Meijiawucun
Working tea village of terraced hillside gardens, roadside teahouses and farmers roasting the season's Longjing harvest by hand.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Meijiawucun, a tea village in the hills above Hangzhou, opens with a strange fact: much of the tea sold worldwide as Meijiawu Longjing actually grew a thousand miles away, in Sichuan. It follows decades of counterfeiting built up around the village's name, from leaves dyed to fake Shi Feng grade to oil brushed on for a fresh-picked sheen, and lays out how small the true harvest is set against demand from gift shops and airport kiosks across China. Listen for what the roughly five hundred farming households here are up against every spring.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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