Beijinger for a Day: Hutongs, Chinese Cooking Class and Tea Ceremony Tour
Beijing, China
Trip Type: Cultural Tours
Duration: 8 hours
To experience authentic Beijing life, there is no better way than spending the day in Beijing’s Hutongs, the narrow residential lanes. You’ll visit the hutongs and Bell Towers by rickshaw, visit a local vegetable market, learn how to cook some Chinese food in a beautiful courtyard, and participate in a traditional tea ceremony.
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To experience authentic Beijing life, there is no better way than spending the day in Beijing’s Hutongs, the narrow residential lanes. You’ll visit the hutongs and Bell Towers by rickshaw, visit a local vegetable market, learn how to cook some Chinese food in a beautiful courtyard, and participate in a traditional tea ceremony.
Your morning will start from visiting a local vegetable market, to purchase ingredients for your dumpling cooking class. Your guide will help you in identifying many vegetables you have probably never seen before.
Following the vegetable market visit, your guide will take you to a 100-year-old courtyard, where you will get taught to make traditional Chinese dumplings. There are many special ways to make them, and there is no better place to learn this than in China. You will then be able to taste what you have cooked as lunch!
After lunch you can relax as your rickshaw driver weaves through the ancient narrow lanes, also known as Beijing’s Hutongs. The Hutongs have captured traditional Beijing’s essence, and you will spend time here to have a real look into what the authentic Beijing city life is like for the local Beijingers. In fact, many of the alleys have been around for centuries. The hutongs sometimes look a little bit like a village among in this big city.
Within these hutongs, and lying at the northern end of the imperial axis that passes through the centre of Beijing, the Drum and Bell towers are two of the oldest structures in the city. You’ll visit these after your cooking class. In ancient times they were used to officially mark time, with the bell announcing the start of the day and the drum marking the end of it. Today they are the centre pieces of one of the best-preserved Hutong areas in China. There are traditional Chinese drum performances several times a day and the views of the surrounding Hutong alleyways afforded from the top of either tower are spectacular.
To quench your thirst following the climb up the stairs, you will taste traditional Chinese tea at a tea house inside the Bell Tower. If you thought tea tasting was easy, just watch the intricate processes involved in boiling Chinese tea – a process that differs for each type of tea.
After this , you will be taken back to your hotel.
Your morning will start from visiting a local vegetable market, to purchase ingredients for your dumpling cooking class. Your guide will help you in identifying many vegetables you have probably never seen before.
Following the vegetable market visit, your guide will take you to a 100-year-old courtyard, where you will get taught to make traditional Chinese dumplings. There are many special ways to make them, and there is no better place to learn this than in China. You will then be able to taste what you have cooked as lunch!
After lunch you can relax as your rickshaw driver weaves through the ancient narrow lanes, also known as Beijing’s Hutongs. The Hutongs have captured traditional Beijing’s essence, and you will spend time here to have a real look into what the authentic Beijing city life is like for the local Beijingers. In fact, many of the alleys have been around for centuries. The hutongs sometimes look a little bit like a village among in this big city.
Within these hutongs, and lying at the northern end of the imperial axis that passes through the centre of Beijing, the Drum and Bell towers are two of the oldest structures in the city. You’ll visit these after your cooking class. In ancient times they were used to officially mark time, with the bell announcing the start of the day and the drum marking the end of it. Today they are the centre pieces of one of the best-preserved Hutong areas in China. There are traditional Chinese drum performances several times a day and the views of the surrounding Hutong alleyways afforded from the top of either tower are spectacular.
To quench your thirst following the climb up the stairs, you will taste traditional Chinese tea at a tea house inside the Bell Tower. If you thought tea tasting was easy, just watch the intricate processes involved in boiling Chinese tea – a process that differs for each type of tea.
After this , you will be taken back to your hotel.
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