Region · in China
Guizhou
Guizhou is one of the two largest tea-growing provinces in China by planted area, level with or just behind Yunnan, and it has almost no name recognition to go with it. It is a high, wet plateau in the southwest that expanded into tea very recently and very fast on provincial policy, and much of what it grows leaves anonymously, to be finished and sold under other regions' names. Reading Guizhou is mostly reading the supply side of teas whose labels say somewhere else.
What grows here
Green tea overwhelmingly. Duyun Maojian, from Duyun in the south, is the province's one entry on China's famous-tea lists. Meitan, in the Zunyi area, is the largest tea county in the province and makes Meitan Cuiya green and Zunyi black, with neighbouring Fenggang alongside it. Beyond the named teas there is a very large quantity of unbranded early spring green sold as raw material rather than as a Guizhou tea.
The ground
The Yunnan and Guizhou plateau, with most gardens somewhere between roughly 800 and 1,400 m under persistent cloud and high humidity. This is karst country, though the tea sits on the acidic yellow soils between the limestone rather than on it. The province markets its soils as unusually rich in selenium and zinc, particularly around Fenggang, which is a claim worth treating as a claim. The useful facts are altitude and light: gardens are high, the sun is weak and there is very little heavy industry near the growing areas.
Harvest seasons
Early, and that is the commercial argument. Guizhou picks well ahead of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, and that timing is worth more to a processor in another province than a Guizhou name is worth to a consumer, which is a large part of why the leaf leaves unnamed.
What to look for
Guizhou is more often the hidden answer than the thing on the label. Early spring green sold under an eastern famous name at an unusually low price is quite likely Guizhou leaf, and that is not the grower's doing; it happens at the processing end. Bought as itself, Guizhou tea tends to be good value precisely because it carries no name premium. Duyun Maojian is the one Guizhou name that commands a premium of its own, which makes it the one worth checking the origin on.
How it got here
Guizhou's tea history is largely twentieth century and largely deliberate. In 1939, with the coast lost to the war with Japan, the Nationalist government surveyed the interior for a site and founded the Central Experimental Tea Farm at Meitan, the first state-run tea research and production station China had. It stayed after the war, leaving the province with a research base out of all proportion to what it grew. The expansion came much later, from provincial policy in the 2000s that pushed tea across the plateau as a poverty programme, and the acreage grew far faster than the reputation. That gap is what a buyer is looking at today.
Places in Guizhou
Named places inside Guizhou. The ones with a page of their own are links.