Tea grows mainly in a belt of warm, wet uplands across Asia and East Africa, wherever the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, gets at least 1,200 mm of rain a year and acidic soil. According to FAO data for 2022, the world harvested about 29.8 million tonnes of tea leaf, and four countries grew 81% of it: China (14.5 million tonnes, 49% of the total), India (6.0 million, 20%), Kenya (2.3 million) and Sri Lanka (1.4 million), followed by Turkey, Vietnam and Indonesia. The best-known growing regions are Yunnan, Fujian and Zhejiang in China, Assam and Darjeeling in India, the Kenyan highlands around Kericho, Sri Lanka’s central hill country and the Black Sea coast of Rize in Turkey. The plant is native to the borderlands of southwestern China, northeast India and northern Myanmar, and it reached most of today’s big producers only in the 19th and 20th centuries.
One note on the numbers: FAO counts harvested green leaf, not finished tea. In Kenya about 4 kg of fresh leaf makes 1 kg of “made tea”, so the weight of tea that ends up in packets is roughly a quarter of the figures below.
What Camellia sinensis Needs: Rain, Acid Soil and Altitude
The tea plant is an evergreen shrub of tropical and subtropical climates. Left alone it grows into a tree of up to 16 m, but on estates it is pruned to waist height so that pickers can reach the new shoots. It needs a climate no colder than hardiness zone 8, at least 1,200 mm (47 in) of rain a year and acidic soil. A young plant takes about three years before its first harvest, and during the growing season it puts out a fresh “flush” of shoots every 7 to 15 days; only the top 25–50 mm, the bud and the youngest leaves, is picked.
Height changes the cup. Many of the finest teas grow at up to 2,000 m above sea level, where the plants grow more slowly and develop more flavour. That is why so many tea districts are hill country: the slopes of Darjeeling, Sri Lanka’s central highlands, the Kenyan plateau. Two varieties divide the map. The small-leaved Chinese variety, var. sinensis, is used for most Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese teas; the large-leaved var. assamica supplies pu-erh and most Indian tea, Darjeeling being the main exception. With care the plant survives far outside its comfort zone, in Cornwall and Perthshire, Washington state and Vancouver Island, and south to Hobart in Tasmania and Waikato in New Zealand. Small commercial pockets also exist on São Miguel in the Azores and in Guria in Georgia.
China: Yunnan to Zhejiang, Half the World’s Leaf
China grew 14.53 million tonnes in 2022, 49% of the world’s tea, and it is also where the plant comes from. Botanists place the natural home of tea in a fan-shaped area near the source of the Irrawaddy, stretching about 2,400 km from the Burma frontier east to Zhejiang and about 1,920 km from latitude 29°N in northern Burma south through Yunnan to 11°N. Genetic studies point to two separate homes of China’s Assam-type tea, one in southern Yunnan around Xishuangbanna and Pu’er, the other in western Yunnan around Lincang and Baoshan. Pu-erh, the region’s fermented tea, takes its name from the old tea-trading town of Pu’er, today’s Ning’er.
Cultivation spread east and north from there. The first record of tea being cultivated dates to the Han dynasty, on Meng Mountain near Chengdu in Sichuan, and the oldest physical tea yet found came from the mausoleum of Emperor Jing of Han at Xi’an, showing that tea was drunk at court in the 2nd century BC. Today the best-known names come from the warm, rainy hills of the southeast. Longjing (Dragon Well), a pan-roasted green tea, comes from the slopes around Longjing village near West Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, where the premium leaf is picked before the Qingming festival in early April. Fujian, where the English merchant Peter Mundy met tea in 1637, is the home of oolong, the partly oxidised tea developed in the 15th century; the Wuyi Mountains of northern Fujian produce Da Hong Pao, one of China’s most celebrated oolongs.
India: Assam’s Brahmaputra Plain and Darjeeling’s Slopes
India produced 5.97 million tonnes in 2022, about a fifth of the world’s tea, from two very different landscapes. Assam, lying on either side of the Brahmaputra and bordering Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, is the world’s largest tea-growing region by production. Its gardens sit at or near sea level in greenhouse conditions: daytime temperatures reach about 36 °C and the monsoon can drop 250–300 mm of rain in a single day. That heat and rain give the strong, malty black tea used in breakfast blends. Assam is also, with southern China, one of only two regions with native tea plants; the Scottish adventurer Robert Bruce came across the local plant in 1823, after being directed to a Singpho chief, and saw the Singpho brewing tea from its leaves.
Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, is the opposite: steep, cool slopes where the bushes go dormant through the winter, planted not with the Assam plant but with the Chinese sinensis variety. Archibald Campbell planted Chinese seed there in 1841, the Alubari garden opened in 1856, and since 2004 “Darjeeling” has been a registered geographical indication limited to estates in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts. Picking runs from March to November in four flushes, from the light first flush to the muscatel second flush.
Kenya: Kericho and the Highlands Either Side of the Rift
Kenya is the third-largest producer, with 2.33 million tonnes of leaf in 2022. Tea was first planted in 1903 by G. W. L. Caine at Limuru, and commercial estates began in 1924, when Brooke Bond sent Malcolm Fyers Bell to start them. The growing areas lie in the Kenyan Highlands on both sides of the Great Rift Valley, on volcanic red soils with 1,200–1,400 mm of well-spread rain and long sunny days. The best known is around Kericho, a town founded in 1902 west of the Rift on the edge of the Mau Forest.
Kenyan tea is unusual in being mostly a smallholder crop. The Kenya Tea Development Agency runs 66 factories serving more than 560,000 smallholders on about 130,000 hectares, and its members grow more than 60% of the national crop. Most of the leaf is processed by the crush, tear, curl (CTC) method into the strong, uniform granules that blending houses buy for British and other breakfast teas.
Sri Lanka and Turkey: Ceylon’s Hill Country and the Rize Coast
Sri Lanka (1.40 million tonnes in 2022) owes its tea industry to a disease. James Taylor, a British planter, introduced tea planting in 1867, and the crop took off after coffee leaf rust, Hemileia vastatrix, ruined the island’s coffee plantations from 1869. The cool, humid central highlands around Nuwara Eliya produce the prized high-grown teas, while low-country districts such as Matara, Galle and Ratnapura, hotter and wetter, give heavier, more astringent tea that sells well in the Middle East. Tea earned Sri Lanka over US$1.3 billion in 2021, about 2% of GDP, and every pack carrying the Lion Logo must be pure Ceylon tea packed on the island.
Turkey (1.30 million tonnes) has grown most of its tea since the mid-20th century in one strip of coast: Rize Province on the eastern Black Sea, which has a mild climate, high rainfall and fertile soil. A trial at Bursa with Japanese and Chinese seedlings failed in 1888; experiments in Rize began in 1912. Tea spread partly as a substitute for coffee, which became an expensive import after the Ottoman Empire lost Yemen. Turks now drink more tea per person than anyone, about 3.16 kg each a year, and import tariffs of roughly 145% keep the home market for Rize tea.
Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan and the Smaller Producers
Below the top five, production thins out quickly. Vietnam (1.12 million tonnes) and Indonesia (0.60 million) are the next largest, followed by Bangladesh, Argentina and Uganda, each with between 0.33 and 0.44 million tonnes. Japan grows only about 80,000 tonnes a year, almost all green tea such as sencha, in Shizuoka, Kagoshima and Mie prefectures, with Uji near Kyoto the most prestigious name. Japan consumes most of it at home. Tea first arrived there in the Nara period (710–794) with envoys returning from China.
How Tea Spread: Dutch Ships, Camel Caravans and Robert Fortune
For most of history tea moved as a drink, not as a plant. It became popular across China under the Tang dynasty, when it also spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea in the 8th century. Overland it travelled west along the Silk Road and the Tea Horse Road into Tibet and Central Asia. By sea, the Dutch East India Company made the first recorded European shipment in 1607, from Macao to Java, and shipped Japanese tea from Hirado to Europe two years later. Russia received a gift of tea from a Mongolian khan in 1638 and in 1679 agreed a treaty for regular supplies by camel caravan, paid for in furs. London coffee houses sold tea from 1657, and Catherine of Braganza made it fashionable at court after marrying Charles II in 1662.
The plant itself left China because of Britain’s trade deficit. Paying for tea in silver, and then smuggling opium to recover it, led to the Opium Wars; meanwhile the East India Company set out to grow its own. Chinese tea was introduced to India in 1836, and in 1848 the botanist Robert Fortune was sent secretly into China to collect plants and expertise. Most of his plants did not survive in the Himalayas, but hybrids of Chinese and Assam stock, grown with Chinese techniques, created the Indian industry. Ceylon followed in 1867 and Kenya in 1903. That chain of transfers is why the modern tea map is a colonial map, and why the drinking customs described in the geography of tea ceremonies reach far beyond the few rainy hillsides where the leaf is grown. Tea’s great rival followed a similar path from a single homeland, as the story of coffee’s origins shows.