China International Tea Expo – Hangzhou Tea Expo

The Exhibitory Value of the Hangzhou Tea Expo

• The China International Tea Expo is the only national-level specialized exhibition in the global tea industry approved by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Since permanently establishing itself in Hangzhou in 2017, it has successfully convened seven sessions, widely recognized within the industry as the world’s most authoritative, largest-scale, and far-reaching tea event. It serves as a concentrated showcase of China’s tea industry achievements and a central hub for fostering global connectivity in the tea sector. Co-hosted by the former Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and the People’s Government of Zhejiang Province, the expo completed an upgrade to a market-oriented operational mechanism in 2024 and will host its eighth edition in 2026, carrying forward the national mission of advancing high-quality development of China’s tea industry and deepening mutual learning among global tea civilizations.
• The core value of participating lies in its unparalleled national platform status and its role as a global benchmark for tea industry trends. At the seventh edition in 2025, the expo attracted 199,000 visitors, setting a new record for attendance. Six thousand seven hundred thirty-six professional buyers from 25 countries and regions converged in Hangzhou, engaging in 15,710 rounds of professional negotiations. On-site transactions totaled 258.215 tons of tea, worth RMB 288.7 million, while preliminary agreements were reached for 7,365.098 tons, valued at RMB 5.8674 billion. All these figures represent historic breakthroughs, underscoring the expo’s strong momentum as a premier global tea event.
• The expo provides a one-stop commercial platform covering the entire tea industry value chain. With an exhibition space of 60,000 square meters in 2025 and 2,500 standard booths, the expo brings together nearly a thousand traditional tea enterprises and emerging brands. Well-known names such as Zhongcha, Zhejiang Tea Group’s Shifeng, and Lu Zhenghao compete side by side. Exhibits span six major tea categories, along with tea utensils, tea machinery, tea packaging, tea food, and tea technology. As the host venue, the Hangzhou Pavilion showcases local public brands like West Lake Longjing, Jingshan Tea, and Qiandao Lake Tea, alongside derivative products, integrating AI interactions and digital art installations to create immersive tea culture experiences. Robots even appear as “tea artists,” serving tea to visitors, vividly illustrating the innovative synergy between technology and tradition.
• The expo keeps pace with three major industry trends—new tea food, new tea drinks, and tea technology—establishing a showcase for innovative products and cutting-edge concepts. In 2025, the expo introduced a dedicated “New Tea Food & New Tea Drink” thematic zone, where over twenty manufacturers of deeply processed tea foods and new tea drink brands—including Zhiweiguan, Bawang Chaji, and Luyu Pao De Cha—presented跨界 products such as tea snacks, blended beverages, tea-based coffees, and tea ice creams, precisely targeting younger consumers. Jingshan Tea Development Co., Ltd.’s smart matcha machine, using a robotic arm to simulate the Song Dynasty tea-whisking technique, can perfectly recreate the “snow foam and milky blossoms” tea art in just minutes. Meanwhile, the Tea Utensil Aesthetics zone gathered classic pieces like Jingdezhen blue-and-white porcelain and Yixing purple clay teapots alongside avant-garde designs, with intangible cultural heritage masters and a new generation of artisans driving the transformation of traditional techniques through material innovation and functional optimization.
• The expo aligns with the industry strategy of “Three Teas Coordination,” building a technological hub that integrates research, education, production, and application. During the 2025 expo, nearly one hundred distinguished foreign guests from over forty countries, international organizations, and regions visited, bringing together specialty teas and tea cultures from Korea, Laos, Vietnam, India, Bulgaria, Nepal, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran, and other nations, demonstrating diverse tea-making wisdom. Buyers from the United States, Australia, Mexico, Germany, Singapore, and other regions engaged in in-depth tastings and negotiations across various pavilions, resulting in numerous cooperative intentions. The expo also meticulously organized more than fifty high-quality cultural events, including themed forums, a conference for short-video content creators in the tea industry, a Song Dynasty tea-whisking competition, a tea culture book fair accompanied by a Song-style tea market, and a tea beverage bazaar featuring invited master brewers.
• For Chinese enterprises, the expo serves as a strategic gateway to expand into global markets, connect with international resources, and showcase innovative strengths. The eighth edition of the expo in 2026 will kick off from May 21 to 25, adopting for the first time a “one expo, two venues” coordinated layout, held concurrently at the Hangzhou International Expo Center (National Expo Pavilion) and the Hangzhou Tea Expo Convention and Exhibition Center (Longwu Pavilion). The National Expo Pavilion is positioned as a “tea trade extravaganza,” with a planned exhibition area of 60,000 square meters, expected to attract over 1,500 brand enterprises. The Longwu Pavilion, meanwhile, is designated as a “tea innovation window,” with a planned exhibition area of 17,000 square meters, focusing on showcasing living intangible cultural heritage, emerging tea drink trends, and tea-tourism integration. Over thirty countries and regions are anticipated to send brand enterprises, with returning exhibitors from Vietnam, Nepal, Korea, Malaysia, Laos, and others, alongside first-time appearances of specialty teas from Africa, South America, and other emerging producing areas. Participating enterprises can leverage this platform to access global procurement networks and seize opportunities for high-quality development and internationalization in the tea industry.