Across Guizhou, ancient tea trees grow among forests, family farms and villages, some hundreds of years old and others more than a thousand. Around them are communities whose knowledge of these plants has largely been passed down through practice rather than books: when to pick, how to read the weather, and how to respond to nature’s cues. To understand why so much of this still exists, it helps first to understand Guizhou itself.
Where Is Guizhou, China and Why Is It So Little Known?
贵州 /gway-joh/ is a landlocked province in southwest China, neighbouring Yunnan, Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan and Guangxi. Its capital is Guiyang, where Grass People Tree’s Tea House, also known as Master’s Tea House, is based. More than 90% of the province is mountainous or hilly, and around 62% is exposed karst: an ancient limestone landscape of mountains, caves, underground rivers and steep valleys shaped by water over immense periods of time.
Growing up here, mountains were simply part of how we understood distance. A village that looked close on a map might sit across several ridges and a river. For much of Guizhou’s history, this geography made the movement of people, goods and ideas extremely difficult. Trade and travel were limited, and relatively few of the poets, scholars and travellers who helped write other parts of China into the wider cultural imagination made their way this far southwest.
(Image: Seen from a modern highway, the mountainous terrain that made travel across Guizhou so difficult for centuries.)
The mountains also shaped Guizhou’s human geography. The province is home to many long-established ethnic communities, including the Miao, Buyi, Dong, Gelao, Yi, Shui, and Tujia peoples, whose languages, food traditions, textiles, architecture, music, and relationships with the land have developed with remarkable local specificity. Even communities separated by relatively short distances could develop distinctly different customs. This cultural diversity is as fundamental to understanding Guizhou as its karst landscape — and inseparable from the ways tea has been grown, made and understood here.
Even Guizhou’s relative obscurity can be glimpsed in China’s earliest tea literature. In the eighth-century Classic of Tea (茶经), Lu Yu recorded tea from 黔中 (Qiánzhōng, “chyen-jong”), the Tang-era region centred largely on present-day Guizhou, naming four tea-producing prefectures — 思州 (Sīzhōu, “suh-joh”), 播州 (Bōzhōu, “bwoh-joh”), 费州 (Fèizhōu, “fay-joh”) and 夷州 (Yízhōu, “yee-joh”). Yet he marked them simply as “not known in detail” [未详], while noting that the teas he encountered could nevertheless be “exceptionally good” [其味极佳]. Guizhou was therefore not absent from China’s early tea record; its tea was recognised, but the place itself remained largely beyond the knowledge of even tea’s most influential early writer.
Centuries later, the great Ming traveller and geographer 徐霞客 (Xú Xiákè, “shoo shyah-kuh”) was one of the relatively few celebrated travellers to explore Guizhou extensively, recording its extraordinary karst landscapes. His travels through the province produced the 《黔游日记》 (Guizhou Travel Diaries), one of the earliest extensive written accounts of Guizhou’s geography, landscapes and society, later incorporated into his celebrated Xu Xiake’s Travels (《徐霞客游记》). His records included the great formations near present-day Xingyi (兴义) and what is now known as Wanfenglin (万峰林) — the Forest of Ten Thousand Peaks. Today, Wanfenglin receives nearly four million visitors a year, with 3.86 million recorded in 2025 alone: a striking reversal for a landscape that, for centuries, relatively few outsiders travelled far enough to see.
(Image: Wangfenglin, Xingyi, Guizhou)
Guizhou, then, was never without remarkable landscapes, cultures or tea. What the mountains restricted was connection and circulation: the roads, trade routes and movement of people and ideas through which other places became widely known. That remoteness came at a cost to the people who lived here. Yet it also meant that much of what existed within these mountains remained outside the forces of standardisation and large-scale commerce for longer than elsewhere. Both consequences continue to shape Guizhou today.
How Remoteness Shaped Guizhou and Its Tea
To the locals, it would be difficult to romanticise Guizhou’s long isolation. The same mountains that limited outside influence also hindered transport, trade and economic development, particularly for rural communities. As recently as 2014, the World Bank described Guizhou as one of China’s least developed provinces, with 11.5 million people living below the national rural poverty line. Agriculture therefore became an important part of the province’s poverty-alleviation strategy, and tea — already well suited to Guizhou’s mountainous environment — became one of the industries developed to create livelihoods and open new opportunities for rural communities beyond the mountains.
