Cultivars
Named cultivars within Camellia sinensis, and the variety groups they sit inside. A cultivar is a decision a grower made about which plant to propagate, and it explains more about a tea than the country on the packet does.
102 of these 186 records go beyond a description. Those carry three further sections — why a grower plants it, what it does in the cup, and how much of that flavour is really the cultivar rather than the growing site or the processing. The other 84 carry the description, the botany and the origin only. The work is being done in order of how much a reader is likely to meet the plant, so the gap is real, it is known, and it is not hidden by writing the missing sections from guesswork.
Camellia sinensis var. sinensis
127 cultivarsThe small-leaved variety native to south-west China, and the botanical basis of most Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and Darjeeling tea. Slower-growing and lower-yielding than assamica, with narrower, more serrated leaves and better cold tolerance — which is why it dominates the categories where aroma matters more than strength.
The local population of the Anhua area in Hunan, and the material behind the province’s dark teas — the brick teas and Fu brick with its deliberate fungal growth. It is a landrace, and it is a reminder that dark tea is not made from inferior plants: the material is coarse because the process requires mature leaf and stem, not because the population is poor.
One of the classical Uji cultivars for tencha, and among the most highly regarded material for high-grade matcha. Asahi is selected from the old Uji population rather than bred in a modern programme, which is part of its standing: it represents the plant stock the Kyoto covered-garden tradition was built on, before national cultivar breeding standardised the crop around Yabukita.
An old Uji-derived cultivar nicknamed 'natural gyokuro' for its unusually low astringency and high sweetness even without shading. It is difficult to grow and susceptible to disease, so it survives mainly as a parent of better-behaved cultivars.
The clonal cultivar responsible for most of Darjeeling’s modern premium first flush. It produces a floral, muscatel-leaning cup with far more aroma than the older seed-grown China bushes, and now dominates replanting across the district.
A Phoenix Dan Cong type propagated, by the usual account, from cuttings taken to eight separate plots — the origin of the ‘eight immortals’ name. It gives a thick, sweet, orchid-and-fruit character with more body than most Dan Cong types, and it is one of the cultivars that has travelled furthest from Phoenix Mountain into plantings elsewhere in Guangdong.
A Hunan cultivar combining the two properties Chinese green-tea breeding pursues most consistently: early budding and a heavy coat of down on the bud. Down is not merely decorative — a downy bud is what makes a needle-shaped or curled green tea look the way the market expects, and a cultivar without it cannot be used for those styles regardless of how it tastes.
One of the numbered Taiwanese releases from the middle of the series, between the well-known early numbers and the Jin Xuan generation. Taiwan’s numbering runs continuously from the first releases to the most recent, and the gaps in public awareness of it are commercial rather than botanical: a number becomes famous when a tea made from it sells, and the rest stay in the research record.
One of the four famous Wuyi ming cong, and immediately identifiable in the field: its new leaves emerge pale yellow-green rather than dark, which is where the ‘white cockscomb’ name comes from. That pigmentation carries through to the finished tea, which is roasted far more lightly than most yancha because a heavy fire would obliterate its delicate, herbal, almost medicinal sweetness. It is the rock tea that least resembles a rock tea.
A Taiwanese bred cultivar planted principally in the north-west for Oriental Beauty, where the tea depends on leafhopper feeding to develop its honey aroma. Bai Lu was selected in part for how it responds to that damage — the plant has to be attractive to the insect and has to convert the injury into aroma rather than simply losing yield — which makes it one of the few cultivars bred around a pest relationship instead of against one.
One of the lesser-known Wuyi ming cong, grown in small quantity alongside the four famous bushes and the more recently bred Guan Yin crosses. The ming cong group is worth understanding as a category: these are plants that were selected individually, by eye and by taste, on a specific cliff face, long before anyone was running a breeding programme, and their survival depends on somebody choosing to keep propagating a low-yielding plant.
The Phoenix Mountain stock behind Ya Shi Xiang, named for its pale leaf rather than for any white-tea connection. It is the single most planted Dan Cong lineage outside the old bushes, which is why Ya Shi Xiang is the most available of the aroma types.
The albino-mutant cultivar behind Anji Bai Cha. Its shoots emerge nearly white in early spring because low temperatures suppress chlorophyll, and green again as the season warms — which is why the harvest window is measured in days rather than weeks.
A Wuyi ming cong from a cliff-face bush, whose name — variously written with characters for sprite, waist or kite — refers to its position part-way up a rock wall. It is one of the ming cong that most clearly demonstrates why the category exists: a single named bush, propagated, giving a fruity, dried-longan character distinct enough that Wuyi growers kept it separate from the mass Shui Xian plantings around it.
The other cultivar propagated from Da Hong Pao stock, selected in the twentieth century and now widely planted in Wuyi. It gives a slightly sweeter, less mineral cup than Qi Dan and is the more forgiving of the two under heavy roast.
An Anxi cultivar closely related to Tie Guan Yin and routinely sold as it. The leaf is thinner and the aroma shorter, but processed identically the two are genuinely hard to separate — which is why Ben Shan accounts for a great deal of what is sold as inexpensive Tie Guan Yin.
A Taiwanese numbered release from the group that came after Jin Xuan and Cui Yu, and one of several attempts to repeat what those two achieved: a cultivar with a distinctive aroma of its own, high enough yielding to be worth planting, and easy enough to grow to survive contact with an actual smallholding. Very few releases manage all three, which is why Taiwan’s planted area is still dominated by a plant selected long before any of them.
Another of the named Korean cultivars, from the same national programme. The reason Korea has so few and adopted them so late is structural rather than technical: tea cultivation in Korea was largely dormant for much of the twentieth century and was rebuilt from the 1970s onwards, so the country had to establish an industry before it could sensibly breed for one.
A Wuyi ming cong whose name — ‘does not know spring has come’ — records its late bud break, weeks after the surrounding plantings. Lateness is the whole identity of the cultivar: it is picked when the main Wuyi harvest is finished, which suits a small producer’s labour schedule and gives a sweet, soft, comparatively low-tannin rock tea.
The seed-grown mixed population that predates named cultivars in Fujian, and the original stock for both Gong Mei white tea and traditional Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong. Because it is a population rather than a clone, no two gardens are quite alike.
The small-leaved variety native to south-west China and the botanical basis of most Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and Darjeeling tea. It is a variety rather than a cultivar — the level above cultivar in tea botany — and it is where the majority of named cultivars ultimately derive from.
The local seed-grown population of Cangwu County in eastern Guangxi, and the plant material the national standard for Liu Bao dark tea is written around. It is a landrace rather than a cultivar: a field of it is a field of individuals, not a field of one clone, and that variability is part of why basket-aged Liu Bao from different villages tastes different in ways a single cultivar could not explain. Guangxi's tea plants sit at the small end of the large-leaf range and the large end of the small-leaf range, which is why the standard pairs this population with a second, broader category — the Guangxi large- and medium-leaf types — rather than treating either as sufficient on its own.
One of the named Korean cultivars developed in the national agricultural research system, as distinct from the jaerae-jong seed populations that most Korean tea still comes from. Korea’s planted area is small, its industry is concentrated in Hadong, Boseong and Jeju, and its breeding programme is correspondingly recent — which means a Korean tea sold under a cultivar name is unusual and informative.
