Hangzhou, the West Lake, and Dragon Well tea

Asia » China » Hangzhou
September 28th 2008

Published: May 4th 2009

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wanderlustwest

Emperor's Tea

The highest grade tea

Today we booked our only tour of the entire trip: a day trip to Hangzhou, about 3 hours outside of Shanghai. We had been excited for this trip and booked it for the main purpose of visiting a Dragon Well or Longjing tea plantation.

Since it seemed far too complicated to arrange to get out to Hangzhou on our own, our tour ended up being almost a private tour with only 2 other people in the group with us. We lucked out and had a great guide named Maggie from Gray Line Tours, who was incredibly helpful and friendly.

After an early start at 730am, we arrived in Hangzhou for a cruise on the West Lake. We saw a few man-made islands (one of which is sinking) as we took in the views along the lake which also included pagodas, bridges, and the city of Hangzhou itself. The place was packed as it was the weekend leading up to the big National Day holiday on October 1st.

We stopped at a hotel for a delicious family-style lunch with other tour groups before making our way to the Mejiwu Tea Village plantation. The tea terraces lined the hills and we could

West Lake

Pagoda on the hill of the West Lake

see the workers gathering the tea leaves from the plants in the sunshine. We were given an introduction to the Longjing Tea, the village, and the tea maiking process.

Sampling the tea and participating in the ceremony was a lot of fun. Being big tea drinkers, Shane and I were quite interested in what our guide had to say. As well, having participated in a Japanese ceremony which is quite different, it served as a nice comparison. Of course, no visit to the tea village is complete without actually purchasing some tea. We were well prepared for the high price of the tea in comparison to the rest of the trip which was inexpensive. My family had visited the same plantation in 2003 so I was also familiar with the quality and taste of the green tea. Shane and I bought a large container to share back home and some smaller ones as gifts.

After the tea plantation, we headed to a pagoda site from 900 AD. The wood and brick pagoda was still standing upright. We didn’t have enough time to take a walk up the pagoda but explored the surrounding gardens including a selection of famous

Hangzhou

Lots of boats and people on the West Lake

Chinese pagodas in miniature.

After that it was back to Shanghai. There wasn’t that much to the tour and traveling took up most of the time, but we were satisfied since the main reason for taking the tour was to go to the tea plantation.

Traffic back to the city was horrendous. We ended up hopping out of the van early in People’s Park in order to grab some dinner again at Babela’s Kitchen. After all, we liked the restaurant and definitely had a hard time finding places to eat with English menus in Shanghai.

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