Chakvi

Chakvi is a low-key town on the coast road between the Batumi Botanical Garden and Tsikhisdziri, backed by steep green hills. Most travellers pass through on the way to Mtirala National Park, whose access road climbs from here up the Chakvistskali valley. Yet Chakvi has an unusual place in history. In the 1890s the hills around it were planted with some of the first large tea estates in the Russian Empire, and rows of tea bushes, many of them now overgrown, still stripe the slopes above town. The pebble beach is calmer than Batumi's and popular with local families in summer.

The man behind the tea was Lau Jen Jau, a tea specialist from China who arrived in 1893 with a group of workers and stayed for about three decades. He planted the bushes, ran a small factory and trained local growers, and the estate's teas won prizes at international exhibitions. His story is part of local pride, and older residents still talk of him. Pair Chakvi with Mtirala's forest trails in the morning and the Botanical Garden in the afternoon.

In the 1890s Russian investors, led by the tea merchant Konstantin Popov, began planting tea on the wet hills of Chakvi and in 1893 brought Lau Jen Jau from China to run the work. He stayed until the 1920s. In Soviet times the area was part of a vast Georgian tea industry that supplied much of the USSR, and it collapsed after 1991. Today only small producers work some of the old gardens.