Crops in the fields turn golden during the harvest autumn season. [Photo:likefar.com]

It was only about four years ago that Yanhe Village in Hubei Province was an anonymous small hamlet dozens of miles from the highway leading to Wudang Mountain, the cradle of Chinese Daoism.

Today, with the newly introduced development strategy of promoting tourism based on the local tea culture, the village has been able to persuade a large number of visitors to take a detour on their way to Mount Wudang.

With a tea-planting area of 1,200 acres, Yanhe Village has designed its tourism services around the local tea plantations and tea-drinking culture. In the village's newly opened tourist center, tourists can watch a traditional tea-serving ceremony performed by locals. They can stay overnight in one of the two-story villas just beside the tourist center.

The most popular activity for visitors to Yanhe is picking tea leaves in the fields with local tea farmers and then observing how they are processed.

Besides offering an authentic tea-culture experience, Yanhe Village also makes for an ideal destination for tourists who crave an idyllic lifestyle. Because the village has neither a large population nor heavy industry, visitors can enjoy the relatively quiet countryside amid farm animals and the routine operations of the tea plantations.

The village is surrounded by a low-rise but lushly forested mountain. It is said to be another place with a profound Daoist origin because of its proximity to Mount Wudang.

The scenery in Yanhe Village varies during the four seasons. While summer is the peak tourist season when visitors come to escape the city heat, autumn is the busiest season for locals when the tea harvest gets under way.