About China National Tea Museum

China National Tea Museum

The China National Tea Museum, in Chinese Zhongguo Chaye Bowuguan, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, is China's only national museum devoted to tea and tea culture. It opened in April 1991 at Shuangfeng, at 88 Longjing Road in the West Lake area, set among the tea-growing hills where Longjing (Dragon Well) tea is produced, and a second campus — the Longjing area, at Wengjiashan — opened in 2015. The museum holds more than 5,000 artefacts by some counts, and 3,865 catalogued artefacts by others, including tea samples, teaware, tea-processing tools, tea books, paintings and stele rubbings. Its displays trace tea from the age of Lu Yu, author of The Classic of Tea, through the global tea trade. The Shuangfeng site is designed as an open-air “museum without walls” among tea bushes. The museum was rated a national second-grade museum in 2009 and was selected among the fourth batch of national first-class museums in 2020. Its official website is teamuseum.cn.

China's Only National Tea Museum

Tea occupies a place in Chinese culture that no other drink approaches, yet until 1991 China had no national museum for it. The China National Tea Museum was created to fill that gap as a specialist, national-level institution: the exhibition centre, as its own descriptions put it, of world tea culture. Its brief combines the functions of a museum — collecting, preserving, researching and exhibiting tea artefacts — with those of a research and tea-ceremony centre, offering culture presentation, popular-science education, academic exchange, tea-art training, interactive experience, tea tasting and conferences. The museum's site was part of the statement: rather than a city-centre building, it was planted in the Longjing tea country west of Hangzhou's West Lake, surrounded by the tea gardens whose product made the region famous, so that the landscape itself functions as the first gallery.

Opening at Shuangfeng in 1991

The museum was first built from 1987 and opened to the public in April 1991 at Shuangfeng, a site of 4.7 hectares on Longjing Road. The original museum occupied about 3,500 square metres of construction. The Shuangfeng campus was designed in the Jiangnan garden manner — white walls, black tiles, flower corridors, winding paths, rockeries, ponds and waterside pavilions among green tea gardens — and is characterised by the museum itself as an open-air museum without walls, consisting of exhibition buildings set within the tea landscape rather than a single enclosed block. In 1998 the International Peace Tea Culture Exchange Hall was built and opened to the public, and the same year the museum was granted a provincial civilisation distinction by Zhejiang's cultural heritage administration. Its website, teamuseum.cn, opened in 2004, extending the museum's tea-culture brief to the internet.

The Exhibition Halls

The permanent displays at Shuangfeng are arranged in halls devoted to the main dimensions of tea. Accounts name them as the Hall of Tea History, the Kaleidoscope Hall — devoted to tea types and varieties — the Hall of Tea Properties, the Tea Friendship Hall, the Tea Sets Hall and the Tea Customs Hall; the museum's own zone descriptions group them as spaces covering the history of tea, tea varieties, tea activities, tea-people relationships, tea utensils and tea customs. The permanent Chinese Tea Culture Exhibition at Shuangfeng won one of the national top-ten exhibition awards in 2003. The storyline runs from legend and Lu Yu's Classic of Tea, written around 760, through the dynasties' changing methods of preparing tea, to the display of green gold: the ocean trade of the Ming and Qing dynasties, when tea became an important commodity in Europe. Among the celebrated exhibits is a tea sample nearly 300 years old recovered in connection with the Swedish ship Götheborg, telling the story of Chinese tea crossing the oceans.

The Collection

The museum's collection is the material archive of Chinese tea. Published figures differ by counting method — more than 5,000 collections are claimed in the museum's general introductions, while detailed accounts give 3,865 artifacts — and the categories are consistent across sources: teas and tea samples, tea utensils and teaware, tea-processing tools, tea books, paintings and calligraphy, stamps, and tea stele rubbings. The utensils show how the material culture of tea changed as drinking methods changed, from whisked powdered tea to steeped leaf; the books and rubbings preserve the literature of tea that begins with Lu Yu; and the samples themselves, including centuries-old trade tea, are specimens of the commodity that reshaped global commerce. As a specialist museum, the collection's value lies in its completeness across a single subject rather than in individual treasures, although the teaware includes pieces of national significance.

