A tea's place of origin and its dispatch location are not the same thing. Tea bushes grow in one location, the finished tea may be packaged elsewhere, and it may then be stored, customs-cleared, or distributed through yet another country. One cannot deduce where the leaves originated simply from the return address on a parcel.
A practical approach for buyers is to map a verifiable path for every consignment: raw material origin and processor, packaging and batch number, exporting entity, first-entry importer, warehousing or blending facilities, and the ultimate seller to the customer. Not every consignment passes through every stage; direct sales and distribution via European warehousing, for instance, entail different responsibilities and paperwork. The appearance of logistics hubs like the Netherlands in trade figures does not automatically make them the country of origin for the tea plants.
Trace documentation along the supply chain
Verify product specifications, origin, and batches at the raw material and processing stage; check net weights, dates, ingredients, and languages at the packaging stage; audit commercial invoices, inspection records, and transport conditions during cross-border transit; and review the responsible economic operator, pricing, duties, and returns procedures at the retail stage. Testing reports must correlate directly with the physical batch number rather than attaching last year's results to a current consignment.
The Jiang Rong Hao public catalogue illustrates tea varieties and applications, but it cannot reconstruct the full supply chain of any individual live order. Buyers should request documentation tailored to their specific batch and destination country, rather than conflating tea gardens, trade partners, and points of sale into a blanket claim of "European origin".