2025 Donna & Dana's China Trip : 05/16/25

Tour 1; Day 6

Today's schedule:

Lingyin (Buddhist) Temple
Longjing Tea Plantation
West Lake Boat Tour

First, some observations regarding Hangzhou from my journal. Hangzhou is clearly a "newer" city than Beijing or Xi'An with respect to the high-rise buildings and such. Traffic appears to be much more "civilized" - read this as a lot less crazy scooter antics (i.e. no red light running, no wrong way traffic on the streets, no high speed riding on the sidewalks, etc.). That said, I should qualify that comment in that I didn't see much if any of these antics...

We were on the bus by 8 AM for the 1/2 hour drive to the Lingyin Temple (LT) followed by a ~1/2 mile walk to the LT itself. We walked along a path bordered on one side by a stream and a mountain with several carvings into the rock mountain side (how many is several, I don't know, 50-ish?). The walk, and the aura it engendered was a great introduction to the LT. Once inside the LT there were at least 5 extraordinary pavilions on several terraced levels. According to Wikipedia (sorry, not all of this blog comes from my memory, see note about memory, specifically mine, in Day 9 post...) there were, at one time, as many as 18 pavilions, 72 halls and 1300 dormitory rooms within the temple. I didn't see this many structures but I can easily believe there were more than the 5 I noted in my journal. Fun fact (for us non-Buddhists), I was surprised to learn that there are several Buddhas (not sure about capitalization here...). One pavilion within the LT had 500, not a typo, 500 unique Buddhas on display. You'll have to take my word for it because when I walked into that pavilion with my camera I was quickly collared by an attendant (guard?) and told in no uncertain terms (language difficulties aside) "no pictures" inside. Given this fact (i.e. 500 Buddhas), there is only one Top Buddha (I don't know the correct designation - Supreme Buddha??) per temple and it is displayed in the main pavilion within the temple. Each of the 500 "sub" Buddhas was unique, particularly their facial displays. Anyway, all of the pavilions were spectacular (my English limitations are beginning to show themselves in that I'm running out of superlatives in an effort to describe so many of the sites we saw on this trip. I hear you, beginning to show???). The note in my journal is The Longyin Buddhist Temple is the highlight of the trip so far. In retrospect, I think the walk up to the LT was as impressive as the temple itself. Given that we had already seen the Great Wall, Forbidden City, Terracotta Army, and so on, I must have been impressed. Or, maybe I'm one of those folks who is most impressed by what they've last seen... . In our world travels, which by no one's definition is exhaustive, but not minimal either, we've never seen anything like what we've seen in China so far...

From the Lingyin Temple it was on to the bus and on to lunch before we visited the tea plantation. My journal notes nothing more than that we stopped for lunch on the way. So, you can assume... if you said Chinese banquet you've read at least one of the previous blog posts. Anyway, no mention means it was neither excellent nor terrible. I can guarantee no one left the restaurant hungry...

Onward to the tea plantation. Longjing is apparently well known amongst tea enthusiasts and refers to an area within Hangzhou. Longjing means "dragon well" and the tea produced there is known as, well, dragon well tea... I say "produced" because, as I learned, there is much more to "tea" than growing some plants with leaves and boiling them up. Who knew? (clearly not me). The fields of the tea plantation we visited were quite lush and were being harvested while we were there. We saw many "harvesters", they appeared to be mostly, if not all, women. The tea "trees" were kept trimmed quite short and if the plantation host had not told us that they were trimmed trees I would have described them as bushes. The field we visited was over 100 years old (only a baby by Chinese standards...) and there was a plaque along the side of the trail we climbed (yes, climbed...) that Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, had walked that same path in 1964. Fun fact, at this plantation each tea tree 3-leave shoot is picked by hand, pan-roasted then packaged or consumed. I wonder if Lipton does it this way... no, I don't really wonder. Part of our tour was to enjoy tea that was picked and roasted that day, along with biscuits. Both were excellent and while Donna was watching the tea leaves of the day's harvest being roasted I heard some of the biscuits crying out to be relieved of their existence as such in this world (i.e. I ate my and Donna's share of biscuits, biscuits I tell you, they were not cookies no matter what those fibbers say they were...). Donna subsequently bought a couple of containers of tea to bring home. It seemed that no matter how much they charged (and, I don't know, and don't want to know their cost) it couldn't be enough to cover even the labor involved in the production, let alone the tending of the tea fields and all the other aspects of getting the final product into the tin.