The transformation has been remarkable. Large-scale expansion of Guizhou’s tea industry began around 2007; by 2017, the province had more than 7 million mu (around 1.15 million acres) of tea gardens, a figure that has remained broadly stable since. Today, more than 3.2 million people work in or around tea across the province, making Guizhou one of China’s major tea-producing regions.
Yet without the historical reputation enjoyed by places such as Fujian, Zhejiang or Yunnan, Guizhou’s tea needed another way to distinguish itself. One answer was clean tea (干净茶): tea grown under particularly stringent controls on pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural inputs. Guizhou took the national lead in prohibiting water-soluble pesticides and herbicides across its tea gardens, while expanding its list of prohibited and restricted pesticides far beyond the national baseline. The expansion of tea cultivation was partly an economic response to poverty; the province’s subsequent emphasis on clean cultivation has also helped establish Guizhou as one of the most important sources of high-quality tea in and from China today.
What the Mountains Preserved
(Image: Grandma Rao, aged 102, picking tea leaves from a small garden near her house.)
Long before more than a million acres of modern tea gardens were developed, tea was already growing throughout these mountains — among forests, family farms and villages, sometimes as scattered trees rather than cultivated fields. Relative isolation meant that some local tea populations were never completely replaced by commercially favoured cultivars, while others remain scientifically undocumented or little understood.
Mò Yá 默芽, Silent Bud, our naturally low-caffeine wild red tea made from ancient tea trees in Guizhou, is one such example. The trees grow wild in an ancient forest, where this unusual population was only recently mapped and scientifically tested, revealing naturally occurring caffeine levels of around 0.01–0.1% in selected trees — extraordinarily low for Camellia sinensis, whose leaves typically contain around 2–5% caffeine by dry weight. Its recent identification provides living evidence that Guizhou’s mountains still harbour tea populations and naturally occurring characteristics that have yet to be documented or understood.
(Image: natural low-caffeine wild & ancient tea trees identified in Guizhou)
This diversity is not confined to remote forests. Across Guizhou, tea trees can still be found growing among forest trees, grasses, medicinal plants and wildflowers; in family tea gardens, cows wander among them, eating weeds and fertilising the soil, while people forage for seasonal plants nearby. One tea tree can look and taste noticeably different from another, even when they grow only metres apart. Alongside this biological diversity, family methods continued into the age of industrial tea production, and knowledge remained closely tied to particular communities, plants and landscapes. Here, tea is not simply a crop planted on the land, but one participant in a much larger living ecosystem.
As Guizhou Opens to the World
This is the Yin Yang at the heart of Guizhou’s story. The mountains that once restricted movement and economic opportunity also allowed extraordinary biological and cultural diversity to persist for longer outside the forces of standardisation. Modern development has transformed lives across the province, and that change cannot be dismissed for the sake of one's wish for things to remain unchanged. Nor should preservation mean keeping communities in the conditions of hardship from which many have worked so hard to emerge.
For Grass People Tree, this question has been there from the beginning. Ten years ago, it was founded to share the largely untold stories of Guizhou’s wild, ancient and indigenous tea trees at a time when both tea and the landscapes it comes from were becoming increasingly commercialised. On one side, it is about our communities here in Guizhou. Having grown up here, we also understand why economic opportunity matters: where limited access has shaped people’s lives for generations, economic development understandably may outweigh concerns about what may be lost along the way. Our work is not about resisting that change, but about helping recognise the value of what has been here for generations that make us who we are — the ancient tea trees, traditional craftsmanship, local knowledge and ways of living with the land — so that development does not have to mean disposing of one for the other.
On the other side are the people beyond Guizhou with whom these stories were created to be shared. Much of what the West knows about tea has reached it through histories shaped by colonisation, and more recently through (mis)interpretations that can detach tea practices from the cultures and people they came from. Sharing these stories through our own lens is therefore crucial: not to offer another definitive version of tea, but to enable voices, histories and different worldviews that have rarely travelled outside these mountains to be heard.
Over the past decade, we have been moved by how deeply these stories have touched others in return. Again and again, we have seen that connection matters: knowing the tree, the maker, the land and the knowledge behind a tea can make drinking it feel almost like a direct encounter with the plants, people and place it came from. Guizhou may be far away, hidden behind mountains and unfamiliar to much of the world, yet when someone drinks a tea grown here and comes to know the story it carries, that distance somehow dissolves. Perhaps this is what the mountains and the teas have been telling us all along: that however far apart we may be, there are still ways of reaching one another.
