AustraliaTea is rarely grown in Australia, but in Queensland the warm, high-rainfall tropical north suits the plant well. Here, a handful of plantations produce clean, full-bodied black tea – some of it grown without pesticides, helped by the region's isolation from the pests that trouble older tea-growing countries. A region in Victoria grows and produces Japanese-style green teas. Our tea industry is small and young by world standards, which makes Australian-grown tea uncommon enough that most Australians have never tried it.ChinaChina is the birthplace of tea and still its largest producer, with a history of cultivation going back well over a thousand years. No other country makes such a range: green teas like Long Jing, pan-fired flat by hand; oolongs from the rock gardens of Wuyi and the hills of Anxi; delicate white teas from Fujian; smoky and golden black teas; and aged, fermented pu-erh from Yunnan. Growing regions stretch across most of the country's south, each with its own cultivars and methods, which is why Chinese tea resists any single description.IndiaIndia is the world's second-largest tea producer, after China, and its output spans an enormous range. Assam, in the humid north-eastern lowlands, gives a bold, malty black tea that forms the base of most breakfast blends. Darjeeling, high in the Himalayan foothills, produces something almost opposite – light, floral and muscatel, often called the champagne of teas. The hills of the Nilgiris in the south add fragrant, brisk teas grown year-round. Nearly all Indian tea is black, though small quantities of green and white are also produced.JapanJapan grows almost all of its tea as green, and almost all of it is steamed rather than pan-fired – a choice that locks in a savoury, marine flavour quite unlike Chinese greens. The country is best known for sencha and for matcha, made from shade-grown leaf ground to powder, but it also roasts older leaf and stem over high heat to make hōjicha, a mellow, toasty tea with most of the caffeine driven off. The major growing regions are Shizuoka, Kagoshima and Uji, near Kyoto.KenyaKenya is one of the world's largest tea exporters, though almost all of its crop is black tea made by the CTC method – crush, tear, curl – which produces the strong, brisk leaf used in teabags worldwide. Grown at high altitude near the equator, the tea is harvested year-round rather than in seasons. More recently Kenya has begun producing a distinctive purple-leaf cultivar, bred for its colour and antioxidant content, as well as small quantities of orthodox whole-leaf tea aimed at the specialty market.NepalNepal's tea gardens sit in the eastern Himalayan foothills, on the same terrain and altitude as Darjeeling just across the Indian border. Commercial growing only began in earnest in the late twentieth century, so the industry is young, but the high elevation and cool climate produce bright, floral black teas with a muscatel character close to their better-known neighbour. Most gardens are in the Ilam district, and much of the leaf is hand-plucked from smallholdings rather than large estates.Papua New GuineaPapua New Guinea grows tea in the Western Highlands, where volcanic soil and high-altitude rainfall suit the plant well. The industry dates only to the 1960s, making it one of the newer origins in the tea world, and most of the crop is robust, full-bodied black tea grown for blending rather than sold under its own name. Its briskness and depth make it a useful backbone in breakfast-style blends, where it carries milk and stands up to a strong brew.Sri LankaSri Lanka still markets its tea under the colonial name Ceylon, and grades it by the elevation it's grown at: low-grown teas are dark and strong, while high-grown teas from districts like Nuwara Eliya and Uva are brighter, brisker and more aromatic. The island turned to tea in the 1870s after a fungus destroyed its coffee crop, and within decades it had become one of the world's largest exporters. Almost all of it is black tea, much of it still picked and processed for consistency of grade.TaiwanTaiwan is best known for oolong, and makes some of the finest in the world. Its high-mountain gardens, many above 1,000 metres, produce light, floral, tightly rolled oolongs prized for their fragrance, while lower elevations give heavily oxidised styles like Oriental Beauty, whose honeyed character comes from leaves bitten by a small insect before plucking. Tea reached the island from Fujian in the eighteenth century, and Taiwanese growers have since refined oolong processing to a degree of control matched almost nowhere else.
