Country
Nepal
Nepal grows tea on the same Himalayan ridge system as Darjeeling, often from the same cultivars and with the same techniques, and for a long time much of it was sold as Darjeeling. Over the last two decades the eastern hill districts have built a name of their own instead, on a base of smallholder cooperatives rather than colonial estates, and that difference in ownership shows up in how experimental the teas are.
What grows here
Two separate industries. The eastern hills, principally Ilam and Panchthar with Dhankuta and Terhathum alongside, make orthodox tea: a Darjeeling-shaped black tea in flushes, plus green, white and a growing range of hand-made oolong-style and unconventional lots. The Jhapa lowlands below them make CTC for the Indian and domestic markets and account for most of the country's volume, which is why national production figures say very little about the tea a specialty buyer would meet.
The ground
The hill gardens sit between roughly 1,000 and 2,000 m on steep, monsoon-fed slopes, which is the same geography as the Darjeeling ridges a few kilometres to the south, in places literally the neighbouring hillside. What differs is age and layout: many Nepali gardens are recent, small and interspersed with other crops, rather than continuous estates laid out in the nineteenth century, so plot-by-plot variation is wider.
The bushes
China-type sinensis and the same clonal material that Darjeeling uses, AV2 among them, because the plants and the knowledge crossed the border with the people. Some gardens still work seed-grown China bush plantings. The practical consequence is that a Nepali first flush and a Darjeeling first flush can be genuinely close in character, which is both the country's commercial problem and its strongest argument.
Harvest seasons
The same four-flush structure as Darjeeling, since it is the same climate: a light first flush from March, a rounder second flush in May and June, monsoon leaf through the summer and an autumn picking. Higher gardens run a little later. Nepali producers are more willing to make something unusual out of a monsoon or autumn lot rather than writing it off as bulk, which is where a lot of the interesting white and oolong-style tea comes from.
How it is made here
Being young and cooperative-owned turns out to be an advantage in the workshop. Without an inherited estate standard to protect, Nepali producers experiment more freely than their neighbours: hand-rolled specialities, heavily withered whites, oxidation levels that sit between the recognised categories. Quality is correspondingly less predictable than Darjeeling's, so the maker's name matters more here than the district's.
What to look for
Nepali leaf has a long history of crossing the border to be blended and sold as Darjeeling, and that flow grew after Darjeeling's 2017 shutdown left buyers short. Two things follow. A suspiciously cheap 'Darjeeling' may well be Nepali tea, and a Nepali tea sold under its own name is frequently the better value of the pair, because it is priced without the borrowed reputation. Buy on the garden or cooperative name and the flush, as you would in Darjeeling.
How it got here
The first gardens, Ilam and Soktim, were planted in 1863, about a decade after Darjeeling's first commercial gardens, but the industry stayed tiny and largely in state hands for over a century. Privatisation and the arrival of smallholder cooperatives from the 1990s built the orthodox sector that exists now, aimed from the start at export and at specialty buyers rather than at the domestic cup. Darjeeling's troubles since 2017 accelerated that, moving both buyers and attention north across the border.
Places in Nepal
Named places inside Nepal. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Nepal
Tea styles tied to Nepal or to somewhere inside it.