Serving Us some Fine Longjing Tea 龙井茶
The Longjing Tea Village is certainly quite a fascinating place to be in. The entire community practically lives off selling tea to tourists who happen to come here. Naturally, they also package and send them to the lowlands in Hangzhou City and the rest of China. Longjing Tea, translated as Dragon Well Tea is renowned as the finest tea in the entire country, this is probably courtesy of Emperor Kangxi who is fond of naming stuff. Kangxi was so fond of the tea and once named it the imperial tea. The tea village itself is on a mountaintop, the same place where the plant the tea plants.
Tea Set at the Old Longjing 老龙井
The leaves are picked and roasted when the time is right to retain the optimum flavor. Then it is steeped in hot water where it produces a nice yellow green color. The tea itself is fragrant and yet not bitter unlike some other green teas. It is said that in Hangzhou, there are four varieties of Longjing you should be aware of, Shifeng 师峰 (Lion Peak), Xihu 西湖(West Lake), Hupao 虎跑 (Tiger Running) and Yunxi 云息 (Cloud Resting). Of these four, the most highly regarded one is the Shifeng. At least, this was what our taxi driver told us.
We entered the Old Longjing 老龙井 to try some of their famous tea. It wasn’t really the season for tea, but the lady was more than eager to demonstrate for us how good their tea is. All the while she was reminding us that it is ok not to buy, just try. She steeped some fresh tea leaves for us and served us the freshly boiled tea. It was really quite nice. Over the years, I have grown to be quite fond of tea, in fact, it is my caffienated bevarage of choice, rather than coffee. The smell of the Longjing tea was very nice and so was the taste, as it was mild but still quite flavorful. The price for a kilo was around CNY 600, which I guess was actually quite reasonable for high grade tea, which can run into the thousands.
We politely turned down the lady, who couldn’t hide her disappointment, but she was true to her word and she did not bug us to buy her tea again. She may probably earn more from wholesalers rather then random walk-ins like us. I would have loved to go down to the tea plantations but my companions were already wanting to go back to the city. We were supposed to take the taxi back to the city when a tourist bus really came through the village. We already gave our word to the driver that we will be using his services to go back and we skipped the bus. On the way back, he continued to recommend us some tours we might be interested it. My friend just told him that we were tired and we wanted to go back to the hostel. I would have wanted to stay longer in the village just to observe the people but there wasn’t much time.
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