TeaHQ

Longjing 43

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.

龍井43Camellia sinensis var. sinensisLongjing 43China

Where it sits in the botany

Longjing 43 is recorded under Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, the variety group one level above cultivar. It is associated with China, which is where it was selected or is most widely planted rather than the only place it grows.

Registration code: Longjing 43. A breeding or registration code identifies the selection in an institutional register and is often the name a grower uses when the trade name is not.

Also transliterated as: longjing 43, long jing si shi san.

Where it came from

Selected at a Chinese tea research institute in the twentieth century from the local Longjing population and propagated widely from the 1970s onward.

How firm this is: Inferred rather than taken from a primary breeding or registration record. Consistently reported in Chinese tea literature; not verified against a primary registration record.

What the plant is like

Early budding, uniform, high-yielding and well suited to the flat pressed shape. Its aroma is cleaner and more immediate than the older Qun Ti Zhong population, which is richer but later and far less uniform.

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.

Everything about Longjing 43 is timing. It buds around a week to ten days ahead of the local seed-grown population, and in a market where the pre-Qingming harvest sells for several times what the same leaf fetches a fortnight later, a week is the whole business case. Beyond earliness it is high-yielding, resistant enough for commercial planting, and — the part that matters for the finished shape — it pushes shoots of very even length, so a batch presses into the flat uniform blade Longjing is judged on without heavy sorting. Its cost is frost exposure: budding early in a region that still gets late frosts means an early spring cold snap can take out the year's most valuable picking.

What it does in the cup

Clean, direct and immediately fragrant, with a chestnut-and-bean sweetness and a short bright finish. Set against the older Qun Ti Zhong population it is more legible and less layered — the aroma arrives at once rather than unfolding, and the finish does not run as long.

How much of this is really the cultivar?

For Longjing the processing dominates and it is not close. The pan-firing is the tea: the temperature, the hand pressure and the length of the fixing decide the chestnut aroma, the flatness and whether the cup reads as fresh or as toasted, and a skilled and an unskilled firing of the same Longjing 43 leaf produce two obviously different teas. Cultivar and garden then argue over the remainder, and the cultivar argument that is actually worth having is not about flavour at all — it is whether you are buying the earliness of Longjing 43 or the complexity of the older population, which is a choice between a date and a depth.

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.

  • Green tea — Tea whose oxidation is halted early by heat, keeping the leaf green and the cup fresh, vegetal or marine in character.

Teas in the catalogue made from Longjing 43

Other cultivars in Camellia sinensis var. sinensis

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.
  • Seed or cutting: how a new tea plant is made — Almost every tea bush planted in the last sixty years is a cutting from another bush rather than a seedling, and that single change explains cultivar names on packets, the uniformity of a modern field and a good deal of what is argued about in tea.
  • Landrace populations and clonal monoculture — A field of one clone and a field of a seed-grown population are two different agricultural objects. The difference runs all the way through — when the field is picked, how the factory has to work, what the cup does, and what happens in a bad year.
  • How a tea cultivar is made, and why it takes decades — Every named plant in the cultivar catalogue is the output of a process that runs for twenty to forty years, mostly at public expense, and ends with a plant that growers may or may not adopt. Knowing the process explains why cultivars have the traits they do.

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.

  • Jiukeng vs Longjing 43 — A parent and a product of Chinese green-tea breeding. Jiukeng is a cold-tolerant Zhejiang cultivar historically as important for what it was crossed into as for what it made on its own; Longjing 43 is the early, uniform selection that reshaped flat-fried green tea.
  • Longjing 43 vs Qun Ti Zhong — The clonal cultivar that now dominates Longjing production and the seed-grown heirloom population it replaced. The clone buds earlier, which matters enormously in a market that pays a premium for the earliest spring tea; the population tastes more layered and yields less.
  • Longjing 43 vs Wu Niu Zao — Much of the ‘pre-Qingming Longjing’ on sale early in the season is not made from a Longjing cultivar at all. Wu Niu Zao buds two to three weeks earlier and is shaped in the Longjing style, and recognising it is the most practical defence a buyer has.
  • Longjing 43 vs Zhongcha 108 — A widely planted Longjing cultivar and the radiation-bred derivative that now sits beside it in the same gardens. The differences are real for a grower and close to invisible for a drinker, which is worth saying plainly.