Region · in China
Shaanxi
Shaanxi's place in tea is split in two by a mountain range. Its gardens are all in the far south, past the Qinling, in country that is climatically southern China. Its famous product is made well to the north of them, at Jingyang on the dry Wei river plain, from leaf grown somewhere else entirely. The trade traces fu brick to Jingyang, and the brick was finished there for some six centuries before the craft was moved away.
What grows here
Two green teas and a brick. Ziyang in Ankang makes a green sold on the unusually high selenium in the local ground, with a geographical indication to match. Hanzhong, west of it on the northern slopes of the Daba mountains, makes Hanzhong Xianhao, a single public brand the city assembled in 2007 out of a scatter of older county names, Wuzi Xianhao among them. Jingyang fu brick is the third and it is not a growing product at all: the county sits north of the Qinling and has never grown tea.
The ground
Two climates in one province, with the Qinling between them. South of the range the Han river basin is warm, wet and forested, on the same side of China's north-south divide as Sichuan, which is why tea grows there and nowhere else in Shaanxi. North of it the Guanzhong plain around Jingyang is dry, continental and cold in winter. That second climate is not a growing terroir. It is a curing one, and Jingyang's whole claim rests on it.
How it is made here
What Jingyang contributes is not the brick but the geography of making it. Leaf grown in Hunan and southern Shaanxi was hauled north as loose dark maocha, then steamed, pressed and above all flowered here, the fa hua step held for weeks in Jingyang's dry air and Jingyang's water. Local practice held that all three had to be present, the water, the climate and the technique, and that the brick could not be made without them. Running a microbial step a thousand kilometres from the garden is the unusual part.
What to look for
Almost all fu brick on the market is from Hunan, and that is the ordinary case rather than a substitution. Jingyang production is a revival: trial batches succeeded there in 2007 and the Jingyang fu brick geographical indication dates only to 2013, so any Jingyang brick you meet was made inside the last two decades and cannot have been ageing since the old days whatever the packaging implies. Southern Shaanxi's greens are a separate question, and the selenium claim on Ziyang tea is a fact about the county's soil rather than a grade.
How it got here
Jingyang made fu brick for roughly six hundred years on the strength of being the transfer point between the tea country and the northwestern caravan trade. It stopped abruptly. Between 1953 and 1958 the state moved the factories, the equipment and the workers to Anhua in Hunan, reasoning that tea should be processed where the leaf grows, and Jingyang production ceased; it resumed only in the 2000s. The province's older claim is Chang'an, the Tang capital that Lu Yu's world supplied. The crypt under the Famen temple pagoda, sealed in 874 and reopened in 1987, held a complete imperial Tang tea service.
Places in Shaanxi
Named places inside Shaanxi. The ones with a page of their own are links.