Place · in Zhejiang
Anji
Anji is a bamboo county in northern Zhejiang that had no famous tea of its own until the 1980s and now has one of China's most recognisable greens. The whole thing rests on a genetic accident: a single pale-leafed bush found in the local hills, propagated by cutting and now planted across the county and well beyond it. Anji is the rare famous origin where the plant rather than the practice is the story.
What grows here
Anji Bai Cha, which is a green tea and not a white one, and very little else that leaves the county. The name describes the colour of the spring leaf, not the processing.
The ground
Northern Zhejiang, in the hills below the Tianmu range, cooler in spring than the Hangzhou basin an hour away. That matters more here than it usually would, because the pale leaf the tea is named for is a temperature effect: the cooler and later the spring, the longer the shoots stay white and the longer the picking window lasts. Anji is bamboo country first, and the gardens are cut into the same hills at the same modest elevations rather than pushed up a famous mountain.
The bushes
One cultivar, Bai Ye 1, and everything planted is a clone of it. The parent plant is a single old pale-leafed bush at Hengkengwu in Daxi village, in what is now Tianhuangping, found in 1982 at around 800 m and still standing. Cuttings taken from it that April are the ancestor of the county's entire industry, which was propagated rather than bred at an institute; the cultivar was only certified as Bai Ye 1 in 1998. That single-clone base is why Anji Bai Cha is so consistent from garden to garden, and why it was trivially exportable.
Harvest seasons
A shorter window than any other famous Zhejiang green. Picking runs for a few weeks from late March and stops when the shoots green up, because a green shoot no longer makes the tea. A warm spring shortens it further. The practical consequence is that an Anji Bai Cha which is not from the current spring should not carry a premium, and one picked late is a noticeably different tea sold under the same name.
What to look for
Bai Ye 1 is grown far outside Anji now, so the county on the label is the claim being made and it is the one to check. Growers in Huangdu village donated cuttings to designated poverty-relief counties in Guizhou, Sichuan and Hunan from 2018, and tea from those plantings is honest but is not Anji Bai Cha. Look for pale, flat, needle-thin leaf and a cup that reads sweet and brothy rather than grassy. Fully green leaf and an ordinary cup mean the pale window was missed, whoever grew it.
How it got here
Short, and unusually well documented for a Chinese famous tea. The mother bush was located in 1982, cuttings struck the same spring, the first comparison plots went in the year after and the county built an industry on it from nothing inside two decades. Anji is often cited in China as the case of a place engineering a famous tea rather than inheriting one, and the cutting donations from 2018 turned it into an instrument of agricultural policy as well as a tea.
Other places in Zhejiang
- West Lake
- Shaoxing
- Lishui
- Kaihua
- Pan'an
- Taishun