Discover Hangzhou
Longjing Village and Meijiawu tea valleys
龙井村 / 梅家坞
The two villages that grow China's most famous green tea, surrounded by terraced tea gardens in the hills behind West Lake. You can walk the terraces for free and sit in a farmhouse teahouse drinking tea picked a few hundred metres away.
The story
What makes this place special
Longjing - Dragon Well - is the pan-fired green tea grown in the hills immediately west of West Lake, named after a well near Longjing village. It became an imperial tribute tea under the Qing, and legend has the Qianlong emperor granting imperial status to eighteen bushes below Lion Peak at the Hu Gong Temple; those eighteen bushes are still fenced and shown to visitors. Shifeng, Lion Peak, is the most prestigious of the five growing areas; Meijiawu is the largest producing village in the West Lake appellation, with over 2,380 mu of tea land and around 560 households making roughly 50 tonnes of dry tea a year.
What you’ll discover
Terraced tea slopes in steep narrow valleys, ten minutes from the lake but feeling rural, with the villages of Longjing and Meijiawu strung along the valley floors - two- and three-storey farmhouses where the ground floor is a tea shop and a tea restaurant, and the family's firing pans are out at the front in picking season. In spring the slopes are full of pickers working the new shoots by hand, and in the villages you can watch leaf being pan-fired: hand-shaken in a pan at 80 to 100 degrees for twelve to fifteen minutes, pressed flat, which is what gives Longjing its flat blade shape. The imperial eighteen bushes and the Dragon Well itself are above Longjing village.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Season is everything. The tea worth coming for is Ming Qian, picked before Qingming around 5 April, and the hillsides are alive with pickers and firing pans from late March through April. Outside that window the valleys are pretty but the activity is gone.
- Everyone in both villages will sell you tea and the quality and pricing vary enormously. Ask to taste before buying, ask which hillside it came from, and be sceptical of anything sold as Shifeng at a village price - overfiring to fake Shifeng's yellowish-green leaf is a known trick.
- Meijiawu is the working tea village, Longjing is the showpiece. Meijiawu is bigger, less picturesque and more genuinely agricultural; Longjing village has the well, the eighteen imperial bushes and the tour buses.
- Walk between them. The Nine Creeks and Eighteen Gullies valley, the tea museum and both villages connect on foot and by local bus through the hills, and a day spent walking that circuit is the best non-lake day in Hangzhou.
- Have lunch in a village farmhouse restaurant. Longjing shrimp, and anything with the new tea leaves in it, is a local dish you cannot get properly anywhere else, and the village restaurants are cheaper and better than the lakeside ones.
When to come
Late March to late April - picking season, Ming Qian tea, and the hills at their greenest. Mornings, when the pickers are out. Autumn is pleasant for walking but the tea story is absent.
Getting around
Mixed. The village streets and valley roads are paved and mostly gentle, and buses and taxis run right into both villages, so a wheelchair user can get to a tea house, watch firing and buy tea. The tea terraces themselves are steep earth and stone paths between banked rows and are not accessible, and the walk up to the Dragon Well and the eighteen bushes above Longjing village involves steps and a climb. With a bad knee, stay in the valley floor and you lose little.
Worth knowing before you go
The picking season runs about 30 days from a week before Qingming (early April) to Guyu (late April) and is the only time you see the terraces being worked. Prices for tea sold to tourists in the villages are high - taste before buying, and expect genuine pre-Qingming Longjing to be expensive anywhere.
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