The article provides information on the commercial and social situation of the Chinese trade port of Hankow and a description of the characteristics of the formation of Chinese trade with foreigners in the second half of the nineteenth century. Being already formed as a major trading port of Central China, in the 1860s, Hankow quickly became the most important point of international tea trade. This role was due to the convenient territorial location of Hankow, allowing it, on the one hand, to accumulate tea from neighboring tea producing provinces, and on the other to serve as the starting point of the land tea route to the north – to Russia, and the sea route – to Europe. The first Russian businessmen who arrived in China not only became full-fledged participants in the international tea market, but were also able to intercept the Chinese tea production initiative for their supplies to Russia. Russian merchants were not limited to buying ready-made tea, as was the case earlier in Kyakhta, but taking advantage of the wide opportunities that the Tianjin Treaty in 1858 and the Beijing Treaty of 1860 provided them with, they opened factories in China and bought raw materials for independent tea production. At the same time, British businessmen bought tea already made by Chinese firms in Hankow, without attempting to produce it on their own. As a result, they were forced to follow the Chinese rules of doing business, without being able to change them. The activities of British merchants are presented on the extensive work of a major American researcher of Hankow – William T. Rowe, not previously considered in Russian historiography. Appeal to this source made it possible to compare the approaches to the tea business of the two major powers – main consumers of Chinese tea: the British and Russian empires, and to fully understand the unique position occupied by the Russian merchants in Hankow. The article also discusses in detail the functions and degree of participation in the tea trade of the main representatives of the Chinese market: local tea manufacturing firms, tea brokers and the Tea Guild. Based on the materials presented, the author analyzed the reasons for the formation of two different approaches (Russians and British) to the conduct of the tea business and interaction with Chinese representatives of the industry.