The weather in Xiamen is said to be generally mild year-round, but it was a rainy day when we visited this southeastern coastal city whose name means “gate of China”. It is ranked as a top port in the country and boasts trade as a main industry, along with large factories of foreign companies, and has what is noted as the most beautiful university in China.
Our first stop was the eerily propagandistic Museum for Ethnic Chinese Abroad, dedicated to those Chinese who left their homeland, some under dire conditions, to achieve fame and fortune overseas, then brought their knowledge and experience back to benefit China. The museum was founded by a prominent local who also displayed his vast collection of ancient artifacts which were indeed beautiful, but left me with a much greater appreciation for our own world class Chinese collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art halfway across the globe.
Next, it was on to the Nanputuo Temple, resplendent in its colorful detailing and peaceful gardens. Built more than a thousand years ago, it contains pagodas, colonnades, temples, and purposefully landscaped pathways that wind up the mountainside to reveal small, meditative sanctuaries. It was interesting to see worshippers performing their solitary prayer rituals, impervious to the throngs of gaping tourists.
China, which is widely recognized as the homeland of tea, takes it’s tea very seriously. The five common tea categories are green, black, white, oolong, and compressed, with many varieties of each depending on where it is grown and how it is processed. Teas, like wines, can have vast and subtle differences from one variety to the next as we discovered when we visited a traditional tea house to learn the process of preparing, drinking, and tasting it. The tea house included a series of rooms, some larger, some smaller, with small chairs or benches and a table where patrons can relax in meditative quiet and drink their tea of choice with ceremonial accompaniment, sipped in small handle-free cups.
Lastly, we stopped at a nearby beach where locals can enjoy the wide stretch of fine sand when the sun shines again.