Ya’an Tibetan Tea

Ya'an Tibetan Tea and Southern Route Border Tea have deep historical continuity, but the modern standards system has expanded beyond one traditional brick form. GH/T 1120—2024 is the current direct industry product standard for Ya'an Tibetan Tea, while a 2024 local group standard further divides products into compressed, loose and bagged forms. Traditional Kangzhuan and Jinjian continue under their own national standards, and the new GH/T 1505—2025 Southern Route Border Tea came into force in 2026. The page therefore preserves the Tea Horse Road and border-tea tradition without treating “Ya'an Tibetan Tea,” “Southern Route Border Tea,” “Kangzhuan” and “Jinjian” as completely interchangeable standard names.

Ya'an has long been an important eastern starting point of the Sichuan–Tibet Tea Horse Road and a major production center for Southern Route Border Tea. In the Qing period, “Southern Route Border Tea” mainly referred to border tea produced in Ya'an, Tianquan, Yingjing and related areas and shipped toward Kham and Tibet; in modern times it was also commonly called border-sales tea or Tibetan tea.

Today “Ya'an Tibetan Tea” has become a regional public brand and a modern product-standard name, while the national intangible-cultural-heritage project retains the historically more stable name Dark Tea Making Craft (Southern Route Border Tea Making Craft). This page therefore preserves the different historical contexts of the two names rather than projecting the modern brand name backward onto all historical records.

Sichuan market-regulation authorities confirm that the geographical-indication certification trademarks “Ya'an Tibetan Tea” and “Ya'an Southern Route Border Tea” are both registered and support qualified enterprises in using the GI special mark. Public GI materials describe the Ya'an Tibetan Tea origin as two districts and six counties: Yucheng, Mingshan, Yingjing, Tianquan, Lushan, Baoxing, Hanyuan and Shimian.

The database therefore records Ya'an Tibetan Tea specifically as a “geographical-indication certification trademark,” avoiding the fabrication of an approval announcement as if it were a conventional national GI product.

GH/T 1448—2024 gives a clear raw-tea sequence: shoots within one bud and five leaves are spread, heat-fixed, first-rolled, first-dried or fired, re-rolled, second-dried or fired, wet-piled, and finally dried or fired to form dark rough tea. Finished tea is then refined, blended and dried, or steam-pressed according to product form.

The Southern Route Border Tea craft preserved as national intangible heritage places greater emphasis on heavy fermentation, post-fermentation, repeated fermentation, non-enzymatic fermentation and color-turning fermentation. These descriptions are not contradictory; they belong to different levels of language—modern standardization on one side and traditional craft knowledge on the other.

The 2024 Ya'an Tea Society group standard describes the three quality grades—Maojian, Yaxi and Jinyu—quite clearly. High-grade compressed Maojian should have a flat surface, defined edges, a glossy dark-brown appearance, a rich aroma with aged notes, a full-bodied taste with returning sweetness and bright red liquor. Loose Maojian is characterized by relatively tight fine strips, a moist dark-brown appearance and deep bright red liquor. Lower grades may shift from bright red toward orange-yellow.

The page therefore does not illustrate every Tibetan Tea as huge coarse black stems in an opaque soy-sauce-dark liquor, but uses a higher-grade representative style of glossy dark-brown leaf and clear bright red liquor.

In 2008, Dark Tea Making Craft (Southern Route Border Tea Making Craft) entered China's second national intangible-cultural-heritage list, project code VIII-152, item No. 935. The current safeguarding institution is the Ya'an Intangible Cultural Heritage and Tea Horse Road Research and Protection Center. In 2022, the craft became a Sichuan constituent element of UNESCO's “Traditional tea processing techniques and associated social practices in China.”

The boundary must remain clear: UNESCO protects the making craft and related culture, not the “Ya'an Tibetan Tea” certification trademark itself.