Hundreds of persimmon trees that should be loaded with yellow fruit lie wilted in Gan Bingdong’s greenhouse in southwestern China, adding to mounting farm losses in a scorching summer that is the country’s driest in six decades.

Gan’s farm south of the industrial metropolis of Chongqing lost half its vegetable crop in heat as high as 41° Celsius and a drought that has shrunk the giant Yangtze river and wilted crops across central China.

Gan’s surviving eggplants are no bigger than strawberries.

A reservoir beside his farm has run dry, forcing him to pump groundwater. “This year’s high temperatures are very annoying,” Gan said.

Drought conditions across a swathe of China from the densely populated east across central farming provinces into eastern Tibet have “significantly increased”, the national weather agency said on Saturday.

The forecast called for high temperatures and no rain for at least three more days from Jiangsu and Anhui provinces northwest of Shanghai to Chongqing and Sichuan provinces.

Local authorities were ordered to “use all available water sources” to supply households and livestock, the weather agency said.

The biggest impact is in Sichuan, where factories have been shut down and offices and shopping malls told to turn off air-conditioning after reservoirs to generate hydropower fell to half their normal levels.

The province gets 80 per cent of its electricity from hydropower dams.