Tea drinking: Time-honored Chinese custom

A customer (R) tastes lotus root starch in Cuiyuting Teahouse in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, July 11, 2012. There are several teahouses besides the West Lake, providing customers with tea at a price of only one yuan RMB (0.16 U.S dollar). It’s the lifestyle in one-yuan-teahouses beside West Lake, as local people enjoy drinking tea in the morning.

With personal tea-leaves, teacups, people enjoy tea, chat and play cards at the one yuan teahouses. Several one-yuan-teahouses were established at the West Lake scenic spot in early 1990s and were important to the tea culture of Hangzhou. Driven by rising costs, almost all the one-yuan-teahouses beside West Lake closed in 2007.

Few of the one yuan teahouses survived due to publicity and customers’ support, with regular customers came frequently. Cuiyuting Teahouse is one of the one-yuan-teahouses. An aged customer at Cuiyuting said that he drank one-yuan-tea for about 20 years and found the teahouses especially suitable for senior citizens. <Xinhua/Ju Huanzong>

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