Beyond scenic tea tourism: Reframing therapeutic experience through enabling places

Abstract

This study conceptualizes therapeutic experience in tea tourism as relationally assembled through material, social, and affective enabling resources. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory study conducted in Wuyishan, China, we identify nine enabling resources and three enabling mechanisms: heterogeneous resource assemblage and placeness emergence, cultural storytelling and symbolic meaning-making, and embodied engagement and interbeing. These mechanisms progressively develop relational agency by connecting tourists with tea plants, local actors, cultural practices, and ecological environments. In particular, plant–human relational agency emerges through reciprocal processes of affecting and being affected by tea plants, moving beyond detached observation toward sensing, responding to, and being-with tea. This relational agency underpins therapeutic capacities, which give rise to therapeutic effects manifested as emotional restoration, reflective transformation, and self-transcendence. By adopting an enabling place perspective, this study advances understanding of how therapeutic experiences are relationally assembled in tourism and offers practical implications for designing healing-oriented tea tourism experiences.