Region · in China
Jiangsu
Jiangsu is the Yangtze delta: flat, wet, rich and mostly not tea country. What tea it has is concentrated in a few hills around Lake Tai and in the corner near Yixing, and one of those hills produces Bi Luo Chun, which sits beside Longjing at the top of the Chinese green tea order. Yixing, in the same corner, is where the unglazed zisha clay teapot comes from.
What grows here
Bi Luo Chun from the Dongting hills at Lake Tai, west of Suzhou, which is the reason to know the province. Nanjing makes Yuhua Cha, a fine straight needle green created in the 1950s and named for the Rain Flower Terrace. Yixing, in the southwest, grows Yangxian tea, which was Tang tribute leaf long before the county became famous for teapots.
The ground
Dongting is two places rather than one. Dongshan is a peninsula reaching into Lake Tai from the east and Xishan is an island in the lake. Both are low hills on weathered sandy soils, and the water is the whole argument: a body that size holds off frost, keeps humidity up and pulls the spring forward, so this is one of the earliest famous greens in China despite the latitude. The gardens are interplanted with fruit and flowering trees, loquat, bayberry, plum and peach among them, which is genuine local practice rather than a marketing line.
The bushes
The old gardens are seed-grown local small-leaf population, and that mixture is part of what a buyer is paying for. Longjing 43, bred in Hangzhou and now planted across a dozen provinces including this one, buds earlier and is the usual choice for new ground, which shifts the picking calendar rather than the shape of the tea. Bi Luo Chun is a made shape rather than a plant, so a clonal garden can produce it and does.
Harvest seasons
Very early. Picking commonly opens in the second half of March and the pre-Qingming window is most of the season worth buying. The standard is severe, a bud with one just-opening leaf, and the number of bud sets that goes into a finished unit is the reason the tea costs what it does. Later pickings exist and are a coarser tea wearing the same name.
How it is made here
All of it happens in one wok, in one continuous sitting, by hand. Kill-green, rolling and drying are not separate stations here. The step that makes the tea is cuo tuan xian hao: the leaf is gathered and rubbed between the palms into balls against the hot pan, which curls it into the spiral and lifts the white down to the surface. The down is raised by the maker rather than merely preserved.
What to look for
Two traps. The name Dongting belongs to two unrelated tea places, these hills at Lake Tai in Jiangsu and Dongting lake in Hunan, where Junshan Yinzhen is made. They have nothing to do with each other. Second, Bi Luo Chun is now made in Sichuan, Guizhou, Zhejiang and Taiwan, anywhere the spiral can be rolled, so the name describes a shape. The protected designation is Dongting (Shan) Bi Luo Chun, Dongting mountain rather than Suzhou at large. Ask for that, ask for the harvest year and drink it inside it.
How it got here
The tea's own account of itself is a renaming. It was called Xia Sha Ren Xiang, roughly 'scares you to death fragrance', until the Kangxi emperor is said to have heard the name on a southern tour in 1699 and replaced it with Bi Luo Chun. The province's other contribution is harder-wearing: Yixing began producing unglazed zisha stoneware teapots in quantity around the middle of the Ming, and they were reaching Europe by the late seventeenth century, which is how the small unglazed pot became the default vessel for Chinese tea.
Places in Jiangsu
Named places inside Jiangsu. The ones with a page of their own are links.