Longjing Mountain - Dragon-well Green Tea Hills

After our boat tour on West Lake, we headed southwest of West Lake, between tree-covered mountains and through one mountain via a long tunnel to a small village called Longjing ("Dragon Well") - located in the valley and which can only be reached via the tunnel through the mountain.

Once in the Longjing, we were surrounded by terraced hillsides full of tea trees. This is where the famous Dragon-well Green Tea is grown and dried. The valley, with persistent mist and fog, is ideal for growing tea, and has been doing so for 1200 years.

We were led through a courtyard, up a winding stone staircase into a tea house, where we were served fresh tea and instructed on true tea technique and the secrets to harvesting and reaping the healthful, vitamin benefits of this precious tea, housed some four hours away from the industrializing east coast in its own, ancient, clandestine valley. By the time Chinese tea reaches American shelves, it has either been preserved and packaged in an inorganic way that reduces the valuable nutrients, or it has been falsified and supplemented with willow leaves and other plant material. The most nutritious, rich tea is harvested in March - very young and early in the season - this is called the "Empress" tea. The harvest season continues for a total of 9 months of the year. For a few select Americans, I was able to procure some of this Dragon-well Green Tea, although I got the April tea (second in nutrients only to the (rather expensive) Empress).

The derivation of "Dragon-well" comes from a local belief that a dragon controlled the rainfall of the misty, foggy mountain valley. As a result, local citizens would travel to Longjing to offer gifts to the dragon as early as the 3rd century A.D.