Origins

A small Caspian origin whose tea grows in the humid subtropical lowlands of Lankaran and Astara, on the same climatic strip that carries Iranian production a short distance south. Planting expanded under Soviet management, contracted sharply in the 1990s, and has since been partly re-established. Output is modest against a domestic culture that drinks a great deal of tea, so most of what is sold in the country is imported and blended.

The origin that supplied most of the Soviet Union’s tea and then almost disappeared. Planting began on the humid Black Sea littoral in the late nineteenth century with Chinese seed and Chinese expertise, expanded enormously under Soviet planning with heavy mechanisation, and collapsed after 1991 — leaving large areas of plantation abandoned to scrub. The current industry is being rebuilt partly from those semi-wild plots, which is unusual: the bushes are decades old, ungrafted and unsprayed by neglect rather than by design.

A small, very high-altitude producer on the ridges of the Congo–Nile divide, where tea is grown by smallholders around a handful of processing factories and is one of the country’s principal export crops. The elevation is extreme by world standards and the leaf grows slowly, which is the usual explanation offered for the brightness of the resulting liquor. Almost all of it is sold at auction into blends.

A tea origin inside a coffee country, and organised quite unlike either its East African neighbours or its own coffee sector. Tea is grown on a small number of large state-established plantations in the wet south-west — Wush Wush in the Kaffa area and Gumaro further north — carved out of the same montane forest belt that holds Ethiopia’s indigenous Arabica. There is no smallholder tea sector to speak of, no auction, and effectively no export identity: the crop is made as CTC and drunk at home, where black tea prepared with spices and sugar is an everyday drink quite separate from the coffee ceremony.

The largest exporter of black tea by volume, built overwhelmingly on CTC manufacture and on the brisk, deeply coloured liquor that most commercial teabag blends are constructed around.

A high-altitude East African producer whose tea is grown mostly on volcanic soils above 1,800 metres. Almost all of it is CTC sold at auction into blends, where its brightness and colour are valued without the origin ever being named on a packet.

An East African producer with two quite separate growing areas: the cool Southern Highlands around Mufindi and Njombe, where most of the crop is grown at high altitude, and the older Usambara plantings in the north-east that date from the German colonial period. Almost all of it is CTC sold at auction into blends, and the country is far better known abroad for coffee than for the tea it has been growing for over a century.

A significant East African volume producer concentrated in the western highlands near the Rwenzori range and the Albertine Rift. The industry was largely dismantled during the political disruption of the 1970s and rebuilt from the 1980s onward, mostly as CTC. Ugandan tea is prized in the blending trade for colour and strength and reaches drinkers almost entirely anonymously, through the Mombasa auction.

The origin of tea as a cultivated crop and the only country producing all six Camellia sinensis categories at scale, from Fujian white to Yunnan dark tea.

A green-tea producer almost exclusively, distinguished by steamed fixation, extensive shading and a highly mechanised, quality-controlled supply chain.

A small green-tea origin with a distinct pan-firing tradition and a harvest vocabulary organised by how early in spring the leaf was picked rather than by cultivar or region.

The centre of modern high-mountain oolong production, where elevation, cultivar selection and a light rolled style produce the creamy, floral profile most drinkers now associate with the word oolong.

Home to the northernmost commercial tea in the world, grown in a small pocket of Krasnodar Krai behind Sochi where the Caucasus shelters the coast from continental winters. Everything about the crop follows from the latitude: the bushes are frost-hardy selections, the growing season is short, yields are low and the tea is a domestic curiosity rather than an export commodity. Russia’s significance to tea is overwhelmingly as a consumer and a trade route, not as a grower.

Tea grows in Europe in one place with an unbroken commercial history: the island of São Miguel in the Azores, where plantations were established in the nineteenth century as the local orange trade failed. The mid-Atlantic climate — mild, humid, without frost — suits the plant, and the surviving factories still run nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rolling and sorting machinery. Volumes are tiny and the tea is mostly sold to visitors and within Portugal.

An origin only in the last two decades, and a very small one. Camellia sinensis has grown ornamentally in British gardens for centuries; commercial plucking began in Cornwall in the 2000s on an estate whose sheltered, mild, high-rainfall valleys already supported camellias and rhododendrons, and a handful of Scottish and south-western growers have followed. Yields are minute, the season is short, and the tea sells at prices set by scarcity rather than by any settled reputation for style.

A single-estate origin on a very large island, and a good demonstration that biogeography does not decide agriculture. Madagascar's highlands are cool, wet and acidic enough for tea over a wide area, but commercial planting happened in one place — Sahambavy, on the escarpment east of Fianarantsoa — and never spread. Everything else the island is agriculturally famous for, vanilla and cloves above all, is grown for export by smallholders; the tea is an estate crop with a domestic market, and the two economies barely touch.