- China jatIndia
The small-leaf seed stock of Chinese origin planted in Darjeeling and in the cooler Indian districts, and the reason Darjeeling tastes nothing like Assam despite both being Indian black tea. The old China-jat bushes still standing on Darjeeling estates are among the oldest productive tea in India, and the district’s premium for old-bush material is a premium for this population rather than for the clones that have replaced it elsewhere on the same estates.
A Sichuan cultivar whose name is a specification: chuan for the province, nong for the agricultural university that bred it, huang ya for the pale yellow-green bud, zao for early. Earliness is Sichuan's structural advantage in the Chinese tea market — the province's spring arrives well before Zhejiang's and Jiangsu's — and cultivars like this one exist to widen a head start that is worth a great deal of money.
Released alongside Jin Xuan by Taiwan’s Tea Research and Extension Station, and its counterpart in character: where Jin Xuan is creamy, Cui Yu is sharply floral and slightly herbaceous.
This record is about the plant, and the plant is the smaller half of the story. Da Hong Pao is first the name of a handful of famous old bushes on a cliff in the Wuyi mountains; second the name of clonally propagated descendants of them, of which Qi Dan is the selection usually identified as the true line; and third — by a very large margin in volume — the name of a commercial blend of Wuyi rock oolongs assembled to a house style, which need contain none of the above. All three are called Da Hong Pao and only the first two are a plant.
Another of the four traditional cultivars brought from Fujian to northern Taiwan in the nineteenth century, distinguished by a notably larger and thicker leaf than Qing Xin. It is hardy and tolerant of poorer ground, which is why it persisted on marginal plots, and it is used for Baozhong, for heavily oxidised styles and increasingly for black tea.
One of the named Turkish clonal selections, made from the region’s existing seedling stands and named for the district it was found in. It is the best known of a small group of Turkish clones, and its limited adoption is the interesting part: a country can have a functioning selection programme and still plant almost entirely from seed, because replanting is a capital decision rather than a technical one.
The seed-grown population of the Dongting hills beside Lake Tai in Jiangsu, and the material for Biluochun. It is a landrace rather than a cultivar, and it is grown in an unusual way: the tea is interplanted among fruit trees — loquat, plum, apricot, peach — rather than in a monoculture field, and the fruity note in the finished tea is locally attributed to that arrangement. Whether the mechanism is real is not settled; the planting arrangement itself is a matter of record.
The base population of Phoenix Mountain in Guangdong, and the plant every named Dan Cong is selected out of. It is a distinct lineage from Fujian’s Shui Xian despite the shared name, and it is genetically varied rather than clonal — which is precisely why single-bush selection has been possible there for centuries. Ordinary Fenghuang Shui Xian, made from mixed plantings, is the everyday tea of the mountain; the aroma-named Dan Cong are the exceptions pulled out of it.
A very large-leaf Fujian cultivar grown mainly in Yongchun, named for leaves said to resemble the citron of the same name. It produces an unusually thick, faintly citrus-peel oolong that behaves more like a Wuyi tea than an Anxi one despite its geography.
A large-bud cultivar from Fu’an in northern Fujian, the district that produces Tanyang Gongfu and Bailin Gongfu. It is used for both white tea and downy black tea, and it is largely responsible for the golden-tipped appearance of the Bailin style — the same downy bud that reads as silver in an unoxidised white tea reads as gold once oxidised.
The northern Fujian cultivar behind most white tea, selected for unusually large buds carrying a dense coat of silvery down. That down is what gives Silver Needle its name and appearance, and the cultivar is the reason white tea from Fuding looks the way it does.
The other Fuding white-tea cultivar alongside Da Bai, and the one with the larger bud and the heavier coat of down that its name describes. Da Hao yields more and produces a visibly fatter, whiter Silver Needle, which is why a great deal of commercial Bai Hao Yin Zhen is made from it; Da Bai is conventionally held to give the more refined aroma. Knowing which of the two is in a needle explains most of the visual difference between one Silver Needle and another.
A cold-tolerant cultivar planted in the northern Honshu tea districts, where the practical question about any plant is whether it comes through the winter rather than what it yields in a good year. Cultivars of this group are rarely seen on export packaging because the districts that grow them are small, but they are the reason tea is grown at those latitudes at all.
A Japanese aroma cultivar of the same generation as Koshun and Sofu, and used the same way: in small plantings by growers making a single-cultivar sencha that announces itself. The commercial logic behind this whole group is worth stating plainly, because it is unusual — these are plants bred to make a tea harder to blend, which is the opposite of what a national breeding programme normally optimises for.
A Fujian selection that made its career somewhere else. Fuxuan 9 was taken up on a very large scale in Guizhou, Guangxi and other south-western provinces building tea industries from scratch in recent decades, and it is a substantial part of why a green tea from Guizhou can taste like a relative of a green tea from Fujian. Cultivars migrate, and provincial styles are much less genetically local than their names imply.
A cross of Fuding Da Bai and a Yunnan large-leaf plant, bred for heavy early yields of large downy buds. It is planted extensively in Fujian for white tea and for bud-grade black teas.
One of the Fuyun series of Fujian cultivars, bred from crosses involving the Fuding large-white material and Yunnan large-leaf stock — which is what the name records, fu for Fujian and yun for Yunnan. The series was developed for vigour and for early, heavy production of downy buds, and it supplies a great deal of the material for jasmine-scented tea and for downy-bud white and green teas.
A Uji cultivar selected from seed and used almost exclusively for high-grade matcha and gyokuro. It is prized for a pronounced marine, seaweed-like aroma under shade that Yabukita does not develop.
One of the named aroma types of Fenghuang Dan Cong, the osmanthus-fragrance group. A Dan Cong aroma name is not quite a cultivar name and not quite a tasting note: it designates plants descended from particular mother trees whose aroma was judged to resemble a given flower or fruit, so the category is defined by a sensory judgement about the plant and propagated clonally from it. No osmanthus is involved at any stage, which is the first thing to say about it.
An early-budding cultivar grown mainly in Kyushu and used to extend the front of the shincha season, when the first tea of the year commands its highest price. Its practical value is scheduling: staggering cultivars by bud-break date lets a factory spread its picking and processing load across weeks rather than days.
The Anxi cultivar behind Huang Jin Gui, and one of the earliest-budding oolong cultivars in Fujian. It is picked well before Tie Guan Yin, which is half of its commercial appeal — it reaches market first — and it carries an osmanthus-like aroma that no processing step puts there.
An older Taiwanese cultivar associated with the island’s black-tea production before the numbered series took over, and now grown in very small quantity. It belongs to the period when Taiwan was a black-tea exporter under Japanese administration rather than an oolong speciality producer, which is the part of the island’s tea history that its current marketing rarely mentions.
A sibling cross of Tie Guan Yin and Huang Dan, distinguished from Jin Guan Yin by a markedly more forward, almost perfumed aroma. In Wuyi it is one of the most recognisable of the newer cultivars precisely because the aroma survives roasting.
A yellow-leaf mutant cultivar whose shoots stay golden through the season rather than greening like Bai Ye Yi Hao. It makes a very sweet, very low-bitterness green tea and is expensive because yields are poor — the same chlorophyll deficiency that produces the flavour also limits the plant.
