On July 5, taking advantage of tea culture writer Zhang Xiake's fieldwork in Gannan for his “Rediscovering Gannan Tea” feature and the official launch of the “Gannan High-Mountain Tea” book project, the Xiaobu Chamber of Commerce organised the town's first Tea Industry Development Forum. Yi Shangmei, executive president of the chamber and chairman of “Xiaobu Meiren Tea”; chamber vice president and secretary-general Xiong Beishan; and Xiong Fangwen, general manager of Xiaobuxiang Tea, joined tea company heads, major tea growers and industry practitioners from across the town, together with town mayor Xu Peng and town publicity chief Zhang Qingqing.
Xiaobu Town has a deep tea culture heritage, with more than 300 years of tea-growing and tea-making history, and is widely known as a “tea town”. Tea gardens in the town now cover 12,500 mu. At the forum, representatives of the tea enterprises put forward suggestions on key areas including standardised tea growing, refined processing, brand building, market expansion, tea-tourism integration and cultural empowerment.
Xiong Fangwen, general manager of Xiaobuxiang Tea, set out the company's differentiated approach: drawing on its thousand-mu tea mountain resources to establish a Hangbaiju chrysanthemum project of more than 500 mu, creating an industrial pattern of complementary positioning and mutual benefit. He proposed that the town's tea enterprises abandon the habit of going it alone and instead strengthen resource exchange, information sharing and coordinated action. He also asked the government to continue strengthening industry cultivation, build shared platforms, and step up promotion of the regional “Xiaobu Tea” brand.
The meeting identified six priority measures: forming a tea industry association, creating a professional tea showroom, developing new-media e-commerce, deepening tea-tourism integration, strengthening school-enterprise cooperation, and precisely expanding sales channels. The town government confirmed it would provide targeted support in three areas: talent and technical backing, market and sales channels, and benefit-sharing mechanisms.
(Originally published on the WeChat account of the Ningdu County Xiaobu Town Chamber of Commerce as “Government and Business Unite over Tea, Joining Forces for Revitalization”, July 16, 2026.)