An island origin where tea is a survivor of the sugar economy rather than a rival to it. Plantations sit on the cool, wet central plateau around Bois Chéri and Chamarel, on lateritic soils too poor and too high for cane, and the industry has spent its whole existence as the crop that occupies the ground sugar did not want. The defining commercial fact is not the leaf but what is done to it: the great majority of Mauritian tea is sold flavoured, overwhelmingly with vanilla, and that blend is a national habit rather than an export line.

A marginal grower with a long history of trying. Repeated nineteenth-century attempts to establish tea in the South mostly failed on labour costs; what survives at scale is a single mechanised garden on Wadmalaw Island in South Carolina, alongside a genuinely artisan sector on the slopes of Hawai‘i’s Big Island and a scatter of small farms in the Pacific North-West and the Gulf states. The Hawaiian growers are the interesting case: small plots, hand-processing and a deliberate focus on speciality rather than volume.

A small producer whose commercial tea comes almost entirely from the wet tropics of far north Queensland, on the Atherton Tablelands behind Cairns, where the crop is harvested by machine and made as black tea for the domestic market. A second, older planting tradition exists in the northern rivers district of New South Wales. Growing conditions are workable rather than ideal — rainfall is reliable in the tropics but labour costs rule out hand-plucking, so the style is set by the machinery.

A deliberate transplant rather than an inherited industry. Camellia sinensis was planted commercially near Hamilton in the Waikato from the 1990s by growers of Taiwanese background, using Taiwanese oolong cultivars and Taiwanese rolling and roasting practice, on the argument that the region’s volcanic soils and clean air suited the plant. The climate does most of the constraining: a temperate maritime season with genuine winter dormancy allows only a few harvests a year, so the operation is small, enclosed against wind, and priced accordingly.

A small Oceanian producer whose tea sits in one place: the Wahgi valley of the Western Highlands, around Banz and Mount Hagen, where estates were established from the 1960s on cleared grassland at roughly 1,500 metres. Being a few degrees south of the equator at that altitude means no dormant season and no flush structure — plucking runs all year — and almost all of the crop is made as CTC. The industry is small, has contracted, and its output reaches drinkers through blends rather than under the country’s name.

A high-volume, low-cost black-tea origin in the subtropical north-east, and one of the most thoroughly mechanised tea industries in the world: the crop is cut by modified tractors rather than plucked, which takes stem and mature leaf along with the shoot. The tea that results is dark, plain and cheap, and it is bought largely for iced-tea manufacture and for blending where colour matters more than aroma. Argentina is also the heartland of yerba mate, a different plant entirely.

A minor origin now, but a genuine one, centred on Registro in the Vale do Ribeira south of São Paulo, where Japanese immigrant families established tea from the 1920s and 1930s. Production peaked in the second half of the twentieth century and has since contracted sharply as growers moved to more profitable crops, leaving a small output made largely as black tea. The Japanese lineage of the planting is the interesting part: it explains why a South American origin has green-tea know-how at all.

An origin consisting, in practice, of one plantation. Tea grows at Bitaco on the western Andean slope in Valle del Cauca, where an estate established in the mid-twentieth century sits inside a cloud-forest reserve above the Dagua valley and supplies the Colombian domestic market. There is no tea auction, no export trade of consequence and no second district — which makes Colombia a useful counter-example to the assumption that a producing country implies an industry. Its agricultural identity abroad rests entirely on coffee.

A substantial producer whose crop is almost entirely drunk at home. The old gardens sit on the low hillocks of the Sylhet division, planted from the 1850s as part of the same Assam expansion that created the Indian industry, with a newer and quite different smallholder sector on the flat land of Panchagarh in the far north. Very little is exported, so the origin is largely invisible in the markets where Assam and Ceylon are household words.

A major black-tea producer with three well-known regions and the world’s largest domestic tea-drinking culture, centred on spiced milk preparations.

A Himalayan origin whose eastern growing districts sit on the same ridge system as Darjeeling, producing teas of closely comparable character under a name that carries far less trade recognition.

A black-tea origin organised almost entirely by elevation, where the same island produces light, brisk high-grown teas and dark, full-bodied low-grown ones under a single national name.

One of the older non-Chinese tea industries, built by Dutch planters in the nineteenth century after early attempts with Chinese seed failed and assamica stock was brought in instead. Production concentrates in the volcanic highlands of West Java and around Lake Toba in North Sumatra, and most of it leaves the country unnamed as blending material. The volcanic soils and reliable equatorial rainfall give a clean, brisk, faintly mineral black tea that packers value precisely because it is consistent.

