Region · in China
Zhejiang
Zhejiang is China's green tea province. Almost everything it grows is green, it holds China's most famous green tea in the hills above the West Lake, and it supplies the bulk export greens that most of the planet drinks without knowing where they came from. It is also where Chinese tea science lives, since the national research institute sits in Hangzhou among the Longjing gardens.
What grows here
Longjing above everything, from the protected West Lake hills and from the far larger production zone across the rest of the province. Anji makes Anji Bai Cha, which despite the name is a green tea from an unusual pale-leafed bush. The province also holds two of China's surviving yellow teas, Mo Gan Huang Ya and Pingyang Huang Tang, and it manufactures most of the gunpowder and chunmee that China exports in volume.
The ground
Humid subtropical, hilly rather than mountainous over most of its area, with heavy spring fog. The West Lake gardens sit in a ring of low hills west of Hangzhou, sheltered, damp and on weathered sandy soils, which is the classic explanation for why leaf from Shifeng and Meijiawu is worth several times leaf grown an hour away. Elsewhere the Tianmu range and the southern uplands provide the altitude, and the flatter eastern ground provides the volume.
The bushes
The argument here is Longjing 43 against qunti zhong. Longjing 43 is a clonal selection bred at the Hangzhou institute, uniform and, crucially, early: it buds around a week ahead of the old stock, which is why it dominates the valuable pre-Qingming window. Qunti zhong is the seed-grown population that preceded it, later, uneven and preferred by traditionalists for a more layered cup. Anji is a case of its own, planted with a temperature-sensitive variety whose spring leaves come out pale and unusually high in the amino acids that read as sweetness.
Harvest seasons
The pre-Qingming window, before roughly 4 to 6 April, is what the province's reputation and its prices are built on, and the gap between a mingqian Longjing and one picked two weeks later is enormous. Because the cultivars bud at different times, the early market is disproportionately Longjing 43, and a genuinely early qunti zhong is a rarer thing than the label suggests. Anji Bai Cha has an even shorter window, since the pale leaves green up as the weather warms and the character goes with them.
How it is made here
Longjing is pan-fired by hand in a wok in two stages, with the leaf pressed flat against the hot metal, which produces the smooth blade shape and the toasted chestnut note the tea is judged on. It is skilled, hot, physically demanding work and a large share of production is now machine-pressed to imitate it. The distinction is visible: hand-fired leaf is slightly irregular and varies in colour, machine-pressed leaf is uniform, and neither fact tells you anything on its own about how the leaf was grown.
What to look for
Longjing is the most imitated name in Chinese green tea. Only the West Lake zone carries the Xihu Longjing designation; the wider Zhejiang Longjing GI also covers the Qiantang and Yuezhou zones, and a great deal of what reaches the market in March is Longjing-style tea from Sichuan or Guizhou, where spring arrives earlier. Inside West Lake the traditional sub-areas are Shi, Long, Yun, Hu and Mei (Shifeng, Longjing village, Yunqi, Hupao and Meijiawu), with Shifeng the most prestigious. Ask for the harvest year on any Chinese green, and do not read Anji Bai Cha as a white tea.
How it got here
Longjing's rise is tied to Qing imperial patronage, and the eighteen bushes by the Hugong temple that the Qianlong emperor is said to have singled out are still shown to visitors. Zhejiang was also the workshop of the export green trade, turning out the gunpowder and chunmee that went to North Africa and Europe by the shipload. In 1958 the national Tea Research Institute was established in Hangzhou, which is why so many of the cultivars now planted across China, Longjing 43 included, were bred within sight of these gardens.
Places in Zhejiang
Named places inside Zhejiang. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Zhejiang
Tea styles tied to Zhejiang or to somewhere inside it.