Anhua dark tea (安化黑茶) is the pressed, post-fermented tea of Anhua County in Yiyang's western hills, recorded as the source place of the type and an important node of the ancient Tea Horse Road. Its black bricks, fu bricks, flower bricks and thousand-tael logs were shaped to survive months on the road. The county itself is 82 per cent mountain on the middle Zi River, near the geographic centre of Hunan, and was chartered in 1072 as the Song state opened the Meishan hills. Dark tea heads Yiyang's list of special products today.
Anhua County presses dark tea into bricks and logs that were built to travel. The leaf, the road it took and the county that still makes it are the three stages of a mountain product's long journey to market, from caravan to domestic table.