The and the Taste of Climate ChangeUnderstanding Impacts of Environmental Variation onBotanical Quality

摘要

We are in a village of the Akha socio-linguistic group in the Yunnan province of southwest China, bordering Myanmar. This area is the motherland of the tea plant and encompasses the center of genetic diversity of cultivated tea and its wild relatives.The Akha are one of the indigenous upland socio-linguistic groups that have an extensive history of cultivating tea and managing diverse tea gardens and tea agro-forests. They are members of the Loloish branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family currently populating southwest China as well as parts of Southeast Asia, including Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. In other words, this area is part of the region where the tea plant originated, and these communities have among the longest history of cultivating tea.