Pu'er Tea Hills Scenic Area

Rolling hills of ancient tea gardens in southern Yunnan, the original heartland of pu-erh tea production, where century-old tea trees still grow under shade canopy on traditional family plantations.

Pu'er Prefecture in southern Yunnan is the origin and heartland of the compressed fermented tea known in Mandarin as pu-erh and to the world's tea specialists as one of China's six major tea types. The hills around Pu'er City and the surrounding counties — Ning'er, Jingdong, Simao — are blanketed in tea gardens ranging from modern plantation monoculture to ancient groves where individual trees are several hundred years old.

The appeal for visitors is not a single monument but a landscape and a way of life. Tea farmers here still hand-pick leaves from tall, gnarled ancient tea trees in what is called ancient-tree tea (古树茶, gǔshù chá) production, the most prized category in current pu-erh connoisseurship. A visit to a family production facility during spring or autumn harvest allows visitors to observe withering, pan-firing, rolling, and sun-drying — the steps in raw (sheng) pu-erh production — and the humid pile-fermentation process that produces ripe (shou) pu-erh.

The Pu'er Tea Museum in Pu'er City provides historical context, with displays on the Ancient Tea Horse Road (Cha Ma Dao) along which compressed pu-erh bricks were carried by pack horse and mule into Tibet, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Tasting sessions at the museum and at licensed tea farms are educational and unhurried.

Day trips from Pu'er City into the surrounding hills can be arranged with local guesthouses. The most-visited ancient tree gardens are at Jingmai Mountain (a separate attraction) and at several village-level farms accessible by local bus.