One of the classical Phoenix Dan Cong aroma types, named directly for gardenia. It is among the more assertive and bitter types in the family — the astringency is part of its signature rather than a processing fault — and it is conventionally used to demonstrate the Dan Cong principle that the aroma name refers to a genuine, repeatable sensory match rather than an added scent.
The local population of Huoshan County in the Dabie mountains of western Anhui, named for Jinji Shan — golden rooster mountain — one of the localities its best material comes from, and the plant behind Huoshan Huangya, one of China's small handful of surviving yellow teas. It is described as shrub-type, large-leaf and late-sprouting, and the late budding is the agriculturally interesting part: Huoshan's tea sits above 600 m in a cold mountain county, and a population that waits is a population that does not lose a crop to a late frost.
A cultivar grown in the Kyoto district for tencha, the shaded unrolled leaf that becomes matcha. Like the other covered-garden cultivars it is selected for how it behaves under shade rather than for open-field performance, and its planted area is correspondingly small and concentrated.
The seed-grown native population that most Korean tea is still made from, rather than a named clone. Because the bushes are grown from seed they are genetically varied and deep-rooted, and in Hadong in particular they grow scattered on wooded slopes rather than in planted rows — closer to managed wild stands than to a plantation. Korean producers regard this as the defining feature of their tea rather than a stage they have yet to move past.
The ginger-flower aroma type among the Fenghuang Dan Cong, named for the scent of the ginger lily rather than for anything resembling culinary ginger. It is one of the types most often described as having a cooling, slightly medicinal edge behind the floral note, and it is among the harder aroma names for a non-Chaozhou drinker to calibrate, because the reference flower is not one most of the tea’s export market has smelled.
A cross of Tie Guan Yin and Huang Dan bred in Fujian, now planted widely in Wuyi as well as Anxi. It carries much of Tie Guan Yin’s floral character on a plant that crops harder and tolerates roasting, which is why it turns up in rock-tea blends.
One of the aromatic Fujian hybrids from the same breeding line as Jin Guan Yin and Huang Guan Yin, and among the most intensely floral cultivars in commercial use. It is planted across Fujian and made into everything from Anxi-style rolled oolong to Wuyi rock tea to downy black tea, and its aroma is strong enough that a Jin Mu Dan is usually identifiable regardless of which of those it has become.
A Taiwanese cultivar released in the 1980s and among the first modern tea breeding programmes whose output became a household name. Its distinguishing trait is a natural creamy, milky note that requires no additive, and which gave rise to the 'milk oolong' category and to a great deal of artificially flavoured imitation.
An old Zhejiang population cultivar from Chun’an on the Xin’an river, one of the traditional small-leaf types propagated across the province before modern clonal selection. It is cold-hardy, late-budding and reliable, and it was widely used as breeding material and as planting stock in areas where an early cultivar would have been caught by frost.
A Japanese cultivar known for a distinctly milky, almost creamy aroma, used both for sencha and as a blending component to soften sharper cultivars.
- Kangra jatIndia
The seed-grown population of the Kangra valley in Himachal Pradesh, a small and often overlooked Indian tea district in the western Himalaya. It is a landrace rather than a cultivar: China-type stock planted in the nineteenth century and left to reproduce in place, adapted over generations to a cold, high, seasonal site. Kangra tea carries a geographical indication, and the population is part of what the indication protects.
One of Japan’s explicitly aromatic cultivars, bred for a floral, almost citrus-peel top note that is unusual in a category built around umami and marine depth. It gives producers a way to make a Japanese green tea that smells like an oolong without changing the processing, and it has become a favourite of small growers looking for something that cannot be confused with a Yabukita blend.
One of the earliest-budding Japanese cultivars — wase means early-ripening — grown where the first tea of the season is the commercial objective. It is a scheduling cultivar rather than a prestige one: planted in a corner of an estate to open the picking season a week before the main crop is ready.
A Kyoto cultivar grown for tencha and gyokuro, valued for the vivid green it holds under shade and after grinding. Colour is a commercial property in matcha to a degree it is in almost no other tea — a dull green is discounted regardless of how it tastes — and Kyomidori is one of the cultivars planted specifically to hold it.
A selected cultivar bred for Longjing production and now the most widely planted material for it, chosen mainly because it buds early — often a week or more ahead of the older local population — which matters enormously in a market that pays a premium for the earliest spring tea.
The other selection made from the Longjing seed population, alongside the far better known Longjing 43. Its leaf is longer and narrower, it buds slightly later, and it is planted a good deal less — which makes it a useful illustration of how a breeding programme actually works: several selections are released from the same population, one of them suits the market’s incentives, and the others become footnotes.
An Anxi cultivar named for the fine hairs on its leaf edge. High-yielding and vigorous, it gives a grassier, sharper cup than Tie Guan Yin and is the third of the Anxi trio a buyer is most likely to meet without being told which one they have.
An old Fujian cultivar used across several categories — oolong in Anxi, black tea in Tanyang, and increasingly for Jin Jun Mei-style buds. Its adaptability is the point: the same plant makes recognisably different teas depending only on how it is processed.
A Kyushu cultivar selected for deep colour and body in the cup, and used mainly where a thick, dark, deep-steamed sencha is the target. It is a workhorse rather than a showpiece: its role is to give a blend weight and green depth that a lighter cultivar cannot supply on its own.
The most widely planted of the Phoenix Dan Cong aroma types and the one most people meet first, named for a honey-and-orchid character that survives heavy-handed brewing better than the more delicate types do. Its dominance is commercial as much as sensory: it yields well and is forgiving to process, so it has been propagated far beyond the original bushes and is now grown well outside Phoenix Mountain.
A Kyushu cultivar noted for a light, clean, faintly fruity character and often used for kamairicha and lightly steamed production rather than deep-steamed sencha. It is grown in small quantity and mostly by producers who process their own leaf, since its qualities are lost in a large mixed blend.
The local population of the Xiushui area of Jiangxi, historically called Ningzhou, and the material behind Ninghong black tea. Like the Qimen population it is a landrace rather than a cultivar, and like the Qimen population it sits behind a black tea that was significant in the nineteenth-century export trade and is now barely known outside China.
A late-budding Shizuoka cultivar with good cold tolerance, planted at the other end of the season from the early Kyushu material. The oku- prefix marks a late cultivar, and lateness is a deliberate agronomic choice: it moves the picking window past the frost risk and out of the peak-labour crush that early cultivars create.
A late-budding Yabukita descendant widely used for matcha and gyokuro because it holds colour well under shading and harvests after the main sencha rush, spreading a producer’s labour.
A late-budding cultivar associated with Saitama and the Sayama district, which sits near the northern limit of commercial tea in Honshu. Cultivars for that district are selected under a constraint the southern prefectures do not have: the plant must survive a real winter and must not break dormancy so early that a late frost takes the crop, and lateness is therefore a hardiness strategy rather than only a scheduling one.
A late-budding cultivar grown mainly in Kyushu, and a good illustration of why a producer plants more than one plant. A field entirely of early cultivars has to be harvested all at once, which needs a peak of labour and factory capacity that then sits idle; adding a late cultivar spreads the same crop over more days. The oku- prefix in Japanese cultivar names marks exactly this — it means late, and Okumidori, Okuhikari and Okuyutaka are all doing that scheduling job.
A Darjeeling clonal cultivar selected at Phoobsering, valued for a heavier body and more pronounced muscatel character in the second flush than AV2 delivers.
