In the afternoon we visited the famous Dragon Tea village in
Hangzhou. Everyone in the tea village is very rich. They have a deal with the
government to give them one fourth of their spring tea harvest and then after
that they don’t have to pay taxes on the rest of their sales. There are 191
kinds of green teas in the world and green tea is the only one with the
powerful antioxidants.
History of Tea: The monks of the temple were the first
people to drink tea. Being monks they weren’t allowed to drink alcohol but
water just got kind of boring sometimes so they flavored it with bush leaves.
When they started noticing the positive health benefits of the tea leaves they
encouraged everyone else to drink it too. Random fact of the day, green tea and
black tea actually come from the same bush. Once tea became widespread in the
east they began to ship it out to Europe in the west. Except it took so long to
get there that by the time the European nobles got it, it had fermented and
turned the water a murky black color. The great thing was though that the
Europeans didn’t know any better and thought that’s what tea was supposed to be
like. They added milk and sugar to supplement the taste and called it black
tea. When the Chinese traveled over to the west they were shocked at the state
of the tea the Europeans were drinking but they didn’t want to admit that any
mistake had been made, so they went along with it and started purposely
fermenting the tea leaves to be shipped to the west. So the world now has green
and black tea.
How tea is harvested: We learned about the operations of the
village. Tea leaves are picked from the bushes once a week from March to
October. They’re picked and dried by hand by the women because women have
smaller more sensitive hands that can more easily pick the best leaves. The
first leaves in the Spring are the best and sell for the most money. The leaves
in the summer and fall are not as good and those are the leaves that are
usually ground up and used in tea bags.
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| Tea Village in Hangzhou |
That day we also got to go on a quick boat tour on one of
the lakes. There are five main lakes in Hangzhou and each one has a specific
function. The lake we went on is specifically for casual boating and has islands
many people visit during festivals. This lake also has pagodas scattered
around, there are three near an island that are actually pictured on the back
of the $1yuan note. Another lake is used specifically for fishing but you can
only fish three days of the week. Another one is used for harvesting clams.
Next to the lake was a pagoda we visited called the Six
Harmonies Pagoda. We climbed 200 stairs up seven levels to the top and it was
really cool because every level you went up the view was different. The six
temptations represent, the body, mind, speech, wealth, and abstinence from
temptation, and I missed the last one. Each level had unique hand carved
pictures right in the stone framework of the building. There was a small inner
chamber with the outer wall with the windows. It was rainy and cloudy that day
and there was no artificial lighting except on the stairs. Ryan called me into
one of the middle inner rooms. There wasn’t anything in the room that I could
see and he told me to look up. It was dark and I couldn’t see much but I could
sort of see a pattern on the ceiling. I decided to take a picture and it was a
blind shot because on the screen it just looked like a black abyss but when the
flash went off, the image that appeared on my camera screen was this
spectacular blue, white and green dragon. I’m sure it was painted hundreds of
years ago and is perfectly preserved thanks to the fact that room gets zero
natural light in it.
For dinner we got to try and local specialty. It was chicken
cooked in a clay pot for four hours. It was delicious but I got a surprise when
I stood up to scoop some more meat out of the pot. I looked down and saw the
whole chicken head staring back at me! I didn’t realize when they said they
were going to cook us chicken they meant they were going to throw in the entire
chicken into the pot!
That night Ryan and I went out and wandered around the
shopping streets. He got himself some new shoes because his old ones weren’t
keeping out all the rain and his feet were getting damp. During the rest of the
trip he got several comments on the shoes. Our guide Gump noticed them first,
apparently Ryan had bought some very popular and trendy shoes backed by one of
the most famous athletes in China. A while later another one of our local
guides also noticed and commented on Ryan’s good taste in shoes. It was quite
amusing.
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