Region · in China
Sichuan
Sichuan is two tea provinces sharing a name. One picks weeks ahead of the famous eastern gardens and makes bud greens plus one of the country's few surviving yellow teas. The other presses coarse leaf and stem into bricks for Tibet and has done so for centuries. The two have almost nothing to do with each other, and most of what Sichuan grows is drunk in China rather than exported.
What grows here
In the west, on Mengding Shan near Ya'an, the bud teas: Meng Ding Gan Lu, Meng Ding Xue Ya and Meng Ding Huang Ya, the last a genuine yellow tea and one of the few still made. Emei Shan gives Zhu Ye Qing. Ya'an also makes the border teas, Zang Cha and its pressed grades Kang Zhuan and Jin Jian, for the Tibetan market. Yibin in the south specialises in very early spring green, and a large volume of unnamed Sichuan leaf goes east to be finished under other provinces' names.
The ground
The Sichuan basin is warm, humid and famously short of sunshine, sitting under cloud for much of the year. That combination is why the province picks first: spring arrives early and the light stays diffuse, which suits tender bud growth. Ya'an, at the western rim where the basin meets the Tibetan plateau, is one of the wettest places in it. Altitude climbs steeply from the basin floor to the Mengding and Emei massifs, so a Sichuan tea can come from almost any elevation and the label rarely says which.
Harvest seasons
This is the province's real commercial asset. The Yibin gardens in the south, planted with early-budding cultivars, can be picking in the second half of January and selling in volume through February, weeks ahead of Zhejiang or Anhui. Some of it is sold honestly as Sichuan tea. A good deal is bought by processors elsewhere and finished into the shapes that eastern names imply, which is why a suspiciously early Longjing or Biluochun deserves a question about where the leaf actually grew.
How it is made here
Ya'an's border tea is the odd craft here. It is built from mature leaf and stem rather than buds, piled and fermented repeatedly over a long cycle, then steamed and pressed into bricks. The grade line is drawn as a stem limit rather than as a leaf standard: under roughly 8 percent stem for Kang Zhuan and under roughly 15 for the coarser Jin Jian. That is a specification written for a product bought by the load and boiled with yak butter, not sipped, and it is the clearest sign that this half of Sichuan was never making tea for the domestic tea market at all.
What to look for
Two different warnings. Mengding sells three famous teas with similar names, and the yellow one, Meng Ding Huang Ya, is routinely faked with green tea because the yellowing step is slow, expensive and invisible on a label; a bright grassy cup means it was skipped. For everything else, Sichuan's problem runs the opposite way to most origins: its leaf is far more often sold as somewhere else than somewhere else's leaf is sold as Sichuan. If a famous eastern green is unusually cheap and unusually early, this province is the likely answer.
How it got here
Sichuan carries the oldest cultivation claim in China. Tradition dates the first planted garden on Mengding Shan to the Western Han, and the mountain supplied tribute tea to the court from the Tang onward, a longer continuous record than any eastern famous tea can show. The other thread is the tea and horse trade. From Ya'an, brick tea was carried on men's backs over the mountains to Kangding and traded into Tibet, an exchange the state ran as policy for centuries. Both threads are still visible, one as a bud tea and one as a brick.
Places in Sichuan
Named places inside Sichuan. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Sichuan
Tea styles tied to Sichuan or to somewhere inside it.