The cultivar propagated from the surviving Da Hong Pao mother bushes on Wuyi Mountain. Almost all authentic single-cultivar Da Hong Pao sold today is Qi Dan or Bei Dou rather than leaf from the original trees, which have not been commercially harvested for decades.
A Fujian cultivar originating in Pinghe in the south of the province and now widely planted in Wuyi, where it is made as a rock tea despite not being native to the mountains. Its orchid aroma is pronounced enough to read through a charcoal roast, which is exactly why northern Fujian growers adopted a southern cultivar: it delivers fragrance that the traditional Wuyi stock does not.
One of the more recent Taiwanese numbered releases, from the period when the station’s breeding priorities had shifted towards disease resistance and reliability rather than aroma alone. That shift reflects a real change on the ground: Taiwan’s tea area has contracted, its labour has become scarce and expensive, and a cultivar that survives with less intervention has a commercial argument that a merely fragrant one does not.
The dominant cultivar of Taiwanese high-mountain oolong and the material behind most of the island’s most expensive tea. It is difficult to grow — susceptible to disease and low-yielding — and is planted anyway because nothing else gives the same combination of thickness and floral clarity.
The cultivar traditionally used for Oriental Beauty, selected because its leaf is readily bitten by the tea jassid whose feeding triggers the tea’s characteristic honeyed aroma.
The cultivar behind Taiwan’s only substantial green-tea tradition, grown almost exclusively in Sanxia south of Taipei. Its leaf is soft and thin with a tender bud, which suits the unoxidised Bi Luo Chun and Longjing-style teas made there and suits almost nothing else — the reason a cultivar of real local importance has a planted area measured in a few hundred hectares.
A Wuyi ming cong — one of the named bushes of the rock-tea tradition — whose name means sparrow’s tongue, after the shape of the small pointed leaf. The same two characters are used in Sichuan and elsewhere for entirely unrelated green teas picked at a very small leaf standard, so Que She is a name that describes a leaf shape in one place and a specific Wuyi plant in another.
Not a cultivar in the strict sense but a seed-grown mixed population — the genetically varied bushes that predate clonal selection. Qun Ti Zhong material is later, lower-yielding and inconsistent bush to bush, and is prized for exactly the complexity that inconsistency produces.
One of the two cultivars that dominate Wuyi rock-tea production, named for a cassia-bark aroma that appears reliably enough across growers and years to function as the plant’s identity rather than as a tasting note.
The cassia-fragrance type among the Fenghuang Dan Cong, and a name that causes real confusion because Rou Gui is also a well-known Wuyi cultivar in Fujian, several hundred kilometres away and in a different oolong tradition. They are different plants: the Wuyi Rou Gui is a cultivar of the Wuyi rock-tea group, while Rou Gui Xiang is a Phoenix aroma classification. Both are named for the spice their aroma is thought to resemble, which is why the collision happened.
A modern Fujian cultivar bred for aroma and now planted in Wuyi alongside the traditional ming cong. It gives a sweet, gardenia-like fragrance and a smooth body, and its commercial appeal is that it delivers that aroma reliably at a scale the low-yielding heritage bushes cannot — which is the recurring economic tension in Wuyi tea.
A cross of Yabukita and Asatsuyu, now the leading premium sencha cultivar in Kagoshima. It buds early, produces an intensely green liquor and carries noticeably more sweetness and less astringency than Yabukita.
An early cultivar planted principally in Kyushu, where the mild climate lets growers exploit its bud-break date to reach the shincha market first. It gives a soft, sweet, low-astringency tea and is one of several cultivars that make Kyushu’s season structurally different from Shizuoka’s rather than merely earlier.
One of the principal Uji matcha cultivars, valued for a rounded, less aggressive umami than Gokou and for consistent stone-milling behaviour.
A cold-hardy Yabukita descendant developed for Saitama, where winters are too severe for many cultivars. It gives a strong, briskly astringent sencha that suits the deep steaming common in the region.
A Saitama cultivar selected for the Sayama district’s cold winters, and one of the older prefectural selections still in the ground. Sayama tea is conventionally described in Japan through a saying that gives Shizuoka the colour, Uji the aroma and Sayama the taste, which is a piece of trade lore rather than an evaluation — but it does record accurately that the district’s reputation rests on its firing practice as much as on its plants.
One of the more recent Japanese releases, bred in the national programme rather than by a prefecture, and part of a group of cultivars selected for a distinct aroma instead of for yield or budding date. Cultivars of this kind exist because Japanese green tea has a structural problem the plant can help with: when nearly every field is Yabukita, a producer who wants a tea that cannot be blended into a commodity lot has very little to work with, and a differently scented cultivar is the cheapest available answer.
The Anhui population behind Taiping Houkui, named for leaves the size and shape of a persimmon leaf. It is the plant that makes the most visually extreme green tea in China possible: Taiping Houkui's flat pressed blades run to several centimetres, and no ordinary small-leaf cultivar grows a leaf long enough to be made that way.
A Shizuoka experiment-station selection that never received a registered name and is known instead by its selection number, which is why it looks like a code rather than a cultivar. It is grown almost entirely by small producers for a single reason: its aroma is widely described as resembling sakura or cherry leaf, a note nothing else in the Japanese cultivar stock produces, and it is one of the clearest cases in tea of a plant selling on smell alone.
An Anhui cultivar selected for early budding, named after Shucheng county — the zao at the end of a Chinese cultivar name means early, and it appears on a great many of them for the same commercial reason that wase appears on Japanese ones. It is planted for green tea across Anhui and neighbouring provinces.
The fourth of the Wuyi ming cong, named for a bush said to have been washed down a slope by rain and then fought over between two temples — a dispute that reportedly ended in court. The tea is the most floral and least austere of the four, with a sweet osmanthus-leaning aroma that survives a medium roast, which makes it the usual entry point for someone learning to taste ming cong against one another.
A large-leaf Fujian cultivar used widely for Wuyi rock teas, giving a thick, woody body that carries heavy roasting well.
A Taiwanese cultivar that flushes almost year-round, giving it its name. It carries a strong lilac-like floral aroma at low elevation, which makes it the cultivar behind most inexpensive Taiwanese oolong and a great deal of bubble-tea base.
An aroma cultivar with a markedly floral, orchid-and-jasmine character that Japanese producers increasingly use for lightly oxidised and semi-oxidised teas as well as for sencha. It is one of the clearest signs of a shift in Japanese breeding priorities: after decades of selecting for yield, colour and frost resistance, aroma became a target in its own right.
The old-bush stock on Phoenix Mountain from which most Dan Cong aroma types descend. 'Song' refers to claimed descent from Song-dynasty plantings; what is verifiable is that the surviving trees are old, individually named, and propagated from rather than replanted.
An early-budding Shizuoka cultivar — wase means early-season — planted to open the picking calendar a few days before Yabukita. Those few days are worth a great deal: the first sencha of the year sells at a premium that falls sharply within weeks, so a cultivar that does nothing but arrive early has a clear commercial case even if its cup is ordinary.
A Kyushu cultivar named for the Takachiho area of Miyazaki, and one of the plants used in kamairicha — the pan-fired Japanese green tea made in parts of Miyazaki, Kumamoto and Saga rather than steamed like the rest of the country’s production. Kamairicha is a reminder that the steaming that defines Japanese green tea is a regional practice that won, not a national inevitability.
