We started our Saturday in Hangzhou with rain, for the first time. We should have anticipated it given the humidity in the air last night. Our first outing was the Mae Ja Woo tea plantation on Weijing Road, a rural mountainous area where they cultivate the Longjin or Dragon Well Tea, a green tea which, we learn, is the younger, unfermented tea that holds the most health benefits.
The tea trees are apparent as you drive up…they line every arable surface of the hills, vales, flatlands all around. The trees are more like shrubs, growing a few feet high but they are everywhere. After a brief tour of the plantation, the process of hand selecting the smaller, tender leaves from the tea tree and heating them up gently to dry them while locking in the phytochemicals, we are once more confronted with the reality of China…human labour is cheap. I can’t imagine life where my job consists of pulling small leaves off a shrub. Fortunately, the plantation owners believe that this job can only be done before noon, otherwise it’s too warm to safely pull the tenders leaves off the tree.
We move inside and get a lesson on how to tell good tea from, uh, non-good tea. Smell. Texture. Taste. Colour. We look at three grades of tea and, honestly, the difference are noticeable…but let’s remember who is putting on the show. Actually, the demo is good…our hostess, visibly pregnant but confident, articulate and poised is giving us a well-rehearsed pitch. She tells us stuff we likely all know….green tea is good for you. But, we learn, not just any tea. The fresh, little leaves in Hangzhou are hand-picked, organically grown and chock-full of flavour, anti-oxidants and vitamins. Not only will drinking green tea regularly promote health by lowering blood pressure, reducing bad cholesterol and boosting your immune system, chewing on the leaves will help stimulate your digestive system and promote weight loss. PLUS….if you take the leaves at the bottom of your cup, mix it in with 2 egg whites and 2 tsp honey and lay the mixture on your face, you’ll have a great facial that will improve your complexion and reduce wrinkles. What more could you ask for?
A price break would be nice. Half a kilo of the Emperor’s Blend is priced competitively, compared to other products like coca products and mary-jane’s favorite blend. Still…she’s sweet and what she’s telling you is so compelling that you suspend the checks and balances that would normally red flag the gargantuan gap between Dragon Well Tea and Lipton’s, which, it is said, gets the rejects of all the Tier 1 to 3 teas and must crush it into tiny pieces because they don’t get the tiny, tender young leaves packed with all the goods. Admittedly, the fact that every other Chinese citizen you see is carrying a plastic bottle with cooled tea in their backpack and the fact that the number of obese people you see here are inversely proportional to the same population at home makes for a compelling argument. I won’t tell you how this story ends…suffice it to say that the Chinese are winning the war for our wallets in every battle they choose to engage in.
Our next destination was the Lingyin Buddhist Temple where we, and ten thousand of our Chinese friends, decided to visit. The temple is built next to the Flying Mountain Top — so named because the buddhists who first settled there thought the mountain top was from India and that it had flown, for some odd reason, to this location. Over the last millennia, the monks carved out the mountains, installing various Buddhist figures, including the jovial Laughing Buddha we all know and love. Stuff like this just not would get done today…at least, not in Canada, due to labour laws.
Once at the top we enter the temple and witness some magnificent effigies including the largest Buddha in China, a 64 foot tall statue carved our of camphor wood. This is no dormant artifact here…the area is bustling with devout Buddhists, young and old, lighting incense, chanting and praying as they visit various temples. One temple holds 100 carved wise men, each larger than life size…they lay offerings at their feet, usually a 1 or 5 Yuan bill. In another temple, 30 or 40 monks are in high mass, banging a drum and chanting as the high priest conducts the service at the foot of a huge Buddha statue. No photographs are permitted inside the temples but I figure the main reason is to avoid disrupting the service — I admit to taking a few photos, discreetly, no flash…hold the camera low.
