Dendrobium (Dendrobium officinale Kimura et Migo) is an epiphytic herbaceous plant mainly found in Anhui, Zhejiang, Yunnan, and Fujian provinces in China. The raw stems or processed products are commonly used as Chinese traditional medicine for treatment of cancer, stomach problems, and lowering blood sugar. In May 2019, approximately 60 to 85% of D. officinale plants were found with disease lesions on leaves in a greenhouse in Ningguo city, Anhui Province, China. The symptoms initially appeared as small, circular, brown spots. As disease developed, the center of the lesions was sunken with a dark brown border. To identify the pathogen, 16 symptomatic leaves were cut into pieces (3 × 3 mm), surface sterilized in 0.1% HgCl for 1 min followed by 70% ethanol for 15 s, and rinsed three times with deionized water. The dried tissues were placed on potato dextrose agar (PDA) medium supplemented with cefotaxime sodium salt (150 μg/ml) and then incubated at 28 ± 0.5°C in the dark. Nine fungal colonies with similar morphology consistently emerged from the diseased tissues after 3 to 4 days. Four single-spore isolates were randomly selected for morphological characterization and identification. The isolates showed whitish to pale gray cottony mycelial growth after 7 days of incubation on PDA at 28 ± 0.5°C in dark. Conidia were produced in small orange masses and were mainly cylindrical, colorless, rounded at both ends, 11.3 to 19.1 × 4.2 to 5.8 μm (n = 50), and single celled with one or two oil globules. Appressoria formed on hydrophobic cover glass at 28 ± 0.5°C were medium to dark brown, obovoid to ellipsoid. The morphological characteristics of these isolates were similar to the species belonging to the Colletotrichum gloeosporioides species complex (Cannon et al. 2012; Prihastuti et al. 2009; Weir et al. 2012). To further confirm the fungus, the rDNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region and partial sequences of two genes (ACT, TUB2) were amplified using primers ITS1/ITS4 (White et al. 1990), ACT512F/ACT783R (Carbone and Kohn 1999), and T1/T2 (O’Donnell and Cigelnik 1997), respectively. The resulting sequences for ITS, TUB2, and ACT were identical to each other in different strains, and representative sequences from strain SHCF-3 were submitted to GenBank with accession numbers MN173821, MN175549, and MN175550, respectively. A comparison using the ITS, TUB2, and ACT sequences revealed 99.62, 99.42, and 99.14% homology with the corresponding sequences (accession nos. JX010165, JX010405, and KJ954435) from the ex-epitype culture of C. fructicola (Hyde et al. 2014; Lu et al. 2018). To test pathogenicity, five 6-month-old D. officinale seedlings were sprayed with conidia suspensions (1 × 10⁶ spores/ml) from each of the isolates, respectively. On control plants, only sterilized water was used. Inoculated seedlings were incubated in a moist chamber (relative humidity > 90%) at 28°C. After 14 days, all the leaves from inoculated plants showed anthracnose lesions similar to those observed in greenhouse, whereas control plant leaves were asymptomatic. C. fructicola was reisolated from all the lesions and showed similar morphology to the original isolates, fulfilling Koch’s postulates. C. fructicola is known to cause anthracnose on Citrus sinensis (Hu et al. 2019) and Camellia sinensis (Shi et al. 2018) in China. To our knowledge, this is the first report of C. fructicola causing anthracnose on D. officinale in Anhui Province, China. This new disease may pose a serious threat to D. officinale quality and yield.