TeaHQ

Ya’an

The Sichuan city at the start of the historic tea-horse road to Tibet, and still the main producer of Kang Zhuan brick tea made for the Tibetan market.

雅安China600–1400 metres

Elevation

Recorded at 600–1400 metres.

How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.

When it is picked

Two calendars in one place. The famous green tea is an early spring pick; the dark tea that made the district's historical importance is the opposite — coarse mature leaf and stem cut late in the season, which is what the compressed brick trade needed and what the plant is happy to supply in quantity.

How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.

How production is organised

Household plots supplying both a speciality green trade and a bulk dark-tea manufacture whose historic market was the Tibetan plateau. The second is made from material the first discards, which is a genuinely efficient arrangement rather than a hierarchy.

How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.

How the name is written

Also transliterated as ya an. Romanisations of a district name vary by system and by vendor, and a packet spelling one way is not describing a different place.

Teas this region is known for

  • Kang Zhuan — Coarse and astringent as a plain infusion, and quite different as intended — boiled and churned with butter and salt, where its roughness is exactly what stands up to fat and salt. A tea that only makes sense inside its own preparation.

Other growing regions in China

The neighbouring districts are the useful comparison: they share a country, a grading convention and often a cultivar, so what differs between them is closer to terroir than anything a cross-border comparison can isolate.

Sources

  • TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ

This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No external document stands behind the elevation band, the climate note or the character described above, which is why each carries its confidence in the open.

How TeaHQ handles sources

Written comparisons

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

  • Ya’an vs Anhua — Two Chinese dark-tea centres that grew up serving two different border trades, and the difference in destination shaped the tea. Ya’an sits at the start of the tea-horse road to Tibet; Anhua supplied the north-western routes and developed the golden-flower brick.