Coffee and the great tide: Haining’s 2026 tide-watching season taps diverse spending

In Zhejiang, watching the Qiantang tide is a Mid-Autumn custom for many people. September 27 is the seventeenth day of the eighth lunar month, and the Qiantang River bore arrived as promised.

At the riverside park in old Yancang, a white line stretches across the river surface, with waves rolling white foam along it, rising and falling. Though called a “one-line tide,” it is not a perfectly straight line but somewhat lively — arching here, surging there, yet the formation never breaks, pushing all the way from the south bank to the north bank.

Today the tide head crashed even more violently into the dam body! Spray burst into a sheet of white — “thunder gathers on the sea surface, a waterfall lies across the river’s heart.” At this moment before the dam the thunder is right beside your ear, as if ten thousand bolts were gathering on the sea and the tidal wave stretched across the river’s heart like a waterfall, with an extremely strong visual impact.

Part of the tide continues forward along the dam by inertia, while more of it is forcibly blocked by this 660-metre dam and turns back along the embankment — this is the “returning tide.” The retreating water surges into the bend, and if the tide level and wind direction are right, it will suddenly surface like a whale, thrusting a column of water into the air — this is the “sky-soaring tide.”

Haining, Zhejiang: coffee, the great tide, and a surge of “new trends”

In the 2026 tide-watching season, Haining, Zhejiang has gained another “new trend” — a coffee carnival.

The Qiantang River has its great tide, and coffee has its own trends too. This coffee carnival features more than 300 kinds of coffee. Besides this “tidal coffee,” there are other interesting finds to explore: chilli chocolate coffee, Sichuan peppercorn coffee, five-kernel mooncake coffee, tide-chasing mandarin soda nitro coffee, tide-moon pear coffee, mango sticky rice coffee…

The mandarin soda nitro coffee is very refreshing, and because nitrogen has been added its texture is wonderfully smooth. One of its ingredients, the mandarin, is a local specialty agricultural product. So many distinctive coffees attract plenty of people to check in during the evening.

Here, drinking is not enough — you can also make a cup yourself.

It is understood that in 2026 the local government issued 1.15 million yuan in citywide consumption vouchers, covering 1 million yuan for dining and accommodation and 150,000 yuan for coffee. This coffee carnival is expected to drive 3 million yuan in on-site spending.

(Source: CCTV.com)