Why has the Beijing Tea Expo become a bellwether for tea industry trends?
On April 23, the 6th China International Tea Industry and Tea Art Expo, hosted by the China Agricultural International Cooperation Promotion Association, organized by Beijing Jinggang Global International Exhibition Co., Ltd., and themed "Tea Joy Time - Beautiful Life with Vessels," opened at the National Agricultural Exhibition Center, with nearly 600 tea enterprises from across the country presenting the people of Beijing with a series of elegant tea events that could be tasted, admired and enjoyed.
According to Secretary-General Wei You of the Beijing Tea Expo Organizing Committee, this year's tea expo reflected the trend of close integration of tea and tea vessels with contemporary life, providing a promotion platform for industry exchanges and for tea enterprises to move closer to the mass market. It aimed to integrate consumer groups at different levels, channel popularity and traffic directly to tea enterprises, and while helping tea enterprises upgrade brand sales and development, seek diversified paths for the development of local tea industries. At this year's tea expo, visitors could not only taste on site tea varieties famous at home and abroad such as Guangyuan Micangshan tea, Rizhao green tea, Guicha tea, Yingde black tea, West Lake Longjing tea, ripe Pu'er tea, Changning broken black tea and strip tea, and Wenshan Baozhong tea, but also listen to a drum song and storytelling performance at the Laoshe Teahouse "Small Tea Gathering," admire traditional purely handmade imitation Yuan blue-and-white porcelain and traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting art, and also "tailor-make" a set of 2015 spring/summer new-style tea clothing.
Wei You told reporters that the Beijing Tea Expo has long been known as the "first exhibition of northern spring tea," the first stop for tea enterprises each year to test the market, and has become a bellwether for tea industry trends each year. According to data from the previous edition, among exhibiting visitors, distributors, agents and import-export traders accounted for 54%, and it was expected that the 2015 Beijing Tea Expo would attract more than 30,000 agents, distributors, wholesalers, gift companies, department stores, group buyers and end users to purchase various teas and tea sets.
At the Sichuan Micangshan Tea Industry promotion event held during the expo, feature films, tea art and Sichuan opera performances intuitively showed the audience the tea-growing and tea-drinking history and rich culture of Wangcang, Guangyuan. At the tea banquet tasting, "Guangyuan yellow tea," praised as the "gold among teas," amazed the audience with its unique qualities of "three yellows and three highs" (golden yellow leaf color, tender yellow leaf base, goose-yellow tea soup, and high contents of lutein, carotene and amino acids). Sichuan Micangshan Tea Industry Group Co., Ltd. signed trade agreements on site with 4 tea distributors.
According to Zhang Shanghua, Secretary of the Wangcang County Party Committee, in recent years Wangcang has taken tea as a pillar industry for enriching the people and strengthening the county, with green and organic tea as the main direction, and famous and high-quality selenium-rich green tea and specialty yellow tea as the development focus, promoting breakthrough improvement of the county's tea industry. The hundred-li tea corridor and ten-thousand-hectare tea gardens it has strived to build are layered with fresh green and fragrant for thousands of li, leading farmers onto the road to moderate prosperity through developing the tea industry. In 2014, the county's tea output reached 3,400 tons, generating an output value of 760 million yuan.
Tian Xuesi, member of the Standing Committee of the Guangyuan Municipal Party Committee, disclosed that in the future Guangyuan will persist in taking scientific and technological innovation promotion as the core, industrialized operation as the direction, and specialty brand building as the focus, striving to develop the tea industry into a pillar industry of modern agriculture and an industry that enriches the people and benefits the people. It aims to achieve by 2018 a citywide tea area of 500,000 mu, output of 20,000 tons, and output value of more than 8 billion yuan, build Guangyuan into a strong modern tea city in Sichuan, an important national organic and health tea base, and the country's largest yellow tea production base, cultivate Micangshan tea enterprises into national key industrialized leading enterprises, and build the "Micangshan" trademark into a China Well-Known Trademark.