market for aged Liu Bao is in Malaysia and Singapore rather than in China. State factories standardised production in the twentieth century, and domestic Chinese interest returned only recently, on the back of the wider dark tea revival.
Places in Guangxi
Named places inside Guangxi. The ones with a page of their own are links.