Across the country’s premier tea region, a punishing chain of drought, frost, hail, heat, and snow wiped out crops, leaving workers and growers struggling to salvage what little the season had left to give.
ZHEJIANG, East China — In the hills above Hangzhou’s West Lake, tea pickers moved slowly through the fog, clad in padded jackets, bamboo hats tilted low, wicker baskets brushing against their backs.
Down in Meijiawu Village, three women lingered in street clothes, watching the familiar ritual carry on without them.
“There weren’t enough fresh leaves for us to pick, so our boss gave us the day off,” says 67-year-old Xu Bangran, from neighboring Anhui province, who has returned to Meijiawu every spring since 2000.
By this time in past seasons, she would have worked at least 20 days straight without a break. This year, by early April, she’s already been benched for five days, all without pay.
A sweeping view of Meijiawu, a core tea-producing village near Hangzhou’s West Lake, Zhejiang.
Every spring, Zhejiang draws in more than 800,000 seasonal workers — most of them older women from inland provinces like Anhui, Jiangxi, and Henan — to hand-pick the delicate tea buds that mark the start of the harvest.
The work is fast, exacting, and tightly tied to just the few weeks around Qingming, or Tomb-sweeping Day each year, when the youngest shoots fetch the highest prices.
This is peak season for Longjing or “Dragon Well” green tea — one of China’s most storied and nicknamed “green gold” for its value and prestige. Beyond taste, its reputation comes from centuries of imperial tribute, labor-intensive hand-roasting, and tightly controlled production in core areas like Meijiawu.
But this year, that narrow harvest window unraveled. A string of extreme weather events — drought, frost, hail, snow, even a freak March heatwave — scorched fields, stunted growth, and wiped out entire crops.
Migrant tea pickers who once relied on a single month of picking to earn half a year’s income are heading home early. For many, this may be their last season. And for some of China’s most iconic teas, the spring of 2025 is already being remembered as one of the worst in decades.
Across China, 2024 brought a wave of extreme weather: record-breaking heat, more than 20 major floods, and at least six typhoons that shattered historical patterns. Experts warn that such events are becoming more frequent and more destructive, posing growing risks to rural industries and seasonal labor.
A villager dries freshly picked tea leaves outside his store in Meijiawu.
For Zhejiang, the stakes are high. One of China’s top tea-producing provinces, it reported more than 217,000 hectares of tea plantations last year, generating over 30 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) in output. It also led the country in both tea export volume and value.
Now, with yields down in key areas, industry insiders say prices for premium teas like Longjing are surging, while smaller producers and sellers face missing out on their most lucrative weeks of the year.
While some farmers are still holding out hope for a second flush, many are already adjusting for the seasons ahead. That includes shifting toward cold-resistant tea varieties, diversifying harvest cycles, and investing in protective tools like windbreaks, frost fans, and early warning weather systems.
Others are enrolling in pilot insurance programs that compensate for weather-related crop loss. But as one agricultural official put it: even with all this in place, tea farming in Zhejiang remains “largely at the mercy of the weather.”
Triple punch
By early April, the season was already falling apart. On the eve of the Qingming, 15 of the 20 migrant tea pickers at Zhu Xiaoqing’s family fields in Meijiawu packed their bags. At dawn, they boarded a bus home.
“My neighbors also began settling wages early and sending pickers home,” the 40-year-old tells Sixth Tone. In a normal year, they’d harvest around 250 kilograms of tea. This spring, they’re struggling to reach 200.
“Qingming used to be the liveliest time in the tea mountains. Some could earn over 5,000 yuan after working more than 20 days. But this year, they’re leaving with only around 2,000 yuan, even after extra tips.”
Bus loads of tourists arrive at a tea garden along the main road near West Lake in Hangzhou.
Xu Bangran nearly boarded the same bus. But her boss asked her to stay, to wait a few more days for the next flush of shoots from the older trees higher up the slope. “I suppose this will be my final year of tea picking,” she rued. “I won’t be coming again next spring.”
This, after all, was no ordinary season.
“The whole mess started last winter,” says Luo Liewan, secretary general of the Zhejiang Tea Industry Association. From there, the season lurched through a chain of extremes — drought, frost, heat, snow, even record winds — each wave hitting before the last could be absorbed.