OK, we're not even close to getting tired... on to the bus and the boat tour of West Lake. West Lake seemed huge. There several boat out and about on the lake but none were private boats. I think all the boats on the lake were tour boats, big and small, and a couple that were just weird. No jet-skis, ski boats, pontoon boats or the like. We went out on a mid-to-large boat (it held our tour group and another) for a relatively short tour (thankfully, we were all more than close to getting a bit tired by now...). There was a huge pagoda overlooking the lake that seemed to be one of the main attractions (we didn't disembark and go in, if that was even a choice, again, OK, by me anyway...).

After the West Lake tour it was back on the bus to the hotel where we then walked to dinner. Several folks commented that they thought it was the "best dinner so far".

Beginning of the walk up to the Lingyin Temple. That Buddha carving in the center of the picture is just a hint of the spectacularity of things to come (yeah, I'm just making words up now...)

Some detail of one of the first carvings we saw...

There were several carvings in the mountain side, large and small. This to give you a sense as to the size and density/distribution of the carvings...

I'll just add these carving pix with little or no comment - the detail and magnificence is clear...

You could cross the stream and walk among many of the carvings. The rock stairways without handrails seems like they would be a litigators dream in the states...

Blue screen insert of our walk up to the Lingyin Temple with a small sample of the rock carvings in the background - kidding, didn't see any blue screen opportunities in China

This is the layout of the Lingyin Temple and, maybe, why I thought there were only 5 pavilions. What this map didn't show was all the stairs we had to climb to get to the main pavilion (at the top). The 500 Buddhas were in the, and I hesitate to describe it this way, "swastika" shaped building on the left. Note; the 500-Buddha building, and it's shape, existed 100's of, maybe a 1000, years before the shape was co-opted by the repugnant scourge that surfaced in Germany in the 1930's.

This was the first pavilion of the 5 and may give a sense as to the size. They got bigger and more extravagant as we climbed up to the remaining 4.

Generally, each pavilion had something to receive incense, which was provided at the entrance to the temple. The incense is used as a method of purifying the surroundings and Stony mentioned that tradition held that 3 incense sticks be used per person. Some folks used many more than that, perhaps deciding that if some purification was good, more was better...

On our way up to the first pavilion

On the front terrace of the first pavilion there was this display of (I think) unique ribbon-like flags. We saw folks talking to the person who hung the flags, I think you could purchase one and write on it - a prayer, wish for good fortune, etc. (which made each kind of unique, I think...)

Main (as opposed to "Top" or "Supreme") Buddha in the first pavilion. You'll see why I called it the "Main" Buddha in the next picture...

These, Buddhas all (I think), were along the wall as we walked through, as were the following ...

This, and the following, were on the backside of the main Buddha...

Onward (and upward) to the 2nd pavilion

Main Buddha of the 2nd pavilion...

... and some of the adjacent Buddhas (I think) along the wall of the 2nd pavilion

And, onward (and upward) to the 3rd pavilion. I hope you're getting a sense of upwardness (another made up word, maybe I should take up cross word puzzles...) of this temple.

The grounds adjacent to the pavilions were every bit as impressive as the pavilions themselves (IMO)...

OK, we didn't make it to the 4th and 5th pavilions. We were running out of time (yeah, that's it, out of time... we were not tired of climbing stairs and no one said the upper pavilions were much like the two we'd seen...that's our story and we're sticking with it). Back down at the entrance grounds level, this is a peek inside the building with 500 Buddhas. From the outside...

This from the bus on our way to the tea plantation

Making our way up the stairs into the tea fields, because someone in the group said "More stairs please"... (not really...)

The tea fields bordered mesmerizing with the tea trees in orderly rows...

... on terraced land. Here, see the harvesters at work, which looks hard to me, but...

... given the choice "Pick tea leaves or go up that mountain, clear and terrace it then plant more tea trees", I'd choose picking, I think...

... and check this, the fields shown above were the "easy" ones to prepare...

Our plantation tour guide, tea time host, and, I think, owner, of the plantation we visited. Here, another example of the many contradictions we saw in China - they practice a method of processing the tea leaves that is 100's, perhaps 1000's, of years old, while checking out what's what on a cell phone...

Yup, we were there...

... as was the rest of our Tour 1 group, we seemed to get along well - no fist fights broke out anyway (just kidding, no, really, no fighting at all...)

Our host with a batch of tea leaves that were either just roasted or about to be roasted. This pic just to give you a sense of their batch size. It takes a lot of batches to make a small number of tins of tea...

Waiting in line to board the West Lake tour boat (as well as anywhere we've visited so far), it was not uncommon to see folks dressed in eye-catching attire like this...