What is China’s greatest green tea

Question:

What is China’s greatest green tea according to the most respected tea experts? (Question proposed by a martial art trainer in Sydney)

Response:

It is hard to tell ‘which is the greatest’.

This is how the green teas (in fact all teas) used to be consumed in China for a long time before the rapid development of modern transportation: teas were produced and consumed locally. For example, XingYang Mao Jian was the local tea of XingYang and almost all tea drinkers in the XingYang area drank Mao Jian. This is why we end up with 300+ green teas in China and only the locals know best about how to make their local teas, as a result of fine tuning the cultivation and processing skills for many generations. Different green teas have different appearance and taste differently. All Chinese teas are also quality graded, eg the top quality Dragon Well (Long-Jing) can fetch a market price 1000 times of a low quality one (not taking into account of the tea dust used for tea bags). As mentioned earlier, all green teas have their distinctive shapes, colours and tastes. Every tea drinker would has a different taste preference, like with all other foods, it is therefore hard to tell which one is the ‘greatest’.