Region · in China
Hubei
Hubei has two claims nowhere else can make, plus a third that is mostly trivia. Enshi, in the western mountains, still steams its green tea, which is what all Chinese green tea once was and almost none of it is now. And the Hubei brick trade supplied Russia and Mongolia by caravan for two centuries, which turned a provincial tea into a European commodity long before anyone abroad knew the province existed. The trivia: Lu Yu, who wrote the first book about tea, was born here.
What grows here
Enshi Yulu, the steamed green, from the Enshi Tujia and Miao prefecture in the west. Qing Zhuan, the pressed green brick, from the southeast around Chibi, made from mature leaf and stem for the northern trade. Yichang and the Enshi hills behind it make Yihong, a nineteenth-century gongfu black built for export. Beyond those the province grows a large volume of ordinary green that is drunk domestically and rarely named.
The ground
Two very different halves. The west, around Enshi, is high, steep, wet mountain country on the edge of the Sichuan basin, remote enough that its tea craft went its own way; the local claim to fame is selenium-rich soil, which the prefecture markets hard. The east is lower, flatter Yangtze country, better suited to the volume leaf that went into bricks. The river is the other terroir fact here: Hankou, now part of Wuhan, was the port that made Hubei tea a global commodity.
How it is made here
Steaming is the point. Enshi Yulu fixes the leaf with steam rather than in a wok, then rolls and dries it into fine dark needles, which is why it looks and tastes closer to a Japanese sencha than to a Chinese pan-fired green. China steamed its tea before the Ming shift to pan-firing and then largely dropped the method, and Enshi Yulu is the one traditional steamed needle green that survived it. At the other end of the province Qing Zhuan runs the opposite way: coarse leaf and stem, sometimes as much as a quarter stem by weight, piled and fermented and pressed hard into a marked brick.
What to look for
For Enshi Yulu the tell is in the leaf and the cup: fine, dark, straight needles and a deep vegetal sweetness rather than a toasted note. Pan-fired Hubei green sold under the Yulu name is a live problem, and a chestnut or roasted character means the wok was used. For Qing Zhuan, judge it as what it is, a coarse trade brick, and ask about stem content and storage rather than looking for tenderness. Selenium content is a marketing line here, not a grade.
How it got here
Hubei's tea went north. From the eighteenth century, brick tea pressed around Yangloudong in Chibi went to Hankou, then up through Zhangjiakou and overland by camel caravan across Mongolia to Kyakhta on the Russian border, the route Chinese sources call the ten thousand li tea road. Russian merchants set up their own brick works at Yangloudong from 1863 and moved the operation down to the Hankou concession in 1873, swapping hand pressing for steam presses; that plant is usually counted as the first machine industry in Hubei. The trade ended with the Russian revolution, and the province's reputation went with it.
Places in Hubei
Named places inside Hubei. The ones with a page of their own are links.