Hangzhou >> Long Jing Tea Farms

Attraction Typ: Zoos, Farms and Wildlife

Location: about 20 km from city

Recommend: 4 Star

Long Jing Tea Farms

Hangzhou Longjing Tea Farms, with green mountains, clear spring, verdant trees, lingering clouds and mists as well as abundant rain and dew, it offers favorable conditions for growing tea.

Longjing tea (Chinese: 龙井茶; pinyin: Lóngjǐng Chá) is China's most famous tea and simply the best of all Longjing variety, reputed as the "Empress of Green Tea". Longjing tea is renowned for its four unique characteristics: jade green color, sweet fragrance, pure and mellow chestnut-like flavor and the beautiful shape of its leaves. Besides these, Longjing tea aids one's health in many ways regardless of one’s age. It is used to deter food poisoning, refresh the body, stop cavities, fight viruses, control high blood pressure, lower the blood sugar level, and to prevent cancer. Hence, Longjing tea is regarded as the elixir for health.

West Lake Longjing tea has more than one thousand years of recorded history and was mentioned in the first ever tea book by Lu Yu during the Tang Dynasty. So popular that even Queen Elizabeth II, former US President Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger once tasted this tea during their visit to China.

Longjing tea is primarily planted in Longjing (Dragon Well), a small village located in the Fenghuang Mountain, the southwest of West Lake, 20 kilometers from downtown Hangzhou. With green mountains, clear spring, verdant trees, lingering clouds and mists as well as abundant rain and dew, it offers favorable conditions for growing tea.

The most famous spring tea from Long Jing is collected in late March-early April and is usually referred to as either emperor tea or white tea. The making of Longjing tea is a unique, labor-intensive process that demands great skill from the tea maker. First, the tea is dried indoors on bamboo mats to reduce the water content by 15-20%. Then the tea is fired at high temperature in a wok, where the skilled worker uses 10 distinct hand movements to shape the tea. This firing kills the enzyme activity and removes the green, grassy taste. The tea is then cooled for about an hour then re-fired at a lower temperature. Finally, the tea is hand-graded by leaf size and packed.

When you finished touring the Longjing tea village, it is a good choice to visit the Longjing tea factory. You can get to know the process of making tea and have more knowledge on how to identify tea.