Anji Bai Cha
Anji Bai Cha has a misleading name: bai cha means white tea, but this is a green, made from a natural light-leaf cultivar (Bai Ye No. 1) whose spring shoots emerge pale jade to yellowish-white. The low-chlorophyll, temperature-sensitive leaf is unusually high in amino acids, giving a remarkably sweet, smooth, umami-rich cup with almost no bitterness. It is a modern Zhejiang star, widely propagated only since the 1980s.
Flat, smooth, jade-to-pale leaves, often with a yellow-green or almost translucent look; the paler spring leaf is the prized material. The cup is notably sweet and smooth with a brothy umami note and very low astringency, closer in sweetness to a shaded Japanese green than a typical Chinese green. Anji County (Zhejiang) origin is the benchmark, and the cultivar grown elsewhere shows less of the pale-leaf effect.
From Anji County in northern Zhejiang, propagated from a single rediscovered old bush of the Bai Ye No. 1 cultivar. The pale color is a genetic, temperature-dependent trait: cool spring temperatures suppress chlorophyll and raise the amino-acid-to-catechin ratio, which is why early-spring picking is both palest and sweetest. As temperatures warm, later leaves green up and the special character fades.
Western: 80-85°C, 3 g per 200 ml, 1-2 minutes. Glass brewing is traditional. Gongfu: 80°C, 4 g per 120 ml, 20-30 seconds, 3-4 infusions. Slightly cooler water preserves the sweetness, while boiling water flattens it.
Anji Bai Cha style green runs €20-40 (about $22-43) per 100 g. Authentic early-spring Anji County material reaches €50-110 (about $54-119) per 100 g.
Prices reviewed June 2026
Longjing (Dragon Well)
The neighboring Zhejiang green, nuttier and less sweet, a useful local reference point.
Gyokuro
The Japanese shaded green it resembles in amino-acid sweetness, reached by a completely different method.
White Peony (Bai Mudan)
An actual white tea, included to clear up the naming confusion that bai cha causes.
Despite the name, Anji Bai Cha is processed exactly like a green tea, fixed by heat rather than withered like true white tea; the white refers to the pale leaf color, not the tea category. The entire commercial crop descends from one ancient bush discovered in the Anji mountains, propagated widely only from the 1980s onward.