Hanzhou tea culture changing or vanishing

Hangzhou (CNS) -– Hangzhou, the picturesque capital of Zhejaing Province, was home to about 1,000 tea houses where citizens enjoy the sublime pleasures of a pot of hot tea with some local desserts in the company of family or friends and surrounded by beautiful natural scenery. However, this accessible and inexpensive recreation is vanishing from public life.

Of the 1,000 tea houses, a reporter learnt from local authorities on Thursday, about 300 were shut down in 2011, along with 146,825 accommodation and catering enterprises registered in Zhejiang Province. Another 16,672 enterprises were deregistered.

"The tea house industry began to decline several years ago," said Qiu Renming, director of the Hangzhou Teahouse Association. Many teahouses were forced to close in recent years due to soaring, unaffordable tea prices, employee wages and shop rental costs, Qiu explained.

Inquiries also revealed that some time-honored teahouses had moved their headquarters and branches to districts relatively remote from the central area of Hangzhou. The remaining downtown teahouses began to redecorate and improve their services to reflect a focus on business people and their needs.

"Increasingly expensive raw materials and incompetent management are converging to create increasingly severe problems," said Li Yaguang, deputy secretary general of the China Cuisine Association, "Now it is time to optimize management modes and explore new routes to pass on the Chinese tradition of tea-drinking."