The municipal government of Lishui in East China's Zhejiang province recently announced that the 13th China (International) Tea Merchants Conference, or Songyang Tea Festival, will be held online due to the novel coronavirus epidemic.

For the first time, the annual event, which will run from March 29 to April 1, will be held in the form of "cloud activities". Themed events such as the Taobao spring tea festival, the 1688 merchants' festival, the Songyang tea auction and tea smart equipment exhibition will be held online.

As early as the Three Kingdoms period (AD 220-280), Songyang county in Lishui has produced tea. Nowadays, tea has become a pillar sector of the agriculture industry and a source of increasing incomes for farmers in Songyang.

Songyang also has the largest green tea trading market in China – South Zhejiang Tea Market. Its trading volume has ranked first of its kind in China for more than 10 years. More than 4,000 tea merchants from around the country operate in the market, which radiates to and drives more than 1.5 million tea farmers' over 670,000 hectares of tea plantations in more than 10 provinces.

To further promote the transformation and upgrading of its tea industry, Songyang has implemented a series of policies to encourage the development of tea e-commerce. In recent years, Songyang tea has shown a surging trend in the fields of an e-commerce platform, live-streaming goods, and short video sales. The development of tea e-commerce has created a good opportunity for rural revitalization and youth entrepreneurship in Sonyang.

According to official data, online retail sales in Songyang reached 2.58 billion yuan ($363.63 million) in 2019, with tea sales accounting for 57.4 percent. To date in 2020, the online tea trade has achieved more than 1.23 million orders, with turnover reaching 200 million yuan.