China Tea Expo 2026

Positioned as The 8th China International Tea Expo, the event is staged in Hangzhou and is designed around practical industry objectives: connecting tea businesses, strengthening trade relationships, and supporting product discovery through concentrated onsite meetings. The official event page highlights Hangzhou’s deep tea heritage and emphasizes that local consumption is strongly associated with green tea, while the expo itself acts as a channel that helps broaden market demand by exposing buyers and consumers to multiple tea styles. For exhibitors and professional visitors, this combination matters because it ties commercial sourcing to a city-level tea ecosystem with established production and consumption patterns, which typically improves the relevance of business conversations and the quality of supplier shortlists formed during the show.

The event narrative is closely connected to how tea categories evolve in the Chinese market: the expo describes its role in introducing different tea types and helping drive rising popularity for white tea, Pu’er tea, and oolong tea alongside the city’s traditional preference for green tea. In business terms, this reflects a clear thematic emphasis on category expansion and market education, which is relevant for importers, wholesalers, and retail chains assessing where demand is forming and how consumer preferences are shifting. For companies planning product lines, the show context supports discussions not only about raw tea sourcing, but also about positioning, storytelling, and portfolio strategy—especially when the objective is to broaden beyond a single dominant category and identify scalable growth segments across multiple tea styles.

As part of the GLOBAL TEA FAIR ecosystem, the event is presented within a platform that focuses on building networks between tea companies and global industry stakeholders. The organizer profile described on the official site underscores long-term engagement with tea businesses, governments of tea production regions, and industry organizations, as well as the continued development of professional forums and events that attract business audiences. For participants, this signals a format intended for commercial exchange rather than purely cultural display: exhibitors can prioritize qualified meetings and channel development, while visitors can use the show to benchmark suppliers, validate product positioning, and accelerate negotiations that would otherwise require dispersed travel across multiple producing regions.

The product focus communicated on the event page is anchored in tea categories that are central to China’s consumption patterns and are increasingly relevant for portfolio diversification. The show references Hangzhou’s long history of tea production and notes that local consumption primarily centers on green tea, while also highlighting the increasing popularity of white tea, Pu’er tea, and oolong tea as the expo introduces a wider range of tea types to the market. For sourcing teams, this provides a pragmatic framework for planning: green tea remains the baseline category for volume and recognition, while the other highlighted categories often represent differentiation strategies—premiumization, aging/collection narratives, and specialty positioning—which can be evaluated through direct supplier conversations and comparative tasting during the exhibition period.

The 2026 edition is hosted at Hangzhou International Expo Center, with the official event page stating a covered area of 70,000 sqm for the exhibition footprint. The venue’s own information lists its location in Qianjiang Century City, Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou, with the address given as 353 Benjing Ave, which is helpful for travel planning, freight coordination, and meeting logistics for teams attending with samples or display materials. Operationally, a venue of this scale supports higher exhibitor density and more structured visitor flow, which typically improves the efficiency of day-by-day meeting schedules and reduces the friction of moving between supplier categories during the show.

The show is presented on the official GLOBAL TEA FAIR website, where HJC Group describes its role in building tea-industry networks and supporting the sector through extensive collaboration with tea companies and institutions, alongside a large calendar of tea forums and events. For exhibitors and professional visitors, this matters because organizer continuity and platform scale often correlate with stronger buyer invitation programs, repeat attendance, and better-structured onsite business services. When assessing participation, it is therefore reasonable to treat the event as part of a broader, recurring tea-trade infrastructure, rather than a one-off local fair, and to align objectives around channel building, sourcing, and category strategy across multiple tea types.