The centre
Dark tea has centres at three different scales, and confusing them is how buyers lose money.
The largest is Yunnan, whose tea districts sit between 1,200 and 1,800 m, and it is a centre of leaf rather than of gardens.
Inside it, the small mountain areas such as Yiwu and Bingdao are the centres that the market talks about.
Menghai is a different kind of centre again, since it is where pressing and ripening happen.
Anhua in Hunan and Liubao in Guangxi are single district centres with their own technologies.
Around them lies the rest of the production, which is larger in volume and almost invisible in the market.
Sichuan’s border tea around Ya’an is the oldest continuous production in the category.
Hubei makes the green brick at Chibi, and Shaanxi has the Jingyang fu brick tradition.
Outside China, dark style tea is made in Japan, Korea and parts of Southeast Asia.
Most of that is drunk young, and none of it carries the ageing culture the Chinese centres have.
So a centre here can mean a province, a mountain or a factory town, and the three are not comparable.
Find out which one a seller means before you compare prices.
Why the centre leads
Trade history made the centres, and in this category more than in any other.
Yunnan’s position came from the caravan routes, which needed a form that could travel for months.
Compression was the answer, and the ageing that happened on those journeys became the quality buyers want.
Anhua’s position came from supplying the border, where tea was boiled rather than brewed.
Liubao’s came from the river route south to Hong Kong and to the communities in Southeast Asia.
Each centre developed around a problem that needed solving, and the method was the solution.
Leaf type reinforced it, since Yunnan has the broad leaf material that ages and the others do not.
Old gardens add a further layer, and the famous mountain names sit on bushes that are decades old.
Tree age and place are tangled together, and no packet can separate their contributions.
Reputation now dominates everything, and it has pushed some mountain prices far past the material.
Bingdao and Yiwu sell far more tea than those areas produce, and most of it grew somewhere else.
That is the honest state of the market, and it is the reason to be careful.
What surrounding areas do well
The surrounding areas do the unglamorous work well, starting with the border trade.
Sichuan’s Ya’an tea is made to be boiled with butter and salt, and judging it as a drinking tea misses the point.
It is coarse by design and it has supplied the same market for a very long time.
Hubei and Shaanxi make brick teas that rarely reach export and are sold as regional curiosities.
Outside China, Japanese and Korean dark style teas are clean and competently made.
They are drunk young, which is a sensible decision rather than a failure.
Within Yunnan, the surrounding areas produce the blended material that most factory cakes are built from.
That is not a lesser product, it is the backbone of the category and it is priced accordingly.
What the surrounding areas cannot do is produce the specific character of an old garden tea.
A genuine old tree cake has a depth and a returning sweetness that blended material does not reach.
Whether that difference is worth the price asked for it is a separate question entirely.
For most drinkers, most of the time, it is not.
A buying note
Separate the three technologies before you think about centres at all.
Learn ripe pu-erh, fu brick and Liubao as three different drinks, and the question of centre changes shape.
Within Yunnan, learn factory tea before garden tea, since factories are honest about what they are.
A factory cake is consistent, and a garden claim is only as good as the supply chain behind it.
Mountain names are where the pricing is least rational, and they are the last thing to spend money on.
Brew 5 grams in a 100 ml vessel at about 95 °C, after rinsing compressed leaf once.
Steep the first real infusion for 30 seconds and extend the time as the cake opens.
Judge a centre tea on whether its bitterness turns sweet, which is the sign of material in the leaf.
Run each sample to the 6th infusion, since dark tea shows what it is late in the session.
For Anhua and Liubao, check the bloom and the basket, and forget the question of centre entirely.
Above everything else, judge the storage, because a decade in a damp room ruins tea from any centre.
A well stored cake from the surrounding area beats a spoiled one from a famous mountain.