Place · in Shandong
Laoshan
Laoshan is a granite massif on the Yellow Sea coast east of Qingdao and one of the northernmost places in China where tea is grown commercially. Tea is not native here and did not arrive until a state programme pushed cultivation north in the middle of the twentieth century. Everything distinctive about Laoshan tea follows from the fact that the plant is being grown right at the edge of what it can survive.
What grows here
Laoshan Green and Laoshan Black, from the same gardens and often from the same growers. Production is small: this is a coastal district rather than a tea region, and the planted area is a fraction of what Rizhao, Shandong's much larger producer, grows further down the coast.
The ground
Granite hills dropping straight into the Yellow Sea, with sea fog in summer, cold dry winters and snow. The maritime edge is what makes tea possible at all here, moderating the winter just enough for hardy bushes to survive where inland Shandong would kill them. Growers credit the long cold season and the very short growing window for the thick, sweet, bean-like character the region is known for, which is the standard slow-growth argument and is at least consistent with the climate. Laoshan is also known for its spring water, which the Qingdao brewery has traded on for over a century.
The bushes
Cold-hardy small-leaf stock railed up from the southern provinces during the transplant programme rather than anything indigenous, and the selection was made on survival before flavour. What matters more than the cultivar is how the bushes are kept alive. Rows are tented through the winter and uncovered in spring, and some gardens are worked as full plastic greenhouses instead. Greenhouse leaf comes earlier and darker, open-field leaf later, thicker and slower grown, and the county rates the second above the first. It is the first question a Qingdao tea shop will ask you, and it never once appears on an export label.
Harvest seasons
The northern calendar does not match the Chinese one. In late March nothing has moved here, so the whole pre-Qingming vocabulary is meaningless and a Laoshan tea advertised as mingqian is telling on itself. Covered gardens can start in early April; the open-field first picking, the one the county prices highest, comes at the end of April into early May, and the season is short. Spring leaf is markedly better than summer or autumn and the gap is easy to taste.
What to look for
Ask two things: whether the tea is actually from Laoshan, and whether it grew outdoors. Shandong's bulk production is at Rizhao, a few hours down the coast, and Laoshan is the name that sells, so leaf travels. Open-field spring tea is the thing worth paying for, and greenhouse tea is not the same product at the same price. Beyond that, buy the current spring: the creamy, bean-like sweetness that makes the region worth knowing fades a good deal faster than the price does.
How it got here
Tea in Shandong is a policy artefact. Shandong launched the nan cha bei yin campaign, bringing southern tea north, in 1956, with Qingdao, Rizhao and Linyi as its three trial sites. The first Laoshan plantings died in their first winter. The batch that took was set out at the Taiqing temple in 1959, tens of thousands of seedlings of which only a fraction came through, and those survivors are the basis of everything growing there now. That leaves Laoshan as one of the very few Chinese origins with a documented founding date and no legend attached to it. Black tea came later still, as a use for leaf outside the short green season.
Other places in Shandong
- Rizhao