Region · in China
Hunan
Hunan is China's dark tea province. Anhua county makes the pressed and pile-fermented heicha that went by caravan to the northwest and to Tibet for centuries, in formats that exist because of how they had to travel. It also makes a tea that is deliberately colonised by a fungus, and grows one of China's best-known yellow teas on an island in a lake.
What grows here
Anhua heicha in its several shapes: the three bricks (fu zhuan, the golden-flower one, plus hei zhuan and hua zhuan), the basket-packed loose grades led by tian jian, and qian liang cha, the compressed logs. Junshan Yinzhen, from a small island in Dongting lake, is the province's yellow tea, and Wei Shan Mao Jian near Ningxiang is the other. Anhua also makes a needle-shaped green, which is a modern craft rather than a tradition.
The ground
The Xuefeng mountains around Anhua give the county its growing ground, humid and warm, on soils the local industry credits for the thick, mature leaf that dark tea needs. The humidity is not incidental: this is a province whose signature process depends on controlled microbial activity, and a damp climate is part of the equipment. Dongting lake in the north is a different landscape entirely, and Junshan is an island in it.
The bushes
Local seed-grown populations, with the Yuntai mountain large-leaf stock at Anhua as the named one. Dark tea is made from mature leaf and stem rather than from buds, so the qualities being selected for here are the opposite of what a famous green wants: substance, thickness and the ability to survive fermentation and years of storage without collapsing.
How it is made here
Two steps define Anhua. Fu zhuan brick undergoes fa hua, a deliberate flowering step in which the pressed brick is held warm and humid until a specific fungus colonises it and appears as golden specks through the tea; a brick without them has failed rather than escaped something. Qian liang cha is packed and compressed inside a casing of bamboo, palm and reed into a log of a thousand old taels, about 36 kg, then cured outdoors for some seven weeks of alternating sun and dew, and it has to be sawn to be drunk.
What to look for
In a fu zhuan brick the golden flowers should be evenly spread through the body, not just on the surface, and their absence is a defect rather than a sign of purity. Do not read Hunan heicha as puerh: both are fermented, but the microbes and the process differ and one does not substitute for the other. Age claims are worth only as much as the seller's records, as anywhere in dark tea. Junshan Yinzhen needs a separate question: yellow tea's men huang smothering step is slow and often skipped, so a good deal of what carries the name is processed as a green.
How it got here
Anhua tea was a border-trade commodity long before it was a connoisseur's product: compressed leaf went north and west in exchange for horses, and the county's tea was designated official border-trade tea in 1595, which fixed both its formats and its market for centuries. The state factory era standardised the bricks. The current interest is recent, a product of the domestic dark tea revival of the last twenty years, which turned a bulk frontier commodity into something sold by vintage.
Places in Hunan
Named places inside Hunan. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Hunan
Tea styles tied to Hunan or to somewhere inside it.