The Anxi cultivar that gives its name to the tea, distinguished by a thick, glossy, slightly folded leaf and a pronounced floral aroma. It is genuinely difficult to grow — low-yielding and sensitive — which is why so much tea sold under the name is made from easier substitute cultivars.
A Wuyi ming cong often described as the oldest of the famous four, associated with a ravine on the Huiyuan rock face. The cultivar gives a dark, dense, heavily mineral tea that takes a strong roast well, and its conventional descriptors — iron, bitter herbs, dried bark — sit at the opposite end of the Wuyi range from Bai Ji Guan’s pale delicacy.
A Fenghuang Dan Cong type whose name — roughly, fragrance that reaches the heavens — is a claim about intensity rather than about a particular flower, which makes it the exception in a system that otherwise names aromas after things. It is associated with a specific hillside within the Phoenix mountains and with a small number of old trees, and material sold under the name substantially exceeds what those trees can produce.
The seed-grown midland population of northern Vietnam — trung du means midland — and for a long time the country’s principal planting material. It is a landrace rather than a cultivar, and it is the plant behind the green tea of Thai Nguyen, which is the reference point for domestic tea drinking in Vietnam in roughly the way Longjing is in China.
A Shizuoka cultivar valued for an unusually bright green liquor and a soft, low-astringency character that makes it forgiving of hotter water than a fine sencha normally tolerates. It is one of the cultivars growers reach for when they want colour and sweetness without deep steaming, and it is often blended with Yabukita to lift a lot that is structurally sound but visually dull.
Not a cultivar: the seed-grown stands of the eastern Black Sea coast that account for essentially all Turkish tea. The industry was established in the twentieth century from Georgian-derived material and has remained overwhelmingly seed-propagated, which makes Turkey the largest tea producer in the world still running mainly on a landrace rather than on clones. Named local selections exist and are planted in small quantity.
A Kyoto cultivar bred for the covered-garden teas — gyokuro and tencha — where the plant is grown under shade for weeks before picking and the qualities being selected for are thin, soft leaf and a high response to shading. It is planted in small quantity relative to the national crop because covered cultivation is itself a small share of production, and it is priced accordingly.
An exceptionally early-budding Zhejiang cultivar, harvestable two to three weeks before Longjing 43. Much of the 'pre-Qingming Longjing' on sale early in the season is Wu Niu Zao, shaped in the Longjing style.
One of the old Fujian cultivars carried to Taiwan by nineteenth-century migrants, and named for the mountains it came from rather than for the tea Taiwan makes with it. It is planted mainly in the north for Baozhong and lightly oxidised styles, where its clean, green-floral character suits a tea that is barely rolled and barely oxidised. Its survival alongside modern bred cultivars is a reminder of how much Taiwanese tea is a Fujian transplant.
A Phoenix Dan Cong type whose signature is a marzipan-and-stone-fruit note rather than a floral one, which makes it the clearest counter-example to the assumption that Dan Cong means flowers. It is less widely planted than the orchid types and is often made with a slightly heavier roast, which reinforces the nutty side of its character.
A Phoenix Dan Cong type whose crude name is, by the usual account, a deliberate deterrent invented by a grower who did not want the bush copied — the polite trade name Yin Hua Xiang is now used alongside it. The aroma is a high, cool, gardenia-and-lily note with a distinctly mineral finish, and it is one of the most sought-after Dan Cong types despite, or because of, the name.
The dominant Japanese cultivar by planted area, selected for cold hardiness, yield and a reliable balance of aroma and umami. Its ubiquity is the reason so much Japanese green tea tastes recognisably related.
A Shizuoka cultivar with a pronounced sweet, milky, almost floral aroma and a reputation for being genuinely difficult — frost-sensitive, uneven and disliked by growers who need reliability. It survives in small plantings because the aroma is distinctive enough that a single-cultivar Yamakai sencha is recognisably not a Yabukita, which for a small producer is the whole commercial argument.
A Shizuoka cultivar whose name means the breath of the mountain, planted for a deep colour and a thick, sweet character in the cup. It is used both for sencha and for covered production, and it belongs to the group of prefectural selections that exist because Shizuoka is large and varied enough to need plants suited to its own upland and lowland districts rather than one national cultivar for all of them.
A Nara cultivar used in the covered-garden production of the old Yamato district, and one of the plants behind tencha made outside Kyoto. Matcha is popularly treated as a Uji product, and the covered gardens of Nara, Aichi, Mie and Fukuoka have been making tencha for a long time as well; a cultivar record is one of the few places that distinction is visible.
A later addition to Taiwan’s numbered cultivar series, bred for a strong floral aroma with better vigour and disease tolerance than Qing Xin. Its purpose is straightforward: to give growers a plant that yields like a modern cultivar while smelling closer to the traditional high-mountain material that Taiwanese oolong’s reputation is built on.
The fourth of Taiwan’s four traditional oolong cultivars, alongside Qing Xin Oolong, Qing Xin Da Mao and Da Ye Oolong, and the one used for Muzha-style Tie Guan Yin in the hills south of Taipei. That is a case worth pausing on: Muzha Tie Guan Yin is made in the Tie Guan Yin manner — heavily rolled, roasted, repeatedly baked — from a plant that is not the Anxi Tie Guan Yin cultivar at all. The tea is named for its process, not its plant.
A Zhejiang cultivar whose name means meeting the frost, after its ability to keep producing late into the autumn when most of the surrounding plantings have stopped. It is used for both green and black tea, and it is one of the cultivars that made autumn-picked Chinese black tea a viable product rather than an afterthought.
The pomelo-blossom aroma type among the Fenghuang Dan Cong, sitting in the citrus corner of the classification alongside the honey-orchid and almond types. Pomelo is grown throughout the same part of Guangdong, so the reference is a local one — the aroma names of Dan Cong are a Chaozhou vocabulary built from Chaozhou plants, which is why they translate so poorly.
The dominant cultivar of southern Kyushu and the second most planted in Japan after Yabukita. It buds very early and vigorously in Kagoshima’s warm climate, which is exactly why it is grown there and rarely further north: the same earliness that gives Kagoshima the first sencha of the season would expose it to late frost elsewhere. Yutakamidori is almost always given a short shading before picking and then deep-steamed, and that combination — not the plant alone — produces the dark, thick, low-astringency cup the prefecture is known for.
Not a cultivar but the seed-grown mixed population that covered Japan before clonal planting standardised the crop on Yabukita from the 1950s onward. Zairai plots are genetically varied bush to bush, deep-rooted from seed rather than cutting, later and lower-yielding, and now rare — a few percent of the planted area. They are the Japanese equivalent of China’s Qun Ti Zhong, and are sought for the same reason: variation in the field gives a layered cup no single clone reproduces.
A Sichuan cultivar of the early-budding, white-tipped type that the province’s spring green teas and its Chuanhong black tea are built on. Sichuan is one of China’s largest tea-producing provinces and is almost invisible in export markets, so its cultivars are correspondingly unfamiliar — an imbalance between what is grown and what is discussed that runs through the whole catalogue.
The other principal white-tea cultivar, from Zhenghe county inland of Fuding. It buds later and is withered differently in local practice, giving a white tea with more body, more colour and a fuller, less delicate character than the Fuding equivalent.
