Where Is Tea Grown? The World’s Tea Producing Countries, from China and India to Kenya, Sri Lanka and Japan

Every true tea, from a pale white to a dark breakfast black, comes from this one evergreen plant. More on the plant in What is tea?

What the tea bush needs

Our staff training notes set out the conditions plainly. The bush wants a tropical to subtropical climate with high humidity and heavy rain: about 150 to 250 cm a year on average, with temperatures between about 15°C and 30°C (59°F and 86°F). It prefers acidic soil. Within those limits it grows anywhere from about 50 m to 2,500 m above sea level, or about 165 to 8,200 feet.

Within that belt, gardens range from hot river plains near sea level to steep slopes high in the Himalayas. Low, warm gardens grow fast and give large crops of bold, strong tea; high, cool gardens grow slowly and give small crops of fine, aromatic tea. That is why Assam, on the plains of the Brahmaputra, and Darjeeling, high in the Himalayan foothills, make such different cups.

The numbers show the trade-off. Our 2023 training deck gives Darjeeling 17,820 hectares under tea and an annual crop of only 8 to 9 million kg, while Tea 101 credits Assam’s estates with close to 507 million kg a year. Less leaf, grown slowly in the cold, is what gives a Darjeeling its flowery lift.

Two plants, carried around the world

Two varieties do most of the work. The small-leafed China plant, known in India as Chinary, is native to the lands of northern Myanmar and China’s Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. The large-leafed Assam plant, Camellia sinensis var. assamica, grows wild in northeast India and can become a small tree if left unpruned.

Apart from southern China and northern Myanmar, Assam is the only region with native tea plants. Everywhere else, tea arrived as seed or cuttings carried by traders, monks and colonial planters.

Most of what all those gardens make is black tea. Our training notes say more than 75% of all tea produced in the world is black and about 20% is green, with oolong and white tea making up the rest.

Tea is, as our founder Kausshal Dugarr likes to point out, “the world’s most consumed beverage after water,” which makes it a vital crop for millions of farmers and plantation workers in the countries below.

Our Tea 101 archive put China at over 30% of the world’s tea in 2017 and ranked the top five as China, India, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

The order below the top two shifts with weather and markets from year to year, so we give only the figures our own sources state, each with its year. They are not one dataset, so read them as a rough picture rather than a league table.

Share of the world’s tea production, as stated in each source and year. Kenya and Turkey are ranked third and fifth in our 2017 Tea 101 posts, without a figure.

Producing a lot is not the same as selling a lot abroad. Sri Lanka, with nearly 300 million kg a year, exports 95% of its crop. Kenya exports 96% of its teas. Turkey, fifth in production, drinks almost all of its own tea, as Japan does, while China and India drink a large share of theirs. More on each country in Kenya, Sri Lanka and beyond.

Our founder put India’s share at 25% in 2020, adding that there was still “no global tea brand from India,” which is the gap Teabox set out to close. Tea 101 credits Assam’s estates with close to 507 million kg a year. “Did you know that Assam is the single largest tea producing region in the world?” we asked back in 2015.

India’s regions

The British planted tea in India to break China’s hold on the trade, but the Assam plant was already growing wild in the northeast. Today India grows tea from the Himalayan foothills to the hills of the far south, and each region has its own character:

• Assam: low, hot and humid plains along the Brahmaputra; bold, malty black teas, best in the summer second flush.
• Darjeeling: small, high Himalayan gardens, many still growing old Chinary bushes; floral spring teas from the first flush and muscatel summer teas.
• The Nilgiris: the Blue Mountains of the south, plucked year round, with fragrant winter frost teas.
• Smaller regions: Sikkim (the Temi garden), Kangra, Meghalaya, Munnar and Arunachal Pradesh.

The small regions can surprise. Arunachal Pradesh has far fewer estates than Darjeeling or Assam, but its Donyi Polo garden, founded in 1985, sold a “Golden Needle” tea at Rs 40,000 per kg in 2018, which our post called the world’s most expensive tea that year. And in 2021 a tea from Temi, in Sikkim, was sipped on air on The Late Show in New York; our founder wrote that he was “immensely excited to see Indian Teas reach every corner of this world.”

AssamTeabox Masterclass · regions clip Arunachal PradeshTeabox Masterclass · regions clip

What India drinks, and where its tea goes

India also drinks a great deal of what it grows. It produces some of the world’s finest teas, but what most of the country loves best is chai, a sweet, milky tea made from strong CTC black tea. Tea is also the country’s second largest employer of organized labor.

Much of India’s tea is still sold at auction, a system older than Indian tea itself. The first tea auction was held in London in early 1679, set up by the East India Company, which held a royal monopoly on goods brought in from India and China.

We buy direct from the gardens instead, and ship from India. Our Upper Namring Spring Black reached our 120th country, the Falkland Islands, in November 2021, and a Goomtee Spring Chinary Black our 121st in April 2022.

For the whole story, start with Indian tea: the complete guide, then explore region by region in Indian tea regions and garden by garden in Tea estates of India.

Tea arrived in Nepal in the 1860s, and Ilam, one of the first estates, is still an elite producer. Its black teas grow at elevations of about 7,000 feet. Until fairly recently Nepal made its tea for home use, and up to the 1950s there were no roads into the tea region at all.

Unlike Darjeeling, where almost every estate has its own factory, Nepal is mostly smallholders, with an average farm of less than an acre, selling leaf to regional factories. Women make up 80% of the pluckers. At Guranse, more than seventy small farms formed a cooperative so they could sell their leaf in larger lots.

That structure makes Nepal flexible and inventive: gardens such as Guranse grow from clones, and Nepal has been making fine, Japanese-style green teas. Its high hill bushes take around seven years to mature for plucking, against three to five years for the lowland bushes that make most of its cheap CTC.

The seasons track Darjeeling’s. Our 2023 training deck puts Nepal’s spring flush from mid-February to mid-April, the summer flush from 5 June to the end of June (“full-bodied, sweet, fruity”), the monsoon flush from mid-July to the end of September and the autumn flush from mid-October to the end of November, with “mellow, fruity-woody notes.” The whole story is in Nepal tea and in our blog story Nepal: Innovation in the high Himalayas.