Tea Time at the Temple
We love our 2.0, user-generated website. Without it, who knows when we would have found out about TeaTrips? But find out we did and on the last day on May holiday we packed off for a day at Yunju Temple, southwest of Beijing.

Impressed with the elegance of the traditional tea ceremony, Norwegian Karen Petersson and Beijinger Marita Sun decided it would be even better at the temple. The day starts with a guided temple tour, followed by a sumptuous vegetarian lunch before finishing with an outdoor tea ceremony conducted by a certified tea school teacher who instructs in the intricacy of Chinese teas.

While I was happy to understand that black tea is actually pu’er cha and yellow tea is only grown in Hunan, Yunju Temple is the real draw. Built at the foot of granite-topped mountains, Yunju is one of the world’s most important repositories of Buddhist knowledge. Not only does it house a 15-meter brick pagoda dating from the Liao dynasty and three massive Ming-era copper Buddhas, it boasts one of the world’s most important collections of Buddhist scripture carved stone tablets. Be sure to pop into the “underground palace” (地宫) where the ten thousand tablets unearthed in 1956 are kept in a humidity and temperature-controlled environment. Be sure to allot extra time to check out the carved reliquaries in Leiyin Cave (雷音洞) half way up the opposite mountain ridge, one of only 10 such caves open to the public.

Lee Mack

Details: Tea Trip

Tel: 139-1033-0850, teatrip@gmail.com, ￥350