Country
Vietnam
Vietnam is one of the largest tea producers in the world and one of the least deliberately bought: most of its output is cheap bulk that vanishes into blends without a country of origin on the packet. The interesting tea sits at two opposite ends, the old shan tuyet trees in the far northern mountains and a modern, Taiwanese-built oolong industry on the southern plateau, and neither has much to do with the volume trade.
What grows here
Green tea for the domestic market above all, with Thai Nguyen as the name every Vietnamese drinker knows. In the northern highlands, shan tuyet, mountain snow tea, is made from old large-leaf trees and turns up as green, as a sun-dried pressed tea and as aged material. The Lam Dong plateau in the south makes rolled oolong on Taiwanese lines. And there is lotus green tea, a Hanoi speciality whose method has no equivalent anywhere else.
The ground
Two growing countries in one. The far north, Ha Giang, Yen Bai, Lao Cai and Son La, is high, misted and steep, with tea trees standing in mountain villages rather than in planted rows, often on land farmed by ethnic minority communities. The southern plateau around Bao Loc and Cau Dat is lower, warmer and laid out industrially, planted deliberately in the last few decades because the climate suited an oolong crop that could be sold into East Asia.
The bushes
The northern trees are large-leaf assamica-type stock, seed-grown, old and locally distinct rather than a named variety, which is what shan tuyet actually refers to. Thai Nguyen's green tea is made mostly from Trung Du, the traditional midland bush. The south is a straight import: Taiwanese cultivars, Jin Xuan and Si Ji Chun in particular, planted with Taiwanese equipment and technique, which is exactly why the resulting tea can pass for Taiwanese.
Harvest seasons
The southern plantations pick nearly year round, which is part of their economic logic and part of why the tea is cheap. In the northern mountains the spring picking is the one worth seeking out, and yields from old trees are small and seasonal in a way the plateau's are not. Lotus tea is bound to a much narrower window than the tea itself, since it depends on the lotus flowering season in the summer.
How it is made here
Lotus scenting is the country's singular craft. Green tea is layered with the fine stamens picked from lotus flowers, or packed inside the flowers themselves, and left to take up the scent, repeatedly, which consumes an extraordinary number of blooms for a small amount of tea. The northern mountains do the other distinctive thing: sun-drying and sometimes pressing shan tuyet material in a way that parallels Yunnan's sheng puerh, which is unsurprising given the geography.
What to look for
Vietnamese oolong resold as Taiwanese is a persistent problem, and it works precisely because the cultivars and the method are the same, so the honest version of that fact is also useful: a Vietnamese oolong bought as one is often good value. Real lotus tea is expensive by necessity, so cheap lotus tea is almost always flavoured with essence rather than scented with flowers. And shan tuyet tree-age claims sit in the same unverifiable category as Yunnan's.
How it got here
The French planted Vietnam's first commercial estates in 1890, in the northern midlands of Phu Tho, and came to the southern highlands later: Cau Dat above Da Lat from 1927, then the flatter ground around Bao Loc, which is where the southern industry's layout comes from. The plantations survived the war years poorly and the sector was rebuilt afterwards as a state industry aimed at volume. Two things changed it: economic liberalisation from the late 1980s, which pushed Vietnam into the top ranks of world production, and Taiwanese investment from the 1990s, which brought oolong cultivars and equipment and created the export tea most Western buyers have unknowingly drunk.
Places in Vietnam
Named places inside Vietnam. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Vietnam
Tea styles tied to Vietnam or to somewhere inside it.