The Geography of Tea

Five Asian nations produce the finest tea

The tea plant — Camellia sinensis — is a tropical evergreen, with glossy dark-green leaves. It grows best in tropical and sub-tropical regions that have hot, steamy weather, slightly acidic soils, and good soil drainage. Tea is grown and processed in Asia, Africa, and Australia, but the finest teas currently come from five Asian countries: India, China, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Japan, and Formosa.

China, the birthplace of tea drinking, has produced tea more than a millennium longer than the other tea growing countries. Although China makes only about ten percent of the tea sold throughout the world (down from almost half before World War II), it produces the greatest number of unusual teas, including an enormous assortment of green tea (roughly 60 percent of Chinese teas are green teas).

India, which produces about a third of the world's tea, is currently the market leader. Only about half of the total is exported each year; India's enormous tea-drinking population consumes the rest. Most Indian teas are black. Interestingly, some tea historians hold that the Indians didn't drink tea until Britain colonized India and introduced wide-scale tea cultivation.

Sri Lanka (often still called Ceylon in tea catalogs) was noted for coffee production until the wholesale destruction of its coffee crop by "coffee rust" disease forced plantation owners to switch to tea cultivation. By 1875 all the coffee was gone. Since then, the country has become the third leading tea producer in the world. One of the people responsible for the shift to tea was Thomas Lipton, who invested in Ceylon to establish a direct source of tea he could sell in his English shops. Like India, most Ceylon teas are black.

Japan, a nation of avid tea drinkers, produces a large crop of green tea that mostly stays at home. A variety of high quality packaged Japanese teas are available, including sencha (ordinary packaged green tea), sen-cha (a steamed green tea), matcha or matsu-cha (a powered green tea used in tea ceremonies), and gyokuro (a sen-cha style tea made from leaves grown under shade).

Taiwan also consumes most of its tea locally, but the island nation does export a variety of high quality green teas and partially oxidized teas, including Oolong, Jade Oolong, and Pouchong, a nearly green tea. Many are noted for the fruity/floral/nutty flavors, and a few are among the most expensive teas available.

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