One of the Zhenong series bred at an agricultural university in Zhejiang rather than at a national or provincial tea institute, which is a distinction worth noticing: Chinese cultivar development runs through several parallel institutions, and the prefix on a cultivar name usually tells you which one made it. Zhe is Zhejiang and nong is agriculture.
A Phoenix Dan Cong type named for the scent of the zhi lan orchid, and generally counted among the more refined and expensive types. It is lighter and higher-toned than Mi Lan Xiang, with less honeyed weight and a longer aromatic finish, and it is the type most often cited when growers argue that Dan Cong should be brewed fast and hot to catch the top note before the bitterness arrives.
A radiation-bred Longjing 43 derivative, selected for earlier budding and better disease resistance while keeping the flat-leaf character. It is now one of the most planted cultivars in the Longjing producing area.
The local population of Qimen county in Anhui, and the plant material behind Keemun black tea. It is a seed-grown group variety rather than a clonal cultivar — a landrace — although selections have since been made from it. Keemun’s character is conventionally attributed to this material together with the county’s climate and its particular manufacture, and separating those three has never been done cleanly.
Camellia sinensis var. assamica
34 cultivarsThe large-leaved variety of Assam, Yunnan and the tea-growing tropics. Bigger leaves, faster growth, higher yields and a tolerance for heat that sinensis does not have. It is the basis of most commodity black tea and also of sheng pu-erh, which is worth saying plainly because the variety is routinely treated as a synonym for strength.
- Assam indigenous jatIndia
Not a cultivar: a seed stock. Jat is the word Indian planting practice uses for a category of seed-grown material, and the Assam indigenous jat is the large-leaf population native to the Brahmaputra valley — the plants whose recognition as tea in the 1820s and 1830s made an Indian industry possible. Individual bushes within it differ from one another, which is what a seed population means, and the jat is a description of ancestry rather than a plant anyone can order.
One of the assamica-derived Japanese cultivars from the black-tea breeding line, and part of the same research lineage as Benifuuki. The beni- prefix marks the group: beni means crimson, and a Japanese cultivar carrying it was almost always selected for black tea rather than for green, even where it is now processed as green by growers who have no black-tea market.
A Japanese black-tea cultivar from the same programme as Benihomare and Benifuuki, and one of the plants the small wakoucha revival went back to when Japanese producers began making black tea again for a domestic rather than an export market. The revival matters to the cultivar catalogue because it kept a set of plants in the ground that the collapse of Japan’s black-tea export ambitions had otherwise made worthless.
Japan’s first cultivar registered specifically for black tea, selected from assamica-derived material as part of the interwar effort to build a Japanese export black-tea industry that could compete with India and Ceylon. That industry never established itself and the plantings were largely abandoned after import liberalisation, but Benihomare survived to become a parent of later Japanese black-tea cultivars and is now grown again by the small wakoucha revival.
Another of the beni- group of Japanese black-tea cultivars, and one whose name — kaori means fragrance — points at what it was selected for. Japanese black tea has never competed on strength or on colour, and the cultivars that survive in the wakoucha revival are consistently the aromatic ones rather than the robust ones, because aroma is the part of the category a small domestic producer can sell.
- BetjanIndia
A named Assam seed stock rather than a cultivar, associated with a particular estate and propagated as seed rather than as cuttings. Seed stocks of this kind were the professionalised middle stage between simply saving seed from a good field and running a clonal breeding programme: a garden with a reputation for good seed sold it, and the name travelled with the material.
The large-leaved variety found wild in Assam and across upper south-east Asia, and the basis of most black tea by volume as well as of pu-erh. Its recognition in the 1830s is what allowed a tea industry to be built in India rather than merely importing from China.
The seed-grown assamica stock planted across eastern and central Africa from the colonial period onward, and still a large share of the ground under tea there. Africa's clonal cultivars — Kenya's TRFK numbers and the Central African selections bred in Malawi — are improvements measured against this material, and the gap between the two is the single largest yield question in African tea. Almost every English-language account of African tea skips straight to the clones.
The large-leaf population of Fengqing county in Lincang, and the material behind most Dian Hong. Its very high bud content and heavy golden down are what give Yunnan black tea its characteristic appearance, and the sweet, malty, cocoa-leaning liquor it produces is why Dian Hong reads as a distinct style rather than a Yunnan version of a Fujian black tea.
One of the Gambung series of Indonesian clones, released by the research institute at Gambung in West Java and widely planted across the country’s tea area. Indonesia’s industry was built by Dutch planters on Assam material and has run on clonal selections since; the GMB numbers are the current generation of them and appear on essentially no packaging anywhere.
An older Indonesian clone that was for a long time among the most widely planted in Java, named after the estate or locality the selection was made at rather than after a research series. It belongs to the generation of estate-made selections that preceded the systematic GMB numbering, which is a sequence most producing countries went through.
The large-leaf cultivar of Lingyun county in Guangxi, and the reason a province almost never named in English-language tea writing supplies leaf to every one of the six categories. Its buds carry a heavy silvery down — the baihao of the name — on an assamica-type leaf, an unusual combination that lets one plant serve a downy white-tea grade, a bud-heavy green tea and a full-bodied black tea from the same field.
- Manipuri jatIndia
One of the seed jats of Indian planting practice, named for the region its stock came from, and reported to be hardier and more cold-tolerant than the Assam indigenous material while retaining large-leaf vigour. Jats are not cultivars and the distinction is load-bearing: a planter choosing a jat was choosing a population with a general character, not a plant with known behaviour.
The large-leaf Yunnan stock of the Menghai area, the basis of most modern shou pu-erh and a great deal of sheng. Its high polyphenol content is what allows wet-piling to work and what gives young sheng its bitterness.
The large-leaf population of Mengku in Lincang, and one of the three Yunnan populations — with Menghai and Fengqing — that most pu-erh and Dian Hong is actually made from. Mengku material is associated with a thick, sweet body and comparatively restrained bitterness, which is a large part of why Bingdao and the surrounding villages command the prices they do.
- Miang landraceThailand
Not a cultivar: the indigenous and long-established large-leaf stands of the northern Thai uplands and the adjoining Shan hills, harvested for miang — tea leaf that is steamed and fermented and then chewed rather than infused. It is one of the oldest continuous uses of the tea plant, it long predates the drinking of tea in the same region, and the plants involved are seed-grown trees in mixed forest rather than anything planted in rows.
One of the first bred cultivars released by Vietnam’s tea research station and widely planted for the export black-tea industry. The prefix records the research station rather than a person or a place of origin, which is the usual convention where a national programme rather than an estate did the selecting.
The large-leaf highland population of northern Vietnam, growing as tall seed-grown trees rather than pruned bushes and picked by climbing. The name means ‘snow on the mountain’ and describes the dense white down on the buds, which is heavy enough to be the first thing a buyer checks. It is a population rather than a clone — the trees vary considerably from valley to valley — and it supplies almost all of Vietnam’s speciality output.
- Sri Lankan seedling teaSri Lanka
The old seed-grown fields that still make up a substantial part of Sri Lanka's planted area, against which the TRI numbered clones are the improvement. Sri Lanka's tea land is unusually old — much of it was planted after the coffee blight of the nineteenth century emptied the same hillsides — and the age profile of the bushes is a live economic problem rather than a piece of history.
