Camellia sinensis var. assamica in Yunnan? Camellia sinensis var. assamica is the tea variety that is associated with Assam, as the name attests.

I have also seen allusions and suggestions that this is the same as the "Da Ye" (large leaf) variety that is used in Yunnan for pu-erh and some red/black teas.  Some tea merchants certainly describe their Yunnan teas as being from assamica plants, and the Assam jungles are not too far from Yunnan so this seems credible.

Is there a reliable source that confirms that the assamica variety is the same as the variety from which pu-erh tea is made?  Or is the reality more complex, with most commercially grown pu-erh tea being a hybrid of var. assamica and other varieties?



Wikipedia pages about tea are currently poorly referenced and I tend to disregard most of the claims on the pages related to tea.  I am looking for references to scholarly books, pointers to trade literature, credible news sites, or quotes from acknowledged experts.

(Note that I am not interested in growing tea plants, this is purely a question about provenance of the foodstuff.)
I find nothing to indicate it's a different cultivar, and several sources saying that it's var. assamica. My favorite couple:


An article (with photos!) on a tea merchant's site, from a guy who says he was actually in Yunnan for a year just for the tea.
A toxicology paper, with Chinese authors (though not from Yunnan).


This doesn't rule out the possibility that there are subdivisions of assamica, leading to some tiny differences between the plants. But I can find no evidence of such subdivisions. Further, given the degree to which things vary simply based on the region they were grown in (due to climate and soil) and the effects of the subsequent processing, even if there are actual differences in the plants (beyond those caused by their environment), they're unlikely to be meaningful in terms of the tea you ultimately drink.

One caveat: this is all about what's most common. But people drink all kinds of things as tea, so it's possible that you'll find tea that was made from a different cultivar with the same processing as pu-erh, and it may well be labelled as pu-erh.