Region · in China
Jiangxi
Jiangxi grows a lot of tea and sells very little of it under its own name. It is ringed by Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian and Hunan, all of which have famous teas, and its production has spent most of the modern era feeding theirs. What it does have is one mountain green with a real reputation, a county that used to belong to Anhui and a Tang dynasty tea market that the world now knows for porcelain instead.
What grows here
Lushan Yunwu, the cloud and mist green from Mount Lu in the north, is the province's one widely known tea. Wuyuan in the northeast makes green tea in the Anhui idiom and is China's leading organic tea county: it certified to European organic standards in 1997 and now supplies around half of the organic green tea the European Union buys from China. Xiushui in the northwest makes Ninghong, which the Chinese trade counts among the earliest gongfu black teas and which sold to Russian buyers by the chest in the 1890s. Fuliang, next to Jingdezhen, still grows tea on ground that carried one of the Tang dynasty's biggest tea markets.
The ground
Hill country around a central basin, wet, hot in summer and cool in the uplands, which is why the tea sits on the mountains at the edges rather than in the middle. Mount Lu rises off the Yangtze near Poyang lake and generates the fog the tea is named for. That same lake and river system is why Jiangxi tea has always moved cheaply and easily, and the low industrial density of the northeastern counties is a large part of why organic certification took hold there rather than elsewhere.
What to look for
Jiangxi is a supplier province, so the useful question is usually what a Jiangxi tea is being sold as. Organic Longjing-style green in particular is often Jiangxi leaf, which is honest product in an inherited shape rather than a fake, but it is not West Lake tea and should not be priced as though it were. Wuyuan green resembles Anhui green because Wuyuan was a Huizhou county for most of its history, not because it is imitating anything. Lushan Yunwu is the name here that gets borrowed most.
How it got here
Jiangxi was central to the tea trade long before it became peripheral to it. Fuliang, the county that contains Jingdezhen, was one of the Tang dynasty's great tea markets and a collection point for the tea tax, familiar to Chinese readers from the line in Bai Juyi's Song of the Pipa about a merchant gone off to Fuliang to buy tea. Wuyuan was a Huizhou county in Anhui for six centuries until 1934, when it was handed to Jiangxi to simplify the campaign against the Red Army; it went back in 1947 and was reassigned for good in 1949, against local objection both times. Neither fact survives in how the province's tea is sold today.
Places in Jiangxi
Named places inside Jiangxi. The ones with a page of their own are links.