Abstract: As a representative manifestation of agricultural civilization, tea agricultural cultural heritage integrates ecological wisdom, production techniques and cultural symbolism, serving as a model for harmonious human-environment interaction. This study, grounded in the theory of cultural landscape genes, developed an index system to identify the landscape features of tea agricultural heritage sites within the “ecology-production-living” (EPL) landscape framework. It identified the core cultural expression elements and explored the intrinsic connections between landscape structure and cultural genes. Anhua dark tea culture, significant as a key node of the Wanli Tea Road and in frontier tea trade, exemplifies ecological and cultural complexity within China’s tea agricultural heritage. Through field surveys and historical analysis, the primary landscape features of Anhua dark tea culture were systematically identified and four core cultural genes were decoded. The findings are as follows: (1) The EPL landscape framework was effective for the systematic identification of tea agricultural cultural heritage, with the deep integration of ecological foundations, production technologies and life rituals, which provides the structural basis for maintaining the stability of cultural genes. The four-dimensional criteria (historical rootedness, functional necessity, spatial identity and dynamic evolution) offer a methodological tool for extracting genes from similar tea culture heritage. (2)The Meishan cultural gene of “Tea-Forest Symbiosis and Faith Transmission”, the fishing-hunting cultural gene of “Fire Roasting Customs and Bamboo Basket Craftsmanship”, the Jin merchant cultural gene of “Wanli Tea Road and Integrity as the Highest Virtue”, and the border-sale cultural gene of “Frontier Integration and the Bond of Unity” reveal the transition of tea from a mountain crop to a frontier link and, ultimately, a medium for civilization, offering a dynamic model for the study of “human-environment relations”. (3) The study highlighted the role of cultural genes in preserving landscape features and continuity, facilitating the transformation of tea culture from “heritage preservation” to “civilizational exchange resources”, thus contributing the Chinese paradigm to the sustainable development of global agricultural cultural heritage.

Key words: agricultural cultural heritage, cultural landscape genes, tea cultural system, EPL landscape, heritage preservation