Tea and Place: The Evolving Discussion about Terroir in Song China

Abstract This article employs terroir as an analytical framework to examine how a place-specific tea acquired its reputation and contributed to processes of cultural self-fashioning in Song China. Focusing on Fujian’s Beiyuan 北苑 tea—exceptionally well documented in Song sources—it explores the close connections among tea, landscape appreciation, and place-making. Drawing on tea manuals and connoisseur writings, the article shows how literati linked tea quality to both natural conditions and cultural practices, using such associations to articulate refined taste and produce place-based knowledge. The case of Beiyuan tea reveals the emergence of a distinctly Chinese rhetoric of terroir, one that transformed environmental description into a rhetoric that mediated between local expertise and imperial order. Within this framework, place itself came to embody quality, integrating physical environment, cultural identity, and sensory experience.