Experience Chengdu: Private Tea-Making Day Tour of Mengdingshan Tea Plantation

The trip was awesome. I took the chance to combine visiting the Bifengxia Panda Centre in the morning and then afterwards the Mengdingshan Tea Plantation. I was very happy that the operator of this tour made this possible and gave helpful advice on the timing and organization of the trip. Although the tea garden and the panda centre are close time was limited and we had to hurry a bit - yet for me this combination was perfect. Green - my tour operator and translator - was great. She was very friendly, helpful and patient in doing a lot of translation work at the tea plantation. I would clearly recommend this tour. It is a unique experience.

We felt the need to write this review to provide a different perspective. We booked this tour due to all those positive reviews that said this tour had been the highlight of their trips. The different experience could be due to the different tour operation/guide (ours was Victor), though the itineraries are similar. The roundtrip from Chengdu took 4 hrs. The cable car rides took another 20 min each way. There’s not much to see at the top. The tribute tea garden is extremely small and disappointing. I’m still not sure which tea garden exactly was the first tea garden in China. After that, we drove a short distance to a tea farm. There was a lot of sitting around waiting for lunch and chatting with the tea farmer without much translation help from the guide. We looked around the small tea garden a bit, picked a few tea leaves, and watched tea master demonstrated roasting/rolling tea leaves (probably the most interesting part of the tour). The tea master let us try our hands at it a bit. While we had fun here and there, this tour was really not a good use of our time and money. I don’t think it’s worth spending the whole day traveling so far for so little activities. We don’t recommend this Mengding tea tour unless you’re already staying near the mountain (less than 30 min away). We also think that it would be more fun to go by yourself and take a longer hike towards the mountain top. It's not necessary to get a guide.

Our Tea Plantation tour was fantastic! Our English-speaking guide, Jenny, was excellent. She is a Chengdu local so it was fun and informative just to talk to her about the area during our drive to the plantation and at lunch. It was extremely convenient being picked up at our hotel in a very nice car and driven in comfort directly to the tea plantation. The experience there couldn't have been better. We spent two hours picking tea after being instructed on how to do it correctly. It was great to be out in the country away from the crowds of the city in the peaceful farm setting. Following that we were served a delicious Sichuan meal, prepared onsite. In the afternoon we participated in the processing of the tea leaves we had picked and they were then packaged for us to take home. We learned so much and had a great time doing it. We were then driven directly back to our hotel. It was a wonderful day and both agreed that it was our favorite thing we did in Chengdu.