Place · in Zhejiang
West Lake
West Lake is the ring of low hills west of Hangzhou where Longjing is supposed to come from. The zone is fixed at about 168 square kilometres and much of it sits inside a protected scenic landscape, so the planted area cannot grow while the value of the name keeps rising, and almost every buying problem in Chinese green tea follows from that one mismatch. It is also unusually accessible for a famous origin: you can walk off a bus into gardens whose spring leaf is among the most expensive tea in China.
What grows here
Longjing, and nothing else that matters. The five core areas, Shi, Long, Yun, Hu and Mei, are only part of the zone: they sit inside the West Lake scenic area and account for a minority of its output, while the rest comes from townships outside the scenic boundary. Shifeng carries the prestige, Meijiawu carries much of the volume, and serious lots are sold under a village name rather than under 'West Lake' on its own. If a seller will not name the village, the village is not the selling point.
The ground
Nothing here is high. The hills rise only a few hundred metres above the lake, so West Lake has never argued from altitude the way a Wuyi or an Alishan claim does. What it has is shelter and water: ravines that hold morning fog, slopes that see less direct sun than the latitude suggests and a loose, sandy, quick-draining soil weathered off the local rock. Growers read that as slow bud growth and a thicker, sweeter leaf. It is also why the differences between the five villages get argued in terms of aspect and shelter rather than height.
The bushes
The same Longjing 43 against qunti zhong argument as the rest of Zhejiang, but with real money on it. Longjing 43 buds early, so most of what can honestly be sold as pre-Qingming West Lake leaf is Longjing 43. The older seed-grown qunti zhong stands inside the zone are a minority, they come later and they are sold on that basis. The two premiums, earliest picking and oldest stock, therefore mostly cannot arrive in the same tin, and a lot claiming both is worth a question.
Harvest seasons
Spring, and effectively nothing else. The reputation is made in the weeks between the first picking and Guyu around 20 April, prices fall by the day across that window and later leaf goes into grades that are not sold on a village name. There is no West Lake autumn tea worth chasing. One practical consequence: the tea is at its best in the months right after firing, so a West Lake Longjing bought late in the year is already some months past the point people pay for.
How it is made here
The firing happens twice with a rest between, and both passes have names. Qing guo, the green pan, kills the green and begins flattening the leaf against the metal. The leaf then sits so its moisture equalises, and hui guo, the return pan, finishes the shape and drives off the rest. Hand firing is taught as a set of ten named hand movements, and the pan temperature is judged by the palm rather than by a gauge. Machine pressing copies the shape and not the sequence, which is why the two are told apart by regularity rather than by outline.
What to look for
Only leaf grown and fired inside the Xihu zone is Xihu Longjing, and the zone is graded. The first-level area is the tea base inside the scenic area, drawn by landmarks rather than village names, so it takes in Wengjiashan and Manjuelong as well as the famous five. The second-level area is the townships beyond, Longwu, Liuxia, Zhuantang and Zhoupu. Both are genuine and do not cost the same, so ask which. Hangzhou also runs a labelling scheme: authorised growers draw a numbered anti-counterfeit label each season, checkable against the association's register, so ask whether a tin has one. Outside it, the wider Zhejiang Longjing designation adds Qiantang and Yuezhou, honest tea under another name.
How it got here
The tea is old and the boundary is new. What protects the zone now is planning and regulation rather than tradition: the core gardens fall inside the West Lake Cultural Landscape that UNESCO inscribed in 2011, and Hangzhou put the whole production area under a dedicated protection ordinance in 2022 that fixes the boundary, the two grades of zone and the label. That is what keeps genuine West Lake Longjing scarce. The city has also made the tea part of how it presents itself, with the national tea museum sitting among the gardens, which is why a place with a very small crop carries such an outsized name.
Other places in Zhejiang
- Anji
- Shaoxing
- Lishui
- Kaihua
- Pan'an
- Taishun