An assamica selection developed from the large-leaf stock brought to the Sun Moon Lake basin under Japanese administration, and the cultivar behind much of Taiwan’s conventional black tea before Ruby No. 18 overtook it. It gives a straightforwardly malty, full-bodied cup in the Assam idiom rather than the aromatic, menthol-inflected style Taiwan later became known for.
A Kenyan clone from the 300 series, the band the country’s better-known selections sit in — including the purple TRFK 306/1. Kenya’s clonal programme is one of the largest and least discussed in tea: an industry built almost entirely on selections made in one country in the second half of the twentieth century, distributed through smallholder cooperatives, and sold onward with no plant name attached to any of it.
Another Kenyan 300-series clone, and one of the selections that appears in discussions of orthodox and speciality manufacture in Kenya rather than only CTC. The country’s speciality sector is small and recent, and it depends on being able to name a plant and a garden — which means reaching back into a clone register that was built for a commodity industry that never needed to.
The purple-leaf cultivar released by Kenya’s Tea Research Foundation and the basis of the country’s purple tea. The colour comes from anthocyanin pigmentation in the leaf and is a breeding outcome rather than a processing one.
One of the most widely planted clonal cultivars in Kenya, selected for yield and for the bright, brisk, deeply coloured liquor that CTC blending demands.
One of the most widely planted clones in Kenya and therefore one of the most widely planted tea plants in the world, given that Kenya is among the largest exporters. The code is a selection reference rather than a name: the first number identifies the trial or seed source and the second the individual selection within it, which is why Kenyan clone codes carry a slash and Japanese cultivars carry poetry.
The first clonal cultivar released by the Tocklai Tea Research Institute in Assam, and the beginning of systematic clonal planting in India. It remains widely grown for its vigour and heavy cropping.
One of the most widely planted of the Tocklai Vegetative clones released for the Assam and north-east Indian industry, selected for yield and for the strong, coloury liquor that CTC manufacture and the domestic blending trade require. The TV series is the reason modern Assam is a clonal crop rather than a seed-grown one, and it changed what an Assam garden looks like as much as what it tastes like.
A Tocklai clone from the same programme as TV23, planted across north-east India for its yield and drought tolerance. Its interest is less in the cup than in what the series represents: a research institute deliberately narrowing a genetically diverse seed-grown crop to a handful of tested clones, with the gains in productivity and the losses in variability that follow.
A large-leaf cultivar selected at the Yingde tea research station in Guangdong and the basis of the Ying Hong black tea the district was created to produce. It was chosen for exactly what an export black tea needed in the mid-twentieth century — thick liquor, deep colour, cocoa-and-malt sweetness and enough strength to take milk — and it remains one of the clearest examples in China of a cultivar bred to hit a defined market specification.
A high-yielding Yunnan clonal cultivar planted extensively on terraced plantation land from the 1980s onward. Most inexpensive sheng and shou pu-erh, and much Dian Hong, comes from it.
Another of the Yunkang series of Yunnan large-leaf selections, developed at the province’s tea research institute and planted widely across the terrace plantings of Xishuangbanna and Lincang. The name means Yunnan-resistant: the series was selected substantially for disease resistance and yield, which is why it dominates the terrace area and why the pu-erh market’s premium material comes from the older seed-grown stands instead.
The large-leaf assamica population of Yunnan, and the raw material for both pu-erh and Dian Hong. Old, unpruned trees within this population — gu shu — are the basis of the most expensive sheng pu-erh, and the age claims attached to them are largely unverifiable by a buyer.
A purple-leaved Yunnan selection whose stems, leaves and buds are all violet rather than green, and which brews a liquor that shifts toward purple in acidic water. It is a genuine cultivar selection from Yunnan large-leaf stock rather than a processing effect, and it is distinct from the purple-tipped Zi Ya material that occurs naturally in old Yunnan gardens — a distinction that vendors routinely blur.
Not a cultivar but a description of material: purple-budded plants occurring scattered through Yunnan’s seed-grown populations, picked out and sold separately. Zi Ya is genetic variation within a landrace rather than a selected plant, which is exactly what distinguishes it from Zi Juan — the bred purple cultivar from the same province. A seller who uses the two names interchangeably is describing two different things.
Camellia sinensis var. cambodiensis
2 cultivarsThe third recognised variety, sometimes treated as a natural hybrid rather than a variety in its own right. It appears far less often in commercial cultivation than the other two and its status in the botanical literature is not settled.
- Cambod jatIndia
The third of the classical Indian seed jats, taken from the southern Indochinese form that botany argues about under the name var. cambodiensis. It sits between the Chinese and Assam types in leaf size and habit, and its practical importance is as a crossing partner: much Indian and Sri Lankan planting material carries Cambod ancestry in a mixture, and very little of it is Cambod alone.
The third name in tea botany, and the least stable one. Plants of the southern Indochinese form are intermediate between the small-leaf and large-leaf varieties — upright, fast-growing, with a leaf of middling size and a habit closer to a small tree than a shrub — and they have been classified at various times as a variety of Camellia sinensis, as a subspecies of a separate assamica species, and as nothing distinct at all. Whether it deserves a rank of its own is a genuine disagreement among botanists rather than a settled fact this record can report.
Hybrids
20 cultivarsCultivars bred deliberately across the variety boundary, usually to combine assamica vigour or colour with sinensis aroma or cold tolerance. Taiwan's TRES numbered series and several Japanese breeding programmes sit here, and their parentage is the reason they behave the way they do.
Not a cultivar and not a landrace but a category of planting material: the mixed-ancestry stock that resulted when Chinese small-leaf seed and Assam large-leaf plants were grown together and allowed to cross, deliberately and accidentally, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because tea does not readily pollinate itself, any two varieties planted near each other will hybridise, and most of the tea planted in India, Sri Lanka and much of Africa is hybrid material rather than either parent variety in a pure form.
One of the Darjeeling clones, and among the most widely planted in the district alongside AV2 and P312. The letter in a Darjeeling clone code is the estate the selection was made on and the number is its serial within that estate’s selections — a naming system that records where a plant was found rather than what it is, which is characteristic of clonal selection made by planters rather than by a breeding station.
A Darjeeling clone selected at the Bannockburn garden and widely propagated across the district, one of the group of estate-named clones that replaced seed-grown planting in the Himalayan gardens. It carries the sinensis-leaning character Darjeeling depends on while yielding better than the old China bushes, and it is one of the clones most often named when a garden lists what a particular lot was picked from.
A Japanese cultivar bred for black tea production from an assamica-influenced cross. Japanese black tea made from it is markedly more astringent and more aromatic than the Yabukita-based wakoucha most producers make.
A cross of Burmese large-leaf assamica with wild Taiwanese mountain tea, and the reason Taiwanese black tea became distinctive rather than derivative. It produces a natural menthol and cinnamon aroma found in no other cultivar.
The less famous sibling of Ruby 18, crossing Kyang assamica with an Indian Jaipuri plant. It gives a rounder, fruitier black tea without the menthol signature, and is planted far less widely.
A Japanese selection from Indian-hybrid parentage — the name is literally an abbreviation of Indian cross — made when Japan was still trying to build a black-tea industry. It survives in small plantings and is used by wakoucha producers and, unusually, by some makers of Japanese oolong-style teas, because assamica-derived material behaves differently under withering than the country’s green-tea cultivars do.
