Camellia sinensis var. assamica

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.

阿薩姆種Camellia sinensis var. assamicaIndiaAlso called Assam bushAlso called large-leaf varietyAlso called da ye zhong

Where it sits in the botany

Camellia sinensis var. assamica is recorded under Camellia sinensis var. assamica, the variety group one level above cultivar. It is associated with India, which is where it was selected or is most widely planted rather than the only place it grows.

Where it came from

Recognised as tea in Assam in the 1820s and 1830s, when indigenous large-leaf plants were identified as Camellia sinensis rather than a separate genus.

How firm this is: Inferred rather than taken from a primary breeding or registration record. The history is well documented in general reference material but was not verified against a primary source in this sprint.

What the plant is like

Large, broad, glossy leaves on a plant that grows to a tree if unpruned. Vigorous, high-yielding, tolerant of heat and humidity and intolerant of frost. Higher in the compounds associated with body and briskness, which suits full oxidation and suits milk.

Why a grower plants it

Yield, hardiness, when it buds, what it resists and whether a machine can cut it. This is the half of a cultivar’s identity that decides what is actually in the ground, and it is usually left out of writing aimed at drinkers.

Assamica is why tea is cheap. It grows fast, flushes many times a year in a warm wet climate, tolerates heat and humidity that would stress a sinensis bush, and yields several times as much made tea per hectare — which is the entire economic basis of the industries in Assam, Kenya, Sri Lanka's low country, Indonesia and Malawi, and of the CTC black tea that is most of the world's supply by volume. Its limit is frost: it does not survive a hard winter, so it is confined to the tropics and to frost-free subtropical ground, and that single constraint explains most of the world tea map that sinensis does not explain.

What it does in the cup

Fuller-bodied, brisker and more astringent than sinensis at comparable processing, with malt and cocoa registers coming forward under full oxidation. That body is what lets it stand up to milk, and the reason the tea-with-milk tradition and the assamica-growing colonial industries are the same history.

How much of this is really the cultivar?

The standing error here is using assamica as a synonym for strong black tea. It is a botanical variety, and the same variety produces Yunnan sheng pu-erh, Yunnan and Fujian silver-needle-style white teas and Kenyan purple tea — none of which is a strong black tea, and one of which is barely processed at all. What assamica reliably supplies is a higher extract, which is a raw material property: more to work with, and more astringency to manage. Whether that arrives as briskness, as sweetness or as decades of ageing potential is decided downstream, by processing.

Cultivar, growing site and processing all shape a cup, and the cultivar is very often the smallest of the three. It is also the one that fits on a label, so almost every commercial incentive runs toward overstating it. This section is on every cultivar page that has been reviewed for it, including the ones where the honest answer is “less than you would think”.

What it is usually made into

The categories this cultivar is typically processed into. It is a statement about common practice, not a limit — processing decides the category, and a cultivar can be taken down more than one route.

Black tea — Tea taken deliberately through full enzymatic oxidation, giving the dark leaf, amber-to-red liquor and malty or brisk character most Western drinkers think of as simply 'tea'.
Dark tea and pu-erh — Teas changed after processing by microbial activity — either deliberate wet-piling or long, slow ageing.
White tea — The least handled category: withered and dried, with no fixation and no deliberate rolling.

Teas in the catalogue made from Camellia sinensis var. assamica

Guides covering this cultivar

The history of tea cultivation — How tea moved from gathered forest trees to selected clonal cultivars on managed estates — and why that shift explains most of what a modern packet tells you about itself.
Why black tea tastes malty — Full oxidation rebuilds the leaf’s flavour compounds into larger coloured ones, trading fresh and vegetal character for malt, dried fruit and cocoa — and the leaf variety decides how far that goes.
Bush or tree: what an unpruned tea plant actually looks like — The waist-high hedge in every photograph of a tea field is an artefact of pruning. Left alone, the same plant becomes a tree, and the places where it has been left alone produce a category of tea that behaves differently from everything else.
Robert Fortune and the theft of Chinese tea — A Scottish plant collector travelled in disguise through the Chinese tea districts in the late 1840s and removed plants, seed and workers to India for the East India Company. Most of what he sent died; what mattered was the knowledge and the people.
A tea leaf, part by part — Everything a drinker judges a tea by — the down on a bud, the thickness of the wet leaf, the serrated edge in the bottom of a gaiwan — is an anatomical feature of a specific evergreen shrub. It is worth knowing what those features are and what they do for the plant.
Sinensis, assamica, and the third name that will not settle — Tea botany has two levels, and most tea writing collapses them into one. Above the cultivar sits the botanical variety, and the difference between the small-leaf and large-leaf varieties explains more about a tea than any cultivar name does.
The other camellias: tea’s relatives, and the ones sold as tea — Camellia is a large genus and tea is one species in it. Several of the others are useful, one is a major oilseed crop, some are grown in gardens, and a few are harvested and sold in ways that make them hard to tell apart from tea.
Cultivar, clone, landrace, variety, style: five words that are not synonyms — These five terms are used interchangeably in tea writing and they mean five different things. Keeping them apart is the difference between a cultivar catalogue that is informative and one that is decorative.

Sources

TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ

This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No breeding register or institutional record stands behind the account above, which is why the origin note carries its confidence in the open rather than reading as a citation.

How TeaHQ handles sources

Written comparisons

Where TeaHQ has set this cultivar against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.

Camellia sinensis var. sinensis vs var. assamica — The one botanical distinction that genuinely explains flavour across the whole catalogue. These are varieties rather than cultivars — the level above cultivar in tea botany — and almost every named cultivar descends from one or the other.