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Opening Ceremony

March 27, 2008 was the day when the China (Hangzhou) West Lake International Tea Culture Expo and the West Lake Dragon Well Tea Festival were unveiled. The event kicked off in the village of Cimuqiao, a suburban part of the West Lake District. The event was composed of two major parts: the season opening ceremony and activities. More than 10,000 visitors flocked to the opening ceremony of the new tea season. A T-platform in a tea garden was eye-catching. Reporters from Belgium, France and Italy were present. They interviewed some tea-picking women through an interpreter. A reporter asked if these new leaves were tea leaves, if the tea leaves could be eaten after they were picked from tea bushes. His questions touched off uproars from tea farmers. Tea farmers explained tea processing in great detail.

After the opening ceremony, Hangzhou, the capital of tea in China, would see a series of events before April goes out and May comes in.

Tea Banquet

The first tea banquet for 2009 was launched on March 28 at the Old Dragon Well Royal Tea Garden. Xu Nanmei, a researcher with Hangzhou-based Tea Research Institute under China Academy of Agricultural Sciences commented that tea banquets would be a new option for Hangzhou residents who enjoy spending a weekend day hanging out at a rural restaurant playing Mahjong and treat themselves to a meat-dominated banquet.

The new-type tea banquet is a four-course luxury. Each course has a different cup of tea as the centerpiece. With the different cups of tea come some well-prepared popular local refreshments and local dim sums such as eggs cooked with tea leaves, tofu, cakes, rice cooked in bamboo, shelled shrimps, fish ball soup, steamed bamboo shoots, sticky-rice dumplings, goose liver, baby pigeons, and swans (swan meat from a poultry farm).

Such a banquet is not cheap. Each was charged 150 for the banquet. And there was no alcoholic beverage at the tea banquet. Would Hangzhou consumers who love the trendy things favor such a quiet treatment?

Zhu Jiaji, director of Hangzhou Teahouses Association, commented that the tea banquet would be launched step by step in hundreds of teahouses across the city. At present, four flagship teahouses in downtown and one suburb teahouse offer the banquet in different formats and at different prices.

Tea banquets are nothing new in the city surrounded by hills where tea plantations have flourished for centuries. History says the earliest tea banquets appeared in Jingshan Mountain in a suburb of Hangzhou where monks sipped tea and ate simple food and compared notes on studies on Buddhist sutra. The food part of the study sessions gradually morphed into a complex rite known today as Jingshan Tea Banquet.

Another version of the origin of tea banquets in Hangzhou goes far back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279) when Su Dongpo first served as the citys chief official. A reverent monk in a temple near the Dragon Well always entertained visitors with a cup of Dragon Well tea. As the monk was famed and visitors increased, foothills around the Dragon Well were developed into tea plantations. When Su Dongpo was appointed again the chief magistrate in Hangzhou, he visited the reverent monk too. The great scholar and the monk became friends and enjoyed each others company. Gradually a tea banquet took shape and evolved into a complex rite too.

Tea Processing as National Intangible Cultural Heritage

Tea production and tradition is one of the top priorities on the agenda of the West Lake District Government. On the opening ceremony of the 2009 tea season, the processing technology of the West Lake Dragon Well Tea was officially recognized as a national intangible cultural heritage. A plaque was delivered by Zhejiang Culture Administration on behalf of the Ministry of Culture.

The manual processing technology used at the Dragon Well village has been refined over centuries. Tea leaves must be aired for dehydration before they are put into a large iron wok to process. A farmer uses his hand to handle tea leaves in the heated wok. His hand moves magically and more than 10 special movements of the hand can be seen by those in the know. A machine can produce 10 kilo finished tea a day whereas an experienced man and a wok can only finish just one or two kilo. The machine-processed tea look nice in both shape and color, but after steeped, the tea does not taste as well as the manually-processed tea. □