The Longjing Campus of 2015

In May 2015 the museum opened its second campus, the Longjing area at 268 Wengjiashan, about 1,500 metres in a straight line from Shuangfeng. Together the two sites are given in later accounts as spanning some 122,000 square metres in total, with about 13,000 square metres of building space; the Longjing zone alone is described as 7.7 hectares against Shuangfeng's 4.7. The two campuses divide the museum's story between them: Shuangfeng, taking tea culture as its main thread, tells how tea entered people's lives, while the Longjing campus — the only space in China devoted to displaying tea-garden ecological protection alongside tea culture and interactive experience — offers a panorama of the surrounding tea mountains and the distant West Lake. The campuses are connected by the ancient Qianlong Imperial Road and the scenery of the Eight Views of Longjing, so the walk between them is itself part of the visit.

Longjing Tea and Its Landscape

The museum cannot be understood apart from the tea it sits inside. Longjing, or Dragon Well, tea is a renowned Chinese green tea, ranked first among China's top ten teas in common listings, named after Longjing Village by West Lake, with a history of some 1,200 years. Legend associates its flattened leaf shape with an imperial visit, and its name with a well whose denser water, after rain, shows a sinuous boundary with the lighter rainwater on its surface, supposedly resembling a moving dragon; the best taste, tradition holds, comes from brewing it with water from Hangzhou's Dreaming of the Tiger Spring. The museum's Shuangfeng buildings stand backed by Jiqing Mountain and facing Wulao Peak, surrounded by continuous green tea gardens — the working landscape in which Longjing is picked and pan-fired, and which the Longjing campus's ecological displays interpret. A tea museum elsewhere could only describe this landscape; at Shuangfeng and Wengjiashan, visitors stand in it.

Research, Ceremony and Exchange

From the beginning the museum was intended to be more than an exhibition: its research facilities were meant to make it a foremost authority on tea research in China, and it functions as a research and tea-ceremony centre as well as an exhibition museum. The International Peace Tea Culture Exchange Hall, added in 1998, gave that exchange role a dedicated building. Tea-art training, tea tasting, interactive experiences and tea-ceremony performance are part of the standing programme at both campuses, alongside academic exchange and conferences. This combination — artefact, garden, ceremony and scholarship in one institution — reflects the subject itself: tea in China is simultaneously a crop, a craft, a literature, a medicine-adjacent practice and a social ritual, and the museum is organised so that no one of those dimensions is exhibited without the others.

Recognition and Standing

The museum's national standing has been formalised in stages. It was rated a national second-grade museum in 2009, and in 2020 it was selected among the fourth batch of national first-class museums — the highest grade in China's museum classification — a status also described as making it the only national first-class museum themed on tea and tea culture. Its official Hangzhou government presentation calls it the world's first thematic museum dedicated entirely to tea culture and the largest tea museum in China with the most comprehensive collection of tea utensils. Hangzhou itself styles the city the tea capital, and the museum is its institutional proof. For visitors, practical accounts give opening hours that vary by season, with closure on Mondays, and access by bus to Shuangfeng station — details best confirmed on the museum's official site before a visit.

Two Campuses, One Story

More than three decades after it opened, the China National Tea Museum remains what it was founded to be: the single national institution for a subject that runs through five thousand years of Chinese life, from the legendary discovery of tea through Lu Yu's eighth-century classic to the global trade that carried Chinese tea to Europe and the Longjing hillsides outside its own windows. Its two-campus form, completed in 2015, lets the older Shuangfeng museum-without-walls carry the history and customs of tea while the Longjing campus carries its ecology and landscape. No other museum in China attempts the whole subject, and none could do so from a more fitting address: 88 Longjing Road, in the tea gardens of West Lake, where the drink in the displays is the same drink growing on the hills around the halls.