Leshan Giant Buddha Tour: Boat View, Old Town & Tea Farm

The cliff stair gives you his face and a two-hour queue. The boat gives you the whole figure at once — the proportions, the scale of the ears, the way he is set into the cliff at the meeting of three rivers. We take the boat. Climbing the Buddha is deliberately not in this day.

Three workshops on one street, and all three are working businesses rather than displays. The forge with its wall of tools. The bamboo shop where the baskets are stacked to the ceiling. And a barber's with a straight razor and a queue of regulars, which is the one that surprises people most.

You take tea in the town's old teahouse first, which is where the conversations start. Then you go into one of the hundred-year-old courtyard houses — not a museum, a home, whose owner is proud of it and would rather explain it to you than have someone else do it. Lunch is local and in the town.

The farmer walks you into the rows and explains what he is actually looking for — which sprout, which bud, why this week and not next, how weather and region change what the same plant produces. Then you pick, badly at first, into a basket. It is harder to do well than it looks and that is the point of doing it.

The family that runs this as a business shows you how the different teas are actually made — the same leaf becoming different things depending on what is done to it and when. Then you get your hands over the wok. There is no thermometer anywhere in the building.

You sit down outside the farmhouse and drink through what has been made. The family's own comparison is to wine: there are cabernets and pinots in tea too, and once someone puts three cups in front of you the argument makes itself. This is the part of the day that runs long, and nobody minds.