The event venue.
On the morning of November 4, the unveiling ceremony of Sichuan Yacha Holding Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Yacha Group”) was grandly held in Chengdu.
About 300 people jointly witnessed the establishment of Yacha Group, including Zhu Chunxiu, Vice Chairperson of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the CPPCC; Quan Zhengqiu, Director of the Chengdu Office of the People’s Government of the Tibet Autonomous Region; leaders of relevant provincial departments such as the Sichuan Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology, the Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission, the Department of Commerce, and the Local Financial Supervision and Administration Bureau; heads of Sichuan tea industry organizations and tea academies; leaders of industry associations and companies such as Sichuan Shucha Industrial Group Co., Ltd., Zhuyeqing Tea Industry Co., Ltd., and Sichuan Tianfu Longya Co., Ltd.; representatives of well-known Sichuan tea enterprises; and news media. At the event, Liu Zhonghua, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor at Hunan Agricultural University, sent a video congratulation. Li Zhuo, Secretary of the CPC Ya’an Municipal Committee, announced the establishment of Yacha Group and unveiled the plaque.
At the unveiling ceremony, the entire program combined a large background screen with a live performance of the Twenty-Four Musicians and Dancers, creating a storytelling experience that went beyond everyday life, immersing the audience in the tea mountains and letting them feel the unique charm of Yacha tea. A promotional video gave a detailed introduction to Ya’an’s premium tea industry resources — from its geographic location and climate to its long history of tea cultivation — as well as the background and significance of the founding of Yacha Group.
Peng Yingmei, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Ya’an Municipal Committee and Mayor of the Municipal People’s Government, delivers a speech.
In her speech, Peng Yingmei, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Ya’an Municipal Committee and Mayor, pointed out that during the recently concluded 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping noted while joining the Guangxi delegation’s discussion: “The tea industry has great prospects. Going forward, we must build our own brands and make the tea industry bigger and stronger.” In recent years, Ya’an has focused on building a hundred-kilometer, one-million-mu rural revitalization tea industry belt. The city’s tea garden area has remained stable at 1 million mu; in 2021, total tea output reached 109,000 tonnes, with a comprehensive output value exceeding 20 billion yuan. The city has 250,000 tea-related farming households and 650,000 people engaged in tea, and tea farmers’ per capita net income exceeds 8,000 yuan, accounting for more than 50% of per capita disposable income. Today, Yacha Group is officially established. Taking this as an opportunity, we will courageously carry the banner of Sichuan tea revitalization, strive to be the vanguard of refined Sichuan tea, fully promote the overall upgrading of the entire Yacha industry chain, work hard to build “Yacha” into a nationally renowned brand, and strive to achieve leapfrog development from a city rich in tea resources to a city strong in the tea industry.
Wang Yun, Vice President of the China Tea Marketing Association and President of the Sichuan Tea Marketing Association, delivers a speech.
Wang Yun delivered a speech on behalf of the China Tea Marketing Association: The China Tea Marketing Association has long followed the development of Ya’an’s tea industry. In particular, after Ya’an’s border-sale tea was named “Tibetan tea” (Zangcha), it became a continuing focus of attention among dark tea consumers nationwide. This time, Ya’an has invested heavily in establishing Yacha Group, