Vehicles with foreign license plates travel south and north on the Cangzhao Expressway; in Liubao Town, Cangwu County, merchants are often crowded in the China Liubao Tea Trading Center. In the adjacent "First Warehouse of Core Production Area", a 23,000-square-meter warehouse is waiting for 20,000 tons of good tea to be put into the warehouse; not far away, it is difficult to find a B & B room during holidays in Liubao Tea Town.
It is hard to imagine that more than ten years ago, tea farmers here had to climb mountains and ridges to Guangdong to "find a market". This sharp contrast reflects the great changes in Wuzhou Liubao Tea industry.
In late May this year, the International Tea Day China home event landed in Nanning for the first time, and the Guangxi tea industry ushered in a high-profile moment. During the event, one piece of news was impressive: In the map where the comprehensive output value of the entire industry chain of Guangxi's tea industry exceeded 70 billion yuan and the sword pointed to the "100 billion goal", Wuzhou Liubao Tea is undoubtedly the most powerful engine-the brand value reached 9.522 billion yuan, and the comprehensive output value is nearly 30 billion yuan, which has supported nearly half of Guangxi's tea industry.
A blueprint is drawn to the end, and the industry is determined to create a wind outlet.
"In the past, we carried tea to the market, but now the market is chasing tea." Shi Rufei, a representative inheritor of Liubao tea making skills at the autonomous region level and a post-80s generation, experienced this change. More than 10 years ago, although Liubao Tea enjoyed a high reputation among senior tea friends, it was in urgent need of breaking the circle in the mass consumer market. Today, the Heishishan Tea Factory she is in charge of has grown from a small tea factory that only accepted small orders of a few thousand yuan to a complex integrating tea making workshops, tea colleges, B & Bs, and restaurants, with an annual output value of over 10 million yuan. The dealer network is spread all over the country, and high-end single products with a unit price of more than 10,000 yuan are selling well in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou. Shi Rufei's experience is the epitome of the Liubao tea industry's ascent to rapid development.
"The tuyere will not come unexpectedly. It only cares for those who make arrangements in advance." Yu Cuiping, director of the Tea Industry Development Service Center of Wuzhou City, pointed out the key. In 2004, there were only four Liubao tea production enterprises in Wuzhou City, with an annual output of only 831 tons, and the industrial foundation was very weak. In the same year, the domestic black tea category market represented by Pu 'er tea recovered rapidly. Wuzhou City keenly grasped this trend and formulated a strategy to make Liubao tea a key agricultural characteristic industry in the city. Since 2004, the city has successively launched support policies for seedling subsidies and the construction of improved seed breeding bases, taking multiple measures to consolidate the industrial chassis; In 2009, special policies and new industrial plans for the development of Liubao tea industry in Wuzhou City were successively issued, in terms of capital, land use, technology, etc. Continue to increase support for tea garden tea enterprises; In 2015, the "Regulations on the Protection of Liubao Tea Culture in Wuzhou City" was promulgated and implemented to build a unique prefecture-level tea industry development bureau in the country; In 2022, with Guangxi's introduction of a special plan to promote high-quality development of the tea industry at the autonomous region level, it will anchor the creation of a 100 billion tea industry with Liubao tea as the core engine, pressing the "acceleration button" for the development of Wuzhou Liubao tea industry.
It is this determination to "draw a blueprint to the end" that has yielded fruitful results: during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the area of Wuzhou Liubao Tea Garden jumped from 114,100 acres to 402,700 acres, and the comprehensive output value soared from 8.5 billion yuan to nearly 30 billion yuan, an increase of 252.9%, achieving explosive growth.
Technology reshapes genes, and culture lights up the brand
policy is the foundation. Technology and culture are the wings for Wuzhou Liubao tea industry to take off.
"After the company put into use automatic impurity removal equipment, fully automatic stainless steel fermentation tanks, and automated pressed tea and small packaging production lines, key production links such as tea impurity removal, pile fermentation, pressed forming, and finished product packaging have saved a lot of manpower and production efficiency has doubled." In an interview with China Tea Wuzhou Company, Cai Junlin, assistant general manager of the company, proudly pointed to the automated fermentation production line, automated autoclave production line and Liubao tea cellars workshop.
It is not only China Tea Wuzhou Company that has tasted the benefits of technology-empowered development. Guangxi Wuzhou Tea Factory has also developed "hot products" such as pure betel nut aroma products and instant Liubao tea powder by upgrading processing equipment and breakthroughs in process technology. Since its listing in 2022, its cumulative sales have exceeded 150 million yuan; Heishishan Tea Factory has upgraded its traditional production line and standardized picking timing and production standards. The price of its flagship product solar tea has tripled, and the competitiveness of its products has been significantly improved...
