A corner of the Hejing Tea Cultivation Academy.
“Green, green the reeds; white dew turns to frost.”
On September 7, coinciding with White Dew — the most beautiful of the twenty-four solar terms — an all-media reporter from China Cooperation Times · Tea Weekly visited the Songzhuang Art District in Beijing’s Tongzhou District, where the Hejing Tea Cultivation Academy is housed inside a large art museum in the Xiaobao art zone of Songzhuang.
At the event, the reporter, together with tea-industry experts and more than twenty trainees from various provinces enrolled in the first Tea Cultivation Practical Trainer class, witnessed the “Star-Rated Teahouse · Hejingyuan Training Base Plaque-Awarding Ceremony and the Launch of the First Tea Cultivation Practical Trainer Class.” Beijing Hejing Tea Cultivation Academy, together with the Teahouse Industry Office of the Commercial Catering Industry Development Center of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, jointly launched the “Tea Cultivation Practical Trainer” assessment program and established the “Star-Rated Teahouse · Hejingyuan Training Base.”
Before the plaque ceremony began, participants, led by the academy’s teachers, took part in a “Dialogue Within a Cup of Tea · Shenshi Tea Gathering,” experiencing the “Shenshi tea session” in a rigorous and orderly manner. As early as 2013, Hejing Tea Cultivation founder Wang Qiong proposed the concept of Shenshi tea, which resonated with countless tea lovers. Over the years, through the promotion efforts of Wang Qiong, her students, and tea enthusiasts, Shenshi tea has become widely popular.
Guests experience the “Shenshi tea session.”
Shenshi tea takes place every day between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m., the period when the bladder meridian is most active in the body. Drinking tea at this hour helps the bladder meridian function, detoxify, and clear blockages. Using abdominal breathing, one drinks seven cups of tea in about forty minutes — usually around 500 ml — drinking until the body feels thoroughly cleansed, circulation improves, and emotions and the body are balanced, achieving the goal of physical and mental health and joy. After the forty-minute Shenshi tea session ended, the trainees said one after another that their bodies had been nourished and their minds and bodies put at ease.
After the session, Li Shouwang, director of the Teahouse Industry Office of the Commercial Catering Services Development Center, presented the plaque to Wang Qiong, founder of the Hejing Tea Cultivation Academy, and delivered a speech. From now on, the academy will serve as the training base for owners of star-rated teahouses nationwide. Technology and culture are the two wings of Chinese tea; tea is the contemporary expression of traditional Chinese culture, and tea-culture education plays a pivotal role in inheriting and carrying forward the spread of Chinese tea culture.
The plaque-awarding ceremony for the “Star-Rated Teahouse · Hejingyuan Training Base.”
Having spent 26 years in the tea-culture field, Wang Qiong has built up deep reserves before releasing them. In her first twenty years she devoted herself to the teahouse business, determined to brew a fine cup of Chinese tea, and recorded her insights in the books White Clouds, Lingering Rosy Light and Brewing a Fine Cup of Chinese Tea. In the following decade, Wang Qiong kept refining herself, devoting her efforts to promoting tea education and spreading the tea-cultivation way of life. She put forward the idea of “cultivating oneself through tea · nurturing virtue with tea” and published the book Tea Cultivation, sharing at every moment the energy within a cup of tea. Through this cup of tea, the owners of star-rated teahouses across the country will surely achieve spiritual elevation at the Hejing Tea Cultivation Academy in the future.
What energy does a cup of tea hold? At the event, the academy specially invited renowned tea-culture expert and veteran tea master Yu Guanting; Lu Yao, former director of the Tea Industry Development Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; and An Mingxia, all-media editor-in-chief of China Cooperation Times · Tea Weekly, to share with the trainees the culture, industry, and everyday life of Chinese tea, while outstanding trainee representatives shared their learning reflections.
At the end of the event, Wang Qiong delivered concluding remarks. She first thanked the specially invited guests and the trainees of the first “Tea Cultivation Practical Trainer” class, and shared her own story with a cup of tea. She said: “All the important growth of my life has been accomplished within a cup of tea. The course of a person’s life is itself a practice that can neither be foreseen nor chosen. A tea cultivator can experience within a single cup the myriad phenomena of life’s subtle meaning, and can build a path of personal growth amid the pouring and repouring of tea. I hope everyone can achieve the harmony of material tea and spiritual tea, and realize the beautiful wish of daily progress and lifelong growth.”
Wang Qiong, founder of the Hejing Tea Cultivation Academy, delivers her speech.
A plaque-awarding and launch ceremony that was simple yet far from simple. Everyone at the event was moved by tea, and the tea-cultivation mottos hanging in the academy — “cultivating oneself through tea, nurturing virtue with tea” and “practice tea daily, cultivate constantly” — will become lighthouses on the trainees’ path of tea practice.
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Author: Lam Sam (LamSam), the Old Tea Head
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