A Georgian selection from the Soviet-era breeding programme, developed for the cold-tolerance that tea needs to survive a Caucasus winter while still giving usable yield. Cold-hardiness is the whole problem of Caucasus and Black Sea tea growing, and Kolkhida-derived material spread from Georgia into the Krasnodar and Azerbaijani plantings for exactly that reason — it is the cultivar lineage that made tea possible at those latitudes.
A Vietnamese hybrid selection combining material from the southern highlands around Lam Dong with the northern research-station stock, and now one of the country’s most widely planted cultivars. Vietnam’s two tea regions are genuinely different — the northern midlands and highlands, and the Lam Dong plateau around Bao Loc — and the cultivar name records a cross between them.
The companion release to LDP1 from the same Vietnamese hybridisation work. Releasing selections in pairs or small groups is standard practice in tea breeding — a programme that spends fifteen years on a cross does not release one plant from it — and it is why cultivar names so often arrive with a neighbouring number attached.
One of the Guizhou breeding programme's black-tea cultivars, and a good place to read a Chinese cultivar name as the address it usually is. Qian is the classical abbreviation for Guizhou; mei points to Meitan, the county where the province's tea research station sits; 419 is the accession. Three characters state the province, the institute and the line, which is a convention worth knowing because it recurs across Yunkang, Zhenong, Zhongcha and Fuyun.
A recent Taiwanese release reported to derive from the island’s indigenous mountain tea rather than from the Chinese-descended cultivars that make up the rest of the planted area. Taiwan has native Camellia populations of its own, distinct from the tea brought over by settlers, and using them as breeding material is a deliberate strategy — the same one that produced the celebrated Hong Yu by crossing wild Taiwanese material with Burmese assamica.
A Japanese cultivar whose young leaves carry anthocyanin pigmentation, so the leaf is reddish-purple rather than green and the infusion turns from purplish to pink when acidified with lemon. It is the Japanese counterpart of Kenya’s TRFK 306/1 and of Yunnan’s Zi Juan: three unrelated breeding programmes that independently produced purple tea plants, in each case as a pigment trait in the leaf rather than as a processing style. This record makes no claim about what the pigment does for anyone.
One of the earlier releases in the Sri Lankan TRI series and still planted across the island. The numbering is worth reading rather than treating as arbitrary: the institute’s selections are grouped into number bands released in successive phases, so a 2000-series clone and a 4000-series clone come from different periods of the programme with different objectives behind them.
The most widely planted cultivar in Sri Lanka, released by the island’s Tea Research Institute and used across the elevation bands from low-grown to high-grown. Its ubiquity is a useful corrective to the way Ceylon tea is usually explained: the sharp differences between Uva, Dimbula and Ruhuna are largely differences of elevation, climate and manufacture, not of plant material, because much the same clone is growing in all of them.
Another of the Sri Lankan Tea Research Institute’s numbered releases, planted alongside TRI 2025 in the island’s replanting programmes. The institute’s series is organised around suitability to elevation band and to drought exposure, so a garden’s clone mix is a record of which risks its planters were managing rather than a flavour decision.
A Sri Lankan clone from the institute’s 3000-series band. Sri Lanka’s programme is one of the older continuously running tea breeding efforts anywhere, and its output is unusually well organised: numbered clones, published planting recommendations by elevation and district, and an extension service that carried the material to smallholders as well as to estates.
A later Sri Lankan release, from the 4000-series band. The later bands come from a period when the island’s planting problem had changed: the estates were ageing, replanting rates were low, drought and low-country expansion had become the pressing issues, and a clone’s tolerance of a difficult site mattered more than its yield on a good one.
An early release in the UPASI numbered clone series, planted widely across the Nilgiris and the other south Indian districts. Clones from this programme are chosen against a different specification from Assam’s: the south Indian crop is harvested through most of the year rather than in flushes, so consistency across seasons matters more than a peak-season peak.
One of the numbered clones released by the UPASI Tea Research Institute for the plantations of south India, where the growing conditions — high, equatorial, with two monsoons and no true dormancy — differ sharply from Assam’s. South Indian clone selection has consequently run on its own track, and the UPASI series is what most Nilgiri, Anamalai and Munnar planting actually consists of.
Variety group not established
3 cultivarsCultivars whose variety group TeaHQ cannot state. Recorded as unknown rather than assigned to the likeliest group, because a guess in a taxonomy field propagates as fact.
The seed-grown population of the Caspian provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran, planted from material introduced from India around the turn of the twentieth century and largely propagated by seed since. Iran grows and drinks a great deal of tea and appears in almost no English-language tea reference, and the plant material is a substantial part of why: there is nothing to name, no clone series to list, and a catalogue organised around named cultivars will therefore show the country as empty.
- Nepali planted stockNepal
Not a cultivar but an honest account of what is actually planted in Nepal, which has no breeding programme of its own. The eastern hill gardens of Ilam, Panchthar and Dhankuta grow old Chinese seed stock and Indian clonal material — AV2, P312, B157, T78 — because they were planted from Darjeeling across a border that is a political line rather than a botanical one. The terai lowlands grow assamica for CTC. Nepali orthodox tea is compared to Darjeeling constantly and sells for less; a large part of why it invites the comparison is that it is frequently the same plants on the same range.
One of the Darjeeling estate clones, named — as B157 and P312 are — for the garden it was selected on rather than by a central breeding programme. It sits alongside AV2 in most modern Darjeeling replanting, and the pattern the four of them make is the real subject: Darjeeling's clonal material was found on its own hillsides by its own planters, not issued from an institute, which is why the names are estates and the records are patchy.
Two levels, not one
Tea botany has a level above cultivar that most tea writing leaves out. The variety group — sinensis, assamica, cambodiensis — describes the botanical variety of Camellia sinensis. The cultivar sits inside it and names a specific propagated selection: Yabukita, Qing Xin, TRFK 306. Yabukita is a cultivar of var. sinensis, and both facts are needed to say anything useful about it.
Collapsing the two produces the errors you see constantly on packaging and in shop copy. “Assamica” gets used as shorthand for a bold malty black tea, when it is the variety behind sheng pu-erh and several white teas as well. A named cultivar gets treated as a grade, when it is a propagation decision. TeaHQ keeps the two levels apart because the questions they answer are different: the variety group tells you what kind of plant it is, the cultivar tells you which plant.
Codes, numbers and the words around them
54of these records carry a registration or breeding code rather than only a name — TRFK 306/1, TRI 2025, TV1, AV2, TRES No. 12. A code is an institution’s signature: the prefix names the research station or the estate that made the selection, and the number places the plant inside that programme. It is not a grade, not a batch number, not a harvest year and not a quality claim, which are the four things it is most often mistaken for.
What a code cannot tell you is as important. It identifies a selection; it does not certify that the plant in a particular field is that selection, and it says nothing about the cup, which depends on site, season and manufacture at least as much as on the plant. Reading a cultivar code goes through the systems country by country and explains why some producing countries number their plants and others name them.
The vocabulary around the codes is looser still. Cultivar, clone, landrace, variety and style are used interchangeably in tea writing and mean five different things — the five words that are not synonyms separates them, including the trade word “varietal”, which is not a botanical term at all.
A cultivar constrains what a tea can be; it does not determine what it is. The same cultivar processed as green tea and as oolong produces two teas with little in common, which is why the processing sequence carries as much of the explanation as the botany does.