The change of the three tea companies is precisely the vivid practice of implementing key technology research and industrialization demonstration projects in Guangxi Liubao Tea's "Eight New and Double Increase" key technologies in the front line. In just three years, this scientific research and technological transformation project led by Liu Zhonghua, an academician of China Academy of Engineering, and linked 38 scientific research units and enterprises to increase the efficiency of traditional process automated production lines by 200 times. Through the digitally controlled intelligent pile-fermentation production line, the pain points of industries such as unstable pile-fermentation quality and large raw material loss of Liubao tea have been significantly improved, and the Liubao tea industry has embarked on a new track of high-quality development.
Technology has given Liubao Tea a standardized body, while culture has given it a premium soul.
With Liubao tea making skills being included in the fourth batch of national intangible cultural heritage representative projects in 2014, it will be included in the UNESCO list as a sub-project of "China Traditional Tea Making Skills and Related Customs" in 2022. In the list of representative works of intangible cultural heritage, the cultural IP of the "Tea Boat Ancient Road" has been completely activated, and the premium and comprehensive value of Wuzhou Liubao tea brand continue to increase. Wuzhou City has taken advantage of the momentum to build a development matrix of "regional public brands + corporate brands." 113 tea companies have been allowed to use special geographical indications, and 52 tea companies have been authorized by certification trademarks, achieving full coverage of tea companies above the regulations. The output value of companies using standards accounts for more than 80% of the total output value of the industry.
In order to further expand the influence of Wuzhou Liubao Tea, in recent years, the city has planned and carried out 34 global marketing activities of the "Ancient Tea Boat Road·New Silk Road", created the Wuzhou Liubao Tea Culture Festival, hosted various tea activities such as the China Black Tea Industry Conference, and linked Malaysia, Laos, Singapore and other countries to carry out various tea cultural exchanges... Wuzhou Liubao Tea is fading from the label of overseas Chinese tea sold as "blooming inside the wall and outside the wall" and has become the "light of domestic goods" with both historical thickness and modern standards.
Breaking through the "deep water zone", jumping out of the "tea industry" and expanding the "tea industry"
tea gardens, expanding the output value, Wuzhou did not lie on the scale of dividends, but started to move towards the "deep water zone" of improving quality, increasing efficiency, and building soul.
Seed industry is the "chip" of agriculture. Focusing on the promotion of improved varieties will lead Wuzhou Liubao Tea to compete in the future high-end market. "After several years of collection, identification and screening, the scientific research team selected the best and selected 7 high-quality new reserve lines. Among them, Wucha No. 10 and Wucha No. 15 were officially authorized by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in October 2024. Currently, more than 30 acres of demonstration planting fields have been established in the experimental base of the institute." Qiu Ruijin, deputy director of the Institute of Agricultural Sciences of Wuzhou City, said that the two new varieties have excellent resistance to diseases, pests, drought and cold. After large-scale promotion, tea yields are expected to more than double that of local native populations. At the same time, the seedling supply side has also accelerated simultaneously. Since 2021, the number of tea nursery bases in the city has increased from 6 to 93, and the nursery area has expanded to 4370 acres, building a complete closed loop from germplasm protection to large-scale seedling breeding.
On the sales side, Wuzhou is accelerating the reconstruction of the connection between people and tea, and online live marketing has become a new battlefield for many tea companies to expand their sales channels. "We don't invite stars in our live broadcast room. We all have front-line employees in workshop production, technology research and development, business operations and other positions who work on their own." Huang Jinda, deputy general manager of Wuzhou Tea Factory in Guangxi, is a member of the live broadcast team in the factory. Relying on practical work experience, he popularizes the "live broadcast" of tea making technology and tea culture, jumps out of the homogenization route of industry traffic and creates a family-style empathic live broadcast room atmosphere has attracted a large number of highly sticky and loyal fans. Since 2023, the company has a total of 500,000 social media fans across its platform, accurately reaching 70% of consumer groups outside the district. Live broadcast rooms have become a new growth engine for the company. From 2024 to 2025, annual online sales will exceed 100 million yuan, breaking the limitation of long-term reliance on offline channels.
Seed industry and e-commerce have activated existing stocks, and Wuzhou has used "tea + cultural tourism + health care" to increase its gold. Standing in a corner of the open-air coffee bar on the top of the mountain in Heishi Liubao Tea Source Expo Park, you can see the 5000-acre tea mountain full of green. This tea tourism complex with a total investment of 2 billion yuan extends the industry from tea making to catering, accommodation and health care. This year's May Day holiday has full passenger flow and has become a place for Internet celebrities to check in. There are more and more projects like this "using tea to lead tourism and using tourism to grow tea" in Wuzhou: a number of landmark projects such as Liubao Tea City, Liubao Town, and Qilou City No. 1 Experience Hall have been completed to welcome visitors. In addition, tea cultural tourism consumption formats such as the Intangible Cultural Heritage Master Tea Brand, tea culture-themed B & Bs, and the "Wuzhou Tea Boat Ancient Road·Xijiang Style Tour" National Rural Tourism Boutique Route are becoming more and more abundant. (Reporter Xie Linlin)