In January, a winter drought settled over Zhejiang. In some areas, it didn’t rain for 40 straight days. Rainfall for the month was more than 70% below average.
Then in February a sudden cold snap hit — three days of dry wind and freezing air. Early buds, already fragile from drought, were scorched. The damage delayed harvests across the board by up to 10 days, throwing the spring schedule into chaos.
Zhu Xiaoqing and her mother, Yang Meihe, weigh dried tea leaves at their home in Meijiawu.
By March the frost had returned, lasting far longer than normal and hit lowland plantations hardest. Then came a freak heatwave: 35 degrees Celsius at the end of the month, a spike rarely seen in local records. Just as quickly, temperatures crashed and it snowed in the mountains. Buds that had survived the frost and heat were now blackened by cold.
In April the winds arrived, with gusts topping 100 kilometers per hour (63 mph) tearing through southern Zhejiang, followed by hailstorms that stripped the last leaves off the branches. In the high mountain gardens, even the freshest shoots curled and dried on the stem.
And yet, not all was lost. The teas that survived tell a different story.
According to Luo, the remaining buds developed sharper aromas — floral, grassy, incredibly fresh — and a richer, sweeter flavor with deeper umami.
“The tea is thicker, more aromatic, and lingers beautifully on the palate. It could be the best tea I’ve tasted in a decade,” he says. Then, with a laugh, adds, “Of course, what I taste may be limited. I tend to get access to the best of the best.”
Eye of the storm
As the heat bore down on Meijiawu in late March, the leaves still had to be picked. And the pressure was only just beginning.
Tea leaves are picked in the fields.
At Zhu Xiaoqing’s fields, the flush arrived almost overnight. One day, the bushes still looked stunned from the cold. The next, tender new shoots were bursting out faster than anyone could keep up.
Within hours, Zhu was calling in extra help from nearby homes. By noon, her crew had nearly doubled to 43 people. Meals were rushed, baskets ran out. “We even had to share,” her mother Yang Meihe recalled. “There just wasn't enough to go around.”
Over the next week, they toiled under a blazing sun that felt like midsummer, only to be caught days later in a freezing downpour. Yet with fingers numb, they carefully harvested the tender “two leaves and a bud” — the ideal pluck in high-end green tea, prized for its delicacy and flavor.
There was no time to return to the dorms for lunch. Pickers stayed on the mountainside all day, crouched among the bushes with their baskets at their feet, eating quickly between rounds. Even drinking water took calculation. One picker, Xu Xiaoying, sipped sparingly from a pink bottle her daughter had given her — bathroom breaks on the slope were a luxury.
Xu Xiaoying holds a pink water bottle gifted by her daughter, which she carries during long days in the fields.
Fang Xuanke, the only man in the group and the field’s facility manager, took charge of the mountain run. Before noon, he collected the freshly picked leaves, packed them into a basket, and carried them down the winding trail for weighing and drying. Then, balancing dozens of lunch boxes on a bamboo pole, he climbed back up to deliver the meals.
He made the trip four times a day — 20 to 40 minutes each way, all while ensuring the freshest leaves made it back in time for immediate drying.
Back at the house, Zhu’s father was racing the clock too. Longjing tea needs to be dried and roasted the same day it’s picked. Any delay, and the flavor begins to fade.
Even with nine extra roasting machines borrowed from neighbors, the work didn’t stop until 2 a.m. That’s when he finally allowed himself a few hours of rest.
By the time the rain set in, the temperature had dropped again. Pickers bundled up in their thickest layers — down vests under cotton jackets, topped with dark green raincoats. They trudged along muddy paths in rain boots, stepping into the footprints of the person ahead to avoid slipping.
Pickers return from a mountain tea garden, emptying their baskets of freshly picked leaves into a container in Meijiawu Village, Zhejiang.
“It’s cold, really cold,” says Zhang Qingzhi, a 62-year-old picker from Jiangxi province. “But tea trees change quickly on rainy days, so we have to hurry.”
But Fang actually worries more about rain than heat. “I heard rain-soaked leaves don’t taste as good,” he says, then shrugs. “But I probably couldn’t tell the difference.”
