Farmers pick spring tea in Songyang county in Lishui, East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/lsnews.com.cn]

The 13th China (International) Tea Merchants Conference, or Songyang Tea Festival, was held online from March 29 to April 1.

On the first day of the festival, dozens of tea-picking masters from all over the country held a unique tea picking competition in the Damushan tea garden in Songyang. The competition which was broadcast live on CCTV news app, Zhejiang news app and other online platforms, with total viewing numbers surpassing 7.5 million.

Also, more than 370 online shops in Songyang county participated in the event through Taobao (Alibaba's e-commerce platform), 1688.com (Alibaba's B2B trading arm for domestic trade) and other platforms. The 1688.com platform alone had transactions worth more than 26 million yuan ($3.69 million), and more than 5,000 buyers were involved.

Songyang tea shows a surging trend in the fields of e-commerce platforms, live-streaming goods, and short video sales despite the epidemic situation. Official data shows that from January to March, Songyang realized 1.694 million online tea transactions, with a turnover of 247 million yuan, up 48.79 percent year-on-year.

Songyang is a national ecological county with a forest coverage rate of more than 80 percent, an excellent air quality rate of more than 99 percent, and a water qualification rate of 100 percent.

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

Songyang has become the first national green food raw materials (tea) standardized production base in Zhejiang province, and has been awarded the title of "national green tea control technology demonstration zone" for six consecutive years.

As a major tea producing area in Zhejiang and an important tea trading hub in China, Songyang has 8,787 hectares of tea gardens. The total output of tea in 2019 was 15,700 tons, with an output value of 1.58 billion yuan, and the comprehensive output value of the whole industrial chain was up to 12.2 billion yuan.