Chinese matcha returns to Europe.
And it is not a downgrade.

For twenty years, buying matcha in Europe meant buying Japanese matcha. It was almost a tautology: matcha was a Japanese word, the ceremony was Japanese, and the regions you learned to name (Uji, Nishio, Yame) were all in Japan. In 2026 that equation has broken, along two paths that crossed: one to do with prices in Kyoto, the other with what is happening on some hills north of Hangzhou.

What happened in Kyoto

The figures are published and they are severe. The tencha harvest in Kyoto prefecture went from 1,127 tonnes in 2024 to 939 in 2025, down 19%. Within that, hand-picked tencha in Uji, the raw material of high-end ceremonial matcha, fell from 10,216 to 6,140 kilos: down 40% in a year. And the average first-harvest price at the JA Kyoto auction went from about 5,400 yen a kilo to more than 20,000. A 265% rise in one season.

We go into the causes and the sources in the analysis of the 2025-26 crisis, but in short: it was not only the weather. It was the weather, plus ageing growers, plus global demand growing faster than any harvest can follow. All three factors are structural. None is fixed by a good spring.

When the supply of an agricultural product tightens like that, two things happen at once. First, the price goes up. Second, and less remarked on, the mid-range disappears before the top of the range: buyers with the budget take the best, and the rest of the market has to look elsewhere.

And then people looked to China

The industry’s reaction was predictable: look for tencha outside Japan. And there happens to be a region that has been producing it, with historical ups and downs, since before Uji existed.

Jingshan temple (径山寺) was founded in 742. Under the Song, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, its monks practised dian cha (點茶): whisking powdered tea with hot water in a bowl. The dark temmoku ceramics we now associate with Japanese chanoyu came from the Jian kilns nearby. In 1187 a Japanese monk, Myōan Eisai, came to study Chan Buddhism; he spent four years watching how tea was taken there, and went home to Japan in 1191 with Camellia sinensis seeds and the method. His Kissa Yōjōki, of 1214, records what he had learned.

Put plainly: matcha was not born in Japan. It was born in China and travelled to Japan, where it was perfected over eight centuries while at home the custom was lost. That nuance matters, because it changes the nature of what is happening now. Chinese matcha in 2026 is not a cheap imitation of a Japanese product: it is the recovery of a technique that had left home. We tell it in more detail in the Jingshan page.

What is done at Jingshan today

Local growers have taken up the Japanese method almost point for point: shading for twenty to twenty-five days before harvest, steaming the leaf to stop oxidation, drying, de-veining and stone milling. No mystery and no shortcut: the same process, with leaf from somewhere else.

The result tastes different, and that is worth saying without euphemism. Against a first-harvest Uji, Jingshan matcha has a slightly warmer green, an aroma with more grass and less sea in it, and an umami that is present but of another character: less deep, more direct. Anyone looking for exactly the profile of an Uji Gokou will not find it here. Anyone looking for a sound ceremonial, with dense foam and no aggressive bitterness, will.

How to judge a matcha without looking at the flag

Here is the point that really matters. Origin is useful information, but it is a mental shortcut, not a criterion. Mediocre Japanese matcha is abundant, and there is perfectly respectable Chinese matcha. These are the criteria you can actually check, ordered by how easy they are to verify:

1. Which harvest

The first harvest (ichibancha) gives tenderer leaves, higher in amino acids and lower in fibre. Later ones are rougher. A product that does not state its harvest is rarely from the first: if it were, it would say so.

2. Days of shading

Shading is what makes a tea tencha rather than something else. Twenty days is the reasonable minimum. Shade slows photosynthesis, the plant builds up chlorophyll and amino acids, and from that come both the deep green and the umami. A pale matcha is almost always an under-shaded one.

3. Verifiable certification

«Organic» without a label means nothing. The EU organic leaf carries the control body’s code, and that code can be checked. Certification says nothing about whether the matcha tastes good, but it does say someone outside the seller has gone and looked at how it is made.

4. The colour, in daylight

Spread a gram on white paper by a window. A vivid jade green is a good sign. Olive or yellowish green points to a late harvest, insufficient shading, or simply time: matcha oxidises and loses colour over the months. It is the cheapest test there is, and it rules out a fair few candidates.

5. The foam

Whisk 2 g in 70 ml of water at 70 °C with a chasen. A good ceremonial gives a dense, fine-bubbled foam that holds for more than a minute. A culinary in disguise gives four big bubbles that collapse in fifteen seconds. Here the milling gives itself away.

We expand on these checks, and what to look at in each, in the five signs of a genuine matcha. Not one of the five asks what country the powder came from.

What not to buy

That Chinese origin is legitimate does not mean anything goes. Plenty of product on the European market trades on the confusion, and it has recognisable signs:

• Origin given as «Asia» or just «China». A serious grower names the region. Whoever does not either does not know it, or would rather you did not.
• A price per kilo that is too low. Shaded, stone-ground tencha has a cost that does not go below a certain floor. Under about €120/kg you are almost certainly buying unshaded ground green tea, which is a legitimate product but a different one, and much cheaper to make.
• The word «ceremonial» with nothing behind it. It is not a regulated category. Nobody certifies a «ceremonial grade». What is certified is organic status; what is declared is the harvest and the shading.

What to expect from here

The Japanese crisis does not resolve in 2026. Uji’s growers are not getting younger, late frosts have not stopped happening, and international demand keeps rising. It is reasonable to expect first-harvest Japanese matcha to stay expensive and scarce, and the mid-range gap to be filled increasingly by Chinese product.

For anyone who drinks matcha, that is not necessarily bad news, provided the label tells the truth. An honest Chinese ceremonial, with its region, its harvest and its certification, at a price that lets you drink it daily, is a better buy than an anonymous Japanese second harvest sold at Uji prices.

What is needed is to stop using country as a synonym for quality. «Japanese» guarantees nothing and «Chinese» disqualifies nothing. The five criteria above work just as well under either flag.