Region · in China
Henan
Henan is wheat and Yellow river country, and it holds one of China's ten famous teas anyway. All of it grows in the far south of the province, on the Huai river and the slopes above it, which is the traditional dividing line between northern and southern China. Tea in Henan is a southern crop being worked on the last ground that will take it.
What grows here
Xinyang Maojian, the pan-fired needle green, is effectively the province's whole reputation and most of its planted area. Xinyang Hong, a black tea made from the same gardens and launched in 2010, is the newer product and exists largely to give the summer and autumn crop somewhere to go. Tongbai county in Nanyang, on the other side of the same range, grows a smaller crop under its own name.
The ground
The gardens sit where the Dabie and Tongbai ranges meet, and everything about them is about being at a limit. Winters are cold enough to matter, the growing season is short and spring is late by Chinese standards, so the leaf grows slowly and the local claim is that the slowness is what puts the aroma in. Reservoirs and river valleys around Xinyang do some of the frost moderation that a coastline does elsewhere.
How it got here
Tea here is old rather than new. Lu Yu's Cha Jing, written around 760, already rates the tea of Guang prefecture, the Tang name for the country around Xinyang, at the top of the Huainan teas, so the ground has been recognised for more than twelve hundred years. Production then lapsed for centuries, and the modern industry does not descend from that line. It was rebuilt deliberately in the early twentieth century, and it was rebuilt in the Xinyang hills rather than anywhere else in the province, which is why one county still accounts for almost all of it.