Enter the dragon

Dragons used to terrify the tea farmers and Buddhist monks of Hangzhou, who in former years saw one as the angry architect of a tidal wave that fills the city's Qiantang River with wondrous swells each October.

Nowadays local families hope the area's eponymous Dragon Well Tea, together with a push from the provincial government, will help rescue them from a deepening global recession which tea-makers in the area claim has eaten into their profits by as much as 33 percent.