Region · in China
Yunnan
Yunnan is the tea plant's home ground: the broad-leaf assamica variety is native here, and some of the oldest cultivated tea trees still standing are in its southern forests. It is the source of all puerh and of dianhong, a black tea the province did not have until the twentieth century. It is also the one province where the age of the plant, not just the quality of the garden, is part of what is being sold.
What grows here
Puerh above all, in both forms: sheng, pressed and left to age, and shou, wet-piled to imitate age. Xishuangbanna, Pu'er and Lincang are the three prefectures that matter, and inside them the argument is about single mountains and villages: Yiwu, Nannuo, Bulangshan, Lao Ban Zhang, Bingdao, Jingmai. Dianhong, the province's black tea, comes mainly from the west, above all Fengqing county in Lincang, and from Baoshan. There is also moonlight white, ya bao buds and the purple-leaf teas, all made from the same broad-leaf material.
The ground
Subtropical highland: monsoon rain from May to October, a dry sunny winter and gardens mostly between 1,000 and 2,000 m on red lateritic soils. The distinction that governs price here is not altitude but planting style. Gushu material comes from old, widely spaced trees standing in mixed forest, deep-rooted and low-yielding; taidi is dense terraced plantation, planted from the 1970s onward for volume. The same village will sell you both, and the cups do not taste alike.
The bushes
Camellia sinensis var. assamica, the broad-leaf plant, with a thicker and more bitter leaf than the small-leaf bushes of eastern China, which is why puerh can take decades of ageing without going hollow. Old gardens are seed-grown populations rather than clones, so one hillside is genetically mixed. State breeding added named cultivars for terrace planting, Yunkang 10 among them, and selected purple-leaf types such as Zi Juan, alongside the naturally purple ziya bushes that turn up in older gardens.
Harvest seasons
Spring picking, roughly March into April before the rains, is the prized one and it is what single-village cakes are made from. The summer flush is diluted by monsoon rain and mostly goes into blends. Autumn tea, picked around September and October and called gu hua, grain flower, after the rice flowering it coincides with, is the second-best material: more aromatic than spring but less dense. A cake that does not state its season is usually not spring.
How it is made here
Puerh starts as shai qing mao cha, sun-dried green material, and the sun is the point. The kill-green is done cooler and shorter than a green tea would take, and the leaf is then dried in sunlight rather than in an oven, which leaves enough enzyme activity and surface microbes alive for the tea to keep changing in storage. Steam and press that and you have a sheng cake. Shou is a separate route: the loose material is heaped, wetted and turned for weeks so that microbes do in months what storage would take decades to do.
What to look for
Ancient-tree claims are the central problem: gushu carries a large premium, no test proves it, and far more is sold than could plausibly exist. The famous single villages, Lao Ban Zhang and Bingdao especially, are counterfeited on a scale that dwarfs their actual output, and a cheap one is not one. For aged cakes ask where it was stored, because humid Guangdong or Hong Kong storage and dry Kunming storage produce very different teas out of the same pressing. And shou is not aged sheng, whatever the shelf label implies.
How it got here
Compression came out of transport: cakes and bricks travelled the tea horse road to Tibet and the northwest for centuries, and the ageing that puerh is now sold for began as a side effect of the journey. Dianhong is recent by comparison, developed at Fengqing in 1939 when the war cut China off from its eastern black tea production. Wet-piling for shou went into production in 1973 at the Kunming and Menghai factories, adapted from damp-storage practice the Guangdong trade had already been using. The speculative puerh boom of the mid 2000s, and its crash in 2007, is why single-village naming and vintage talk dominate the market now.
Places in Yunnan
Named places inside Yunnan. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Yunnan
Tea styles tied to Yunnan or to somewhere inside it.