Ruiyuan, who was born into a family of medical doctors and is good at practicing tea ceremonies and playing Gu Qin (the oldest Chinese musical instrument) as well as the piano, has been fascinated by Chinese traditional tea culture since childhood inspired by her father. At the age of 14, she chose the name “Tingyu” for her dream teahouse which originates from a romantic scene: “listening to the raindrops falling on the leaves”. Time has passed and the childhood dream has been sealed by the busy life.
Only in 2020 when the pause button was pressed due to the global pandemic, she slowed down and re-examined the meaning of her life. Because of her sincere love for Chinese tea. Ruiyuan created the tea website tingyuteahouse.ch in her spare time, hoping to share China’s thousand-year-old tea culture with Swiss and international friends. It is also through Tingyu Teahouse that she gained a precious friendship and later her business partner, Yalan.
Yalan has been engaged in legal and investment work in China and Switzerland for more than ten years. She is reliable, creative in business, and passionate about making a positive social impact. She highly appreciates the natural way of health preservation from the East which has been applied for thousands of years and believes that life should stay simple and natural in order to achieve harmony between people and nature.
In view of the overwhelming presence of industrialized food products in the market and a wide range of health problems resulting from the modern lifestyle, she envisages creating a business with the mission to advocate the health functions of natural herbs and plants, the knowledge of which has been accumulated over the past two thousand years, and to create nutritious and functional food and drinks out of them to safeguard people’s health.
Ruiyuan and Yalan became friends due to their shared affinity for tea and later decided to found Ben Cao Garden to pursue this mission together.
