Qianmei 419
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.
Where it sits in the botany
Qianmei 419 is recorded under Hybrid, 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: Qianmei 419. 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: qianmei 419, qian mei si yi jiu.
Where it came from
Bred within Guizhou's provincial tea research programme at Meitan from material carrying large-leaf assamica influence, and aimed at black-tea production rather than at the province's green teas.
How firm this is: Inferred rather than taken from a primary breeding or registration record. The naming convention is reliable and the programme's black-tea orientation is consistently reported. The parentage, the release year and the planted area were not verified against a primary breeding record.
What the plant is like
A vigorous large-leaved plant carrying assamica influence, grown at altitude in a province better known for green tea. High in the polyphenols that full oxidation converts into colour and body.
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.
Bred for a specific economic problem: Guizhou is high, cool and humid, which suits green tea, but green tea is a crowded market dominated by provinces with older reputations. A high-polyphenol, high-yielding, assamica-influenced cultivar gives a grower a route into black tea instead, where the province competes on cost rather than on name. Crossing large-leaf vigour into a plant that will still survive Guizhou's winters is the actual breeding problem, and it is the same problem Japan's Benifuuki and Taiwan's Hong Yu were each solving in their own climates.
What it does in the cup
As black tea it gives a deeply coloured, full, sweet-malty liquor with firm body and moderate briskness — closer to Dian Hong than to a Fujian gongfu black, which is the assamica parentage showing.
How much of this is really the cultivar?
The honest cultivar claim for a black-tea breeding line is compositional rather than aromatic: a higher polyphenol load gives oxidation more to work with, so the finished tea has more colour, more body and more astringency to manage. What it does not do is fix a flavour — withering time, rolling pressure, oxidation length and firing decide whether that raw material becomes sweet and malty or harsh and flat, and the same leaf will do either. Cultivars bred for a category are best read as a specification for the factory rather than as a promise to the drinker.
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'.
Other cultivars in Hybrid
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.