"The tea leaves I grew in Dalishan village brought in more than 700,000 yuan ($99,000) this year," said Wang Tianbao.

Wang is a tea farmer in Anji, a county in Zhejiang province renowned for its white tea, while Dalishan is a mountain village in Quzhou, Zhejiang.

In 2014, Wang was encouraged by his friend to rent 230 mu (15.33 hectares) of land in Dalishan to plant yellow and white tea leaves.

Wang helped the villagers in Dalishan and nearby Xijinyuan and Shangxi villages combine their plantations to create a total cultivated area of over 800 mu.

Dalishan is a typical mountain village with 13,299 mu of wooded mountains and only 450 mu of farmland.

Local villagers used to mainly live on bamboo and camellia oleifera. But due to the limited transportation and struggling bamboo market in recent years, it was hard to increase their income.

"I was attracted by the untouched natural environment in Dalishan, and the tea leaves produced here look and smell fantastic," said Wang, adding that Dalishan-grown tea leaves generally sell out within 10 minutes in Anji and are capable of selling at more than 1,000 yuan ($141.48) per kilogram, 200 yuan higher than other tea leaves.

On March 21, Wang started picking this year's tea leaves. He left for Anji to sell them in the early morning and then headed back to Dalishan at around 11 o'clock to continue processing more leaves.

"In 2017, sales revenue was 200,000 yuan; In 2019, it was one million yuan and this year, it's expected to be even higher," noted Wang.

Five years ago, Dalishan villager Wu Guolin decided to learn how to plant tea leaves from Wang after visiting the tea leaf market in Anji with the professional tea farmer.

In addition to encouraging the participation of local villagers in tea growing, Wang also hired local female villagers to pick tea leaves and weed the tea plantation.

Dalishan village now treats tea growing as a poverty relief project. In 2019, the village planted 161 mu of tea leaves, and in March this year it organized village cadres to carry out an investigation in Anji in a bid to prepare for the further development of tea planting.

Wang Tianbao (Left) checks the quality of his yellow tea leaves. [Photo/qz96811.com]