Tales of Cities | Tongren, where China's matcha capital hides in plain sight

Most people who drink matcha assume it is Japanese. In Tongren, a mountain city tucked into southwest China's Guizhou Province, that assumption meets a quiet correction. The tea tradition long associated with Japan can be traced back further to China's Tang and Song dynasties (618-1279). During the Song Dynasty, a method called diancha, whisking powdered tea into hot water until it turns pale and frothy, was already widespread among monks and scholars. Gu Lijun, a county-level inheritor of that Song Dynasty tradition, traces the practice back even earlier still, to the Wei and Jin dynasties (220-420). The technique now associated with Japanese tea ceremony, in other words, started in China, centuries before it ever crossed the sea.

Tongren is now working to reclaim that origin story with production rather than just history. The city wears the title "China's matcha capital" for good reason, ranking first nationally and second worldwide in matcha production and sales. That scale is easy to state as a statistic and harder to picture, until you trace the leaf back to the mountain that makes it possible.

Mount Fanjing rises more than 2,500 meters above the surrounding tea country, its ancient rock formations emerging from clouds that never quite leave, wrapped in mist and rain for more than 200 days a year, long enough that locals treat a clear day at the summit as luck rather than expectation. It is a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site, home to plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth, and the climb to its Red Cloud Golden Summit is demanding by design, steep enough in places to require hands as well as feet. It is a mountain that guards its own secrets. Almost everything grown in its shadow carries that same difficulty, and benefits from it.

At the Qizimei Tea Garden in Jiangkou county, plantation head Chen Chunlian tends 220 mu (about 14.67 hectares) of Fuding Dabai, Wuniuzao and Longjing tea, all destined to become tencha, the ground raw material for matcha, with Mount Fanjing visible from the rows themselves. Walk the plantation's lower slopes and the rows of low, dense bushes stretch across the hillside in every direction, broken only by mist rolling down from above, tended by farmers who speak of the mountain with a quiet, matter-of-fact devotion, as though caring for something this rare were simply what one does here. Chen explains that the mountain's high altitude, limited sunlight and near-constant cloud cover raise the amino acid content of the leaves, improving quality well beyond what flatland tea can achieve. Farmers add a further layer of engineering before harvest, covering the plants to block out even more light. Less sunlight means more chlorophyll and more theanine, the compound chemistry behind both matcha's saturated green color and its umami depth. The effect has a name in the trade: "covered aroma." Gu describes the resulting flavor in more familiar terms, bright and fresh, carrying what tea drinkers usually just call "the aroma of seaweed."

From there, the leaf still has a distance to travel before it becomes the powder found on shelves abroad. At Gui Tea Group's matcha workshop, production supervisor Li Tingbao oversees the fine processing stage: aroma enhancement, color sorting, grinding and screening, followed by air separation, a step that filters out stems before the refined tea drops into a material bin to await blending. Only after grinding does it finally become matcha in the form most people would recognize. Li reports that the workshop's output has grown quickly, from roughly 2,500 tonnes in 2025 to an expected 5,000 tonnes this year, doubling in a single season and underscoring how fast global demand has moved.

What happens to that matcha afterward is where Tongren's ambitions become most visible, and most inventive, and it tracks a pattern playing out across the industry worldwide, where matcha has moved well past the teacup into bakery cases, dessert menus and skincare shelves. Tang Yunpeng, general manager of Guizhou Guigui Matcha Food Co., Ltd., leads a team developing matcha products well outside tradition: sun cakes with a flaky, crumbly crust wrapped around matcha filling, cheesecakes, chocolates. Tongren's matcha, Tang notes, carries a stronger bitterness and fuller flavor than matcha grown elsewhere, a distinction that comes through clearly once it is baked, whisked or melted into something else. Elsewhere in the city, matcha turns up in dumplings, noodles, beer, chapstick, hand lotion and perfume. At this point, matcha in Tongren is less an ingredient than a category of its own.

At a local nongjiale, a uniquely Chinese agritainment venue operated by local farmers that doubles as a restaurant and a window into local life, located in Yunshe village of Taiping town in Tongren's Jiangkou county, villager Yang Yanfei's table typically arrives loaded with Larou, the salt-cured smoked pork that anchors Guizhou home cooking, alongside a dish that still catches newcomers off guard: matcha sturgeon, the tea's flavor threaded lightly through the fish rather than layered over it. It is not a novelty so much as evidence of how completely matcha has settled into daily life here, alongside the area's clean air and unspoiled mountains and water, which Yang credits as the real foundation beneath all of it.

For the people who make Tongren's matcha economy run, from tea garden to processing floor to test kitchen, the ambitions are collective, and they add up to something larger than any single product. Chen speaks of the quiet pride in supplying the raw material that starts the entire chain. Tang hopes matcha becomes something bigger still: a calling card not just for Tongren, but for Guizhou and for China as a whole. As matcha continues its rise in cafes and kitchens far beyond Guizhou, Tongren's name is beginning to travel with it.