I feel as though I am in a dream. I am standing in the very place where my favourite green tea in the world is grown. Yet Longjing goes far beyond my own personal passion; it is one of China’s most revered teas and among the world’s most prized green teas. For three days, I stayed in an ancient village tucked among Hangzhou’s tea-covered hills, where Buddhist monasteries and tea gardens have existed side by side for centuries. Each morning, when I opened my door, there was no hotel corridor waiting for me, but a stone village path, bamboo groves, tea gardens and people making their way towards the temples.
This is Amanfayun. Set along a pilgrimage route formed by seven ancient Buddhist temples, it is an extraordinary place where 46 old village buildings, some more than a century old, have been transformed into places to stay. It is not easy to tell where the hotel begins and the village ends. Rather than constructing a new and ostentatious world, Amanfayun seems to have quietly settled into the one that was already here. Walking along stone paths, through bamboo groves and shaded courtyards, you feel less like a guest in a large hotel operation and more like a temporary resident of the village. Perhaps Amanfayun’s greatest achievement is that, rather than drawing attention to itself, it makes you notice the place around it.
In China, tea is not simply a leaf steeped in hot water; it belongs to a vast culture in which agriculture, craftsmanship, history, philosophy and everyday life intersect. During the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Qianlong visited the place we know today as Longjing Village and granted imperial status to 18 tea bushes in front of Hu Gong Temple. Those 18 bushes remain among Longjing’s most powerful symbols today. The prestige that once carried this tea all the way to the imperial table continues, centuries later, to shape its value.
One of the most striking things here is that tea does not exist as an agricultural product separate from village life. Families sell tea outside their homes, meticulously ordered rows of tea bushes cover almost every hillside, and people carry glass cups of Longjing with them throughout the day. Even the waffle served at breakfast comes flavoured with Longjing.
So what makes Longjing so precious? To begin with, its production area is extremely limited. The leaves are picked by hand while still very young in spring, and it is after this that the craftsmanship defining the tea’s character truly begins. In traditional, high-quality Longjing production, the leaves are hand-roasted in heated, wok-like pans. The master presses, lifts, shakes and turns the leaves with the palm of the hand. This is far more than a drying process; it is a craft that gives Longjing its flat, slender and almost flawless form.
The most prized teas are made from the youngest leaves harvested early in spring. The picking season is brief and quantities are extremely limited. This scarcity partly explains reports over the years of exceptional batches of Longjing commanding prices per kilogram higher than gold. The precise day of harvest is critical. Pick a leaf a day too early and it may not be fully developed; a day too late and it may already have lost some of its delicacy. With Longjing, a window of just a few days can determine both the character and the value of a tea.
And then there are the Longjing masters. These are the people who determine the fate of the tea with their hands in a matter of minutes. They read the heat not through a thermometer, but through the memory of their palms. Over years, they learn exactly when the leaf has lost enough moisture, when it needs to be pressed and when it must leave the pan. Give the same fresh leaves to two different masters and you will not end up with precisely the same tea. That is the essence of their craft.
Because my journey fell in August, I should not, in fact, have had any chance of seeing Longjing being produced. The harvest and production take place in spring. Amanfayun, however, arranged something I will not forget. They invited the local tea master who produces tea from their own gardens especially for me and sourced fresh tea leaves so that he could give a small production demonstration. Within minutes, the entire room was filled with the scent of warm leaves, toasted nuts and that unmistakable Longjing aroma. After eight years of reading about, tasting and talking about this tea, I was finally watching it take shape right in front of me. Aman’s own approach to experiencing this landscape includes walking through bamboo forests and tea fields to Longjing Village and, during spring, witnessing local people harvesting and pan-roasting the leaves as a way of understanding this region.
In fact, this was far more than a small gesture; it was a revealing example of where Aman looks for luxury. For me, luxury that day was not the size of my room, the marble used in it or the number of people attending to me. It was making something I could not possibly have witnessed in August possible for a few hours, simply because they had genuinely listened to why I was there. That, to me, is personalized service: Before anticipating what a guest might want, understanding why that guest has come in the first place. This is also where Aman’s particular skill becomes apparent: Rather than using the culture of a destination as decoration, it attempts to become part of it. Perhaps this is why Aman properties in different corners of the world do not feel like replicas of one another, but rather like different geographical expressions of the same idea. Among the core values the brand says it continues to protect are privacy, service, architecture sensitive to its surroundings and pioneering locations.
The same approach can be felt in the kitchen. The summer menu at Steam House foregrounds produce from the lakes and waterways of the Jiangnan region, including Taihu prawns marinated in Shaoxing yellow wine. The continuation of age-old cooking methods in the semi-open kitchen feels like an extension of the same philosophy. Aman itself speaks of architecture that remains true to its destination and of experiences shaped by culture, community and nature. At Amanfayun, there is little need to read the theory; you need only look around.
Perhaps what truly distinguishes Amanfayun is the sense that it positions itself not as the owner of this village, but as one of its temporary custodians. The character of the old village houses has been preserved; the stone paths continue along their old course; the surrounding temples, tea gardens and village life are not a stage constructed behind the hotel, but life itself. This idea of seasonality extends all the way to the spa. Traditional Chinese Medicine holds that the body should be supported in accordance with nature’s rhythms; summer is believed to place greater demands on the heart, and treatments therefore focus on supporting circulation and restoring balance. You encounter a similar philosophy in the kitchen, in the tea and in the gardens: rather than resisting the season, you move with it. In the morning, you might pass a Buddhist monk, step into a tea garden a few minutes later and then have breakfast inside a centuries-old building. And gradually, you understand more clearly that Longjing is not simply a tea. Perhaps luxury can be exactly this: not making a place resemble you when you arrive, but allowing it, for a while, to bring you closer to itself.