They come anyway
By sunset, the pickers began to drift back from the fields to end a tightly choreographed routine.
Xu Xiaoying, 54, unrolls the cuffs of her pants, still damp from the rain, and a few stray tea leaves tumble to the ground. She sets two pots over a firewood stove — one for noodles, the other for boiling water so everyone can wash their hands and feet.
Dinner is simple, but always hot. Most of the women in the dorm are from Jiangxi and prefer their food spicy, so the menu leans that way. Their dormitory sits on the second floor of a side building in Zhu’s village home courtyard — a roughly 30-square-meter room with a double-layered bunk bed that stretches wall to wall. Each level sleeps 10 women, shoulder to shoulder.
Xu Xiaoying prepares a meal for fellow tea pickers.
At Zhu Xiaoqing’s home in Meijiawu, tea pickers gather for a simple noodle dinner after a long day in the fields.
Most migrant tea pickers earn between 180 and 200 yuan a day, depending on the region. In Meijiawu, where Zhu’s tea field is located, the rate is fixed at 180. It’s less than what local pickers make — around 250 yuan for shorter hours — but few of the migrants complain. At their age, they say, they’ve already slowed down. And the work, while demanding, still feels more familiar than anything else on offer.
“At this age, unless someone personally brings you into a factory job, it’s nearly impossible to get in,” says Fang.
Xu Xiaoying agrees. “The factories don’t want us, and there’s not much farmland back home,” she says. “So we come here to earn a little for our retirement. I feel like I am traveling.”
And if tea is to remain a lifeline for women like Xu, the farms they return to each spring will need to keep changing.
Across Zhejiang, farmers are adjusting how — and what — they grow. Many are moving away from early-maturing varieties, which are more vulnerable to late frosts, and planting a strategic mix of early-, mid-, and late-season teas to spread out the risk.
“In the past, we focused heavily on early-maturing types,” says Luo. “Now, more farmers are planting later varieties. They’re more resilient, and often have richer aromas.”
A dormitory for tea pickers, where migrant workers sleep shoulder to shoulder.
During an off-day, tea pickers wash their clothes at a communal village well.
Bamboo baskets hang in the courtyard of Zhu Xiaoqing’s home in Meijiawu, ready for the next round of picking.
A corner of a villager’s home in Meijiawu.
Tea pickers walk through Meijiawu with bamboo baskets.
A delivery vehicle stops along the village road to collect tea leaves from local producers.
A group of tea pickers takes a break before heading to the next tea garden.
Some are also reinforcing their fields with windbreaks, buffer zones, and protective nets to guard against frost and hail. Others are investing in frost fans — once rare in China, but now gaining ground despite their cost — or even deploying urban spray vehicles to blunt the cold. Digital forecasting tools and insurance pilots are also being introduced to help offset losses.
Still, as Luo puts it, “Even with all these strategies, tea farmers are still largely at the mercy of the weather.”
Yet, for most workers that risk has simply become part of the job.
Xu Donghua, Xu Xiaoying’s childhood best friend, began picking tea a decade ago after splitting households with her in-laws and learning to support herself. A childhood fever had left the 52-year-old with lingering cognitive impairments. But her hands move with quiet certainty, brushing steadily through the tea bushes.
She keeps mostly to herself, and rarely speaks. But on the eve of their departure back home, Xu Donghua stepped into the spotlight. That night, the women from the Jiangxi dorm staged a mock wedding, reenacting in dialect an old ceremony from back home called “crying for marriage.”
Tea pickers and tourists greet each other across the road, filming the encounter on their phones.
Donghua stood inside a bamboo grain-drying basin, playing the bride. Someone tied a red plastic bag into a bow and placed it on her head like a veil. The room roared in laughter so loud that someone downstairs eventually complained.
Grinning, Xu Xiaoying pulls out her phone and uploads four clips to her feed on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, where she documents her life as a tea picker. One comment reads: “Xiaoying, you are traveling again.”
That was the plan. A gig in Fujian province was next, further down south. Another year, another field, another harvest around the corner.
Editor: Apurva.
(Header image: Migrant tea pickers make their way up a mountain garden in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, April 2025. All photos by Chen Yiru)