An origin whose tea mostly leaves under someone else’s name. The northern provinces sit on the same upland system as Yunnan and southern Shan State and hold old, tall, seed-grown tea trees worked by Akha, Phunoi and Hmong households; much of that leaf is dried as maocha and crosses the border to be pressed and sold as Chinese material. A quite separate planting exists on the southern basalt plateau, laid out in the French colonial period alongside coffee. The two have different plants, different histories and almost no commercial connection.

A small origin with a single dominant growing area, the Cameron Highlands in Pahang, planted from the late 1920s on cleared montane forest at around 1,500 metres. Output is modest and consumed overwhelmingly at home, where it underpins teh tarik — black tea pulled with condensed milk — rather than reaching speciality markets abroad. A second, smaller planting exists in Sabah on the slopes below Mount Kinabalu.

An origin where a large share of the tea crop is eaten rather than drunk. Shan State, on the same upland system that runs into Yunnan, holds old large-leaf tea stands that supply both conventional green and black tea and laphet — leaf steamed, packed and fermented under weight, then dressed with oil, garlic and fried pulses and served as a dish. Almost nothing leaves the country under its own name, so the tea is far better known inside Myanmar than outside it.

Two tea traditions running in parallel. The northern forests hold indigenous large-leaf trees whose leaf is fermented into miang, chewed rather than infused, in a practice that predates any planted estate; the mountains of Chiang Rai, meanwhile, carry Chinese and Taiwanese oolong cultivars planted from the later twentieth century by Yunnanese communities who settled there. Alongside both sits a large commodity sector feeding Thailand’s sweetened iced-tea market.

A large producer with an old indigenous tea culture and a mostly anonymous export trade. Northern Vietnam holds ancient large-leaf tea trees comparable to Yunnan’s, while the bulk of production is commodity green and black tea sold unbranded into blends.

The first African country to grow tea commercially, and now known for two quite different things: bulk CTC for blending, and a small speciality sector producing unusual white and speciality teas from the same estates.

An origin defined by what was lost. Portuguese planters laid out large estates around Gurué in Zambézia province from the 1920s, on the wet southern flank of Mount Namuli, and by the middle of the twentieth century the district was one of the largest tea areas in Africa. Independence, the long civil war and the abandonment of the estates broke that almost completely; factories were destroyed and bushes reverted to bush. What operates now is a partial restoration on the same ground, which is why Mozambique appears in older tea literature as a major producer and in current trade listings as a marginal one.

The origin most often misfiled, and worth a record largely in order to file it correctly. South Africa is internationally known for rooibos and honeybush, which are not tea: they are unrelated Cape shrubs, and they belong in the botanical register rather than here. Camellia sinensis is a separate and much smaller story, grown on the wet eastern seaboard — the Magwa and Majola escarpment in the former Pondoland of the Eastern Cape, where high rainfall and deep gorges give the plant conditions it gets almost nowhere else in the country, and historically in northern KwaZulu-Natal and the Mpumalanga escarpment.

A southern African producer built on irrigation, which is unusual enough to be the defining fact about it. Tea grows in the Eastern Highlands along the Mozambique border, where rainfall is seasonal and — in the drier southern estates around Chipinge — not by itself sufficient for the crop, so water is drawn from the rivers and applied through the dry months. That single agronomic decision shapes the industry: it is capital-intensive, estate-based rather than smallholder, and concentrated in a handful of very large operations.

A West African producer whose two tea areas sit at opposite ends of the same volcanic line and have almost nothing else in common. One is on the lower slopes of Mount Cameroon at Tole, close to the coast and to the old plantation belt around Buea; the other is high on the Bamenda grassfields at Ndu, several hundred kilometres inland on the ridge that runs toward Nigeria. Both were laid out as large plantations and both remain so, which makes Cameroon one of the few African origins with essentially no smallholder tea sector.

Africa's largest country by population grows tea in one place, and the place is the argument. The Mambilla Plateau in Taraba State rises out of the surrounding lowland to an altitude and a temperature range that has no equivalent anywhere else in Nigeria — cool, misty, grassland country continuous with the Cameroon highlands across the border. Everything else about Nigerian tea follows from that: a small planted area, a domestic market, and no possibility of expansion because there is nowhere else in the country the plant would survive.

Tea grows on the narrow, humid strip between the Alborz mountains and the Caspian Sea, in Gilan and Mazandaran, where rainfall and mild winters allow cultivation that the Iranian plateau could never support. The industry dates from around the turn of the twentieth century and produces black tea for a domestic market that consumes far more than the country grows, so Iranian tea competes at home against large imports.

A major producer that exports almost none of what it grows. Tea was established on the eastern Black Sea coast around Rize in the twentieth century using seed from neighbouring Georgia, on steep, wet, frost-free slopes where little else grew well, and the crop is now the backbone of one of the highest per-head tea-drinking cultures anywhere. The leaf is hand-plucked comparatively coarsely and made as black tea, which suits the brewing method it is made for.