The five that matter
China grows green tea in almost every province that grows tea at all, but five regions set the price and the standard.
Zhejiang comes first. Longjing（龙井）from the hills west of Hangzhou is what the rest of the category gets measured against, and its flat leaf and nutty finish come from being pressed by hand against the wall of a hot wok.
Jiangsu is second, and it rests on a single tea. Biluochun（碧螺春）is picked as a tiny bud and rolled into a snail, and the gardens sit on islands in Taihu lake among peach and plum trees.
Anhui is third and the broadest of the five, because it holds three unrelated teas rather than one.
Huangshan Maofeng（黄山毛峰）comes off the mountain itself, Taiping Houkui（太平猴魁）is pressed into long flat leaves, and Liu’an Guapian（六安瓜片）is made from leaf with the bud and the stem removed.
Sichuan is fourth. Mengding Ganlu（蒙顶甘露）grows on the wet slopes above Ya’an, and Zhuyeqing（竹叶青）comes from Emei further south.
Henan is fifth and the furthest north. Xinyang Maojian（信阳毛尖）grows where winter shuts the bushes down for months, and that long rest shapes the leaf more than any craft decision does.
Five is a working number rather than an official one, and a different writer would argue for four or seven.
Guizhou has a claim through Duyun Maojian（都匀毛尖）, and Shandong has one through the coastal gardens around Rizhao.
What keeps both off this list is that neither name travels far outside China, and the list is about what a buyer will recognise.
What each one grows
The five do not grow the same plant, and this explains more than the province names do.
Zhejiang and Jiangsu work mostly with local seed populations and with Longjing 43（龙井43）, a selected clone that leafs out early and holds the flat shape well under machine pressure.
Anhui leans on larger local populations, which is why its teas vary in leaf size from one valley to the next.
Sichuan works at a different scale again, with gardens running from a few hundred metres up past 1,200 m on Emei.
Henan sits near 32°N, far enough north that the bushes go dormant early and the spring flush is short.
A short flush concentrates the harvest into a few weeks, which is why the top grades there cost what they do.
South of these five, Yunnan also makes green tea, though the category is not what the province is known for.
Why they sit where they do
Three things put a region on this list: a cultivar that suits the climate, a craft that somebody bothered to standardise, and a market that learned the name.
Longjing has all three. Biluochun has the first two and a small harvest, which keeps it scarce rather than famous.
Sichuan has the climate and the scale but no single name that travelled, so its tea often leaves the province under someone else’s.
That last point matters when you buy. A great deal of green tea sold as Zhejiang green tea was grown in Sichuan, and it can be very good tea.
What it cannot be is Longjing, because the name is tied to a boundary.
Regions rise and fall on this. Guizhou grows excellent leaf at Duyun and sells much of it unnamed.
Plant choice interacts with craft in ways that regularly confuse buyers.
A clone bred for an early flush is usually also bred for yield, and the two pull against concentration in the cup.
That is why growers keep older seed populations on their steepest plots, where volume matters least and the leaf can ripen slowly.
Using the list
Treat the five as a way of predicting the cup, not as a ranking.
Zhejiang is where to start if you want a nutty tea that forgives careless water and does not turn bitter when you forget it.
Jiangsu suits anyone who likes a floral, delicate cup, though it punishes water above 80°C faster than most green tea does.
Variety is what Anhui offers: leaf that looks strange, tastes green rather than sweet, and refuses to behave like the tea next to it.
Cold-country tea with a tight, mining sweetness is Henan’s territory, and nothing else in the category quite replaces it.
A label naming somewhere outside these five is not a warning sign. It usually means the tea was cheap because nobody has bid the name up yet.
Buying by region works best as a first filter. After that, the harvest date and the seller tell you more than the map does.