Some did not need to be sold.

A tea farmer in Meijiawu area.

"I got addicted to Longjingcha here," says 26-year-old Guillermo Garcia of Mexico, who first visited several years ago as an exchange student.

"Lipton tea in a bag is so disgusting, but the Chinese tea with all the floating tea leaves is so refreshing. And Longjingcha just feels (like it is of) higher quality than the other Chinese varieties."

Despite several people begging for a coffee after lunch to stay fresh for the packed itinerary, which included a mesmerizing show by House of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou, others were newly converted.

"Green tea is for making the wrinkles disappear," says English teacher Sarah Barnett, 36, of Britain. "I might start drinking it every day, especially because of the anti-cancer benefits. I've noticed all the taxi drivers drink it in Shanghai."

Zhu and all his neighbors are banking on the success of the latest promotional push. The families, often made of 10 or more people, used to make an average of 12,000 yuan a month, he says. Now the amount they have to divvy up is closer to 8,000 yuan.

While this is hardly devastating by rural Chinese standards, it is paltry compared to what many of their neighbors earn in Shanghai.

One local farmer suggested people may be bending the rules to beat the financial crunch.

"I think people are harvesting more fields now than they did before," says one female farmer in her 50s, who declined to give her name.

The farming area is strictly limited to 3,000 acres, says Mao, who calculated that the city's 500 farming families can produce about 75,000 kg of Longjingcha a year.

This adds up to a local industry worth anywhere between 30 and 60 million yuan a year, he says, depending on whether farmers sell to local buyers or trade among themselves at market.

Mao says it is proving difficult to establish the Hangzhou version of the tea as China's original brand given stiff competition from rival green teas, counterfeiters and local legislature outlawing the expansion of arable land to protect the city's heritage.

A tea farmer in Meijiawu area. Matt Hodges

Yet locals are in no rush to urbanize Meijiawu, a plush green paradise that, along with the expansive West Lake, still attracts tourist bucks to the Zhejiang provincial capital, itself the former summer retreat of Chinese emperors.

"We don't want to become a commercial center like Hong Kong, where the only thing people do is shop," says tour guide Lu Ping, 32.

She says that cutting, drying and distributing tea is a way of life that people here do not want to change. The special climate and landscape gives Hangzhou's special blend a unique taste, she adds.

"Here we don't say 'Let's drink a cup of tea'.' We say, 'Let's eat a cup of tea,' because the leaves are so fresh you can chew them while you sip," she says.

With the annual Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwujie) on the horizon next month, Huangzhou could not have timed things better.

Dragon is ingrained in the city: on fountainheads, plastered throughout its 100-odd tea shops and weaving magically in the air in the form of kite-tails over "Heartbreak Bridge" at the area's famous West Lake.

"This could become the emblematic Chinese tea," says Garcia. "I mean, maybe somewhere hidden in the mountains you can make a better tea, but no one has found it yet."