Morning — Hefang Street and a pharmacy from 1874
Hefang Street runs at the foot of the Wushan ridge and is the most continuous piece of old commercial Hangzhou left: Qing-dynasty shopfronts, a rebuilt street wall, and shops selling fans, scissors, ink and tea. The real subject of the morning, though, is the Hu Qingyu pharmacy museum a few doors along, founded in 1874 by a merchant from Anhui and still recognisable as a working medicine hall, with its counters, drawers, preparation rooms and the courtyard where the firm's own line of medicines was sold. It is a gift to a storyteller: one family, one building, a hundred and fifty years of a city's medical trade, and an archive of ledgers and prescriptions to film.
Late morning — interviews in the field
Teams conduct their first interviews here, and the coaching is on the same two points as always: ask about a specific day rather than a general practice, and let the silence run. A pharmacist who has stood behind the same counter for thirty years will give you a better sentence about the neighbourhood than any official will, provided you do not interrupt. Consent forms are completed before filming; where a subject prefers not to be filmed, the audio interview and a general shot are used instead.
Lunch
Noodles and small dishes in the old quarter, with the teams comparing what they have and what is still missing from their stories.
Afternoon — the Longjing tea slopes
The afternoon goes out of the city to the tea hills behind West Lake, where Longjing tea has been grown for centuries and where the Shifeng peak above the village is the site of the eighteen imperial bushes planted in the Qianlong reign. The story to be filmed here is not the tea ceremony - which every visitor films - but the harvest arithmetic: how much fresh leaf one picker takes in a day, how many kilos of fresh leaf become one kilo of finished tea, what a day's picking is paid, and what happens to the price when the first flush comes in early. A farming family hosts the group; the visit is arranged through our local partner and the specific household is confirmed before departure.
Evening — edit session
Back in the city, teams assemble a three-minute cut and screen it. The critique focuses on what the audience could repeat back: if the subject's occupation and one problem they face did not survive the edit, the edit is the problem rather than the footage. Dinner follows and the evening closes with written notes from the tutor.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
In Hangzhou.
