About Fairy Crane Tea 🍃
Fairy Crane Tea is a cultural bridge between Chinese and Western cultures, using tea as a way to explore culture, everyday life, and the ideas that connect us.
Through tea, travel, conversation, and thoughtful learning, we look beyond surface-level information and create space to experience Chinese culture with greater context and understanding.
Our Mission
Our mission is to build a bridge between Chinese culture and Western culture through the principles of tea. This bridge is not built through shortcuts or spectacle, but through careful observation, cultural context, lived experience, and a willingness to sit with complexity.
Tea reminds us that understanding takes time. Culture, like tea, unfolds gradually.
What We Share
Fairy Crane Tea brings together different ways of learning and experiencing culture: tea and culture videos, travel and visual stories, conversations and reflections, blog, and simple practices for everyday life.
Everything we share is shaped by the same question: How can this help someone understand more deeply and connect more thoughtfully?
Why Tea
Tea is not our subject — it is our method.
In tea culture, attention matters. The process is as important as the outcome. Learning happens through repetition, patience, and presence. By applying these principles, we approach culture not as something to consume quickly, but as something to engage with carefully and respectfully.
Meet the Fairy Crane Tea Team
We are your Fairy Crane Tea Team. We are passionate about bridging Chinese culture with Western culture. We want to help people understand beyond the surface level knowledge about Chinese culture and allowing this space to help each person grow in their own unique way. You are welcome in this space and we look forward to communicating with you.
Founder/ Tea & Culture Instructor/ Creative Director
Mitzi Dawn VanderArk/ Li Xiaoying
Dawn is an American from Texas who has lived in China since 2022. A university educator and longtime disciple of Chinese tea and traditional arts, she has spent years learning through study, practice, travel, and everyday life in China.
She founded Fairy Crane Tea in 2025 to create a thoughtful bridge between Chinese and Western cultures. Drawing on both her experience as an educator and her perspective as someone continuing to learn within another culture, Dawn develops Fairy Crane Tea’s courses, guides, conversations, and cultural content.
Her goal is not simply to teach facts about tea or China, but to help people understand the context, meaning, and human experiences behind them.
Visual Story Director/ Operations Director
Lü Daoqing
Daoqing is from Yantai, Shandong Province, and brings a Chinese perspective grounded in the culture and everyday life of the region he calls home.
As Fairy Crane Tea’s Visual Story Director and Operations Director, he works behind the camera to bring China to the audience through cinematography, photography, drone filming, and editing. He also oversees much of the practical work that keeps Fairy Crane Tea moving, from production and equipment to travel logistics and communication in China.
His cultural knowledge and visual perspective help Fairy Crane Tea show more than beautiful places. They help connect what the audience sees with the people, traditions, landscapes, and everyday experiences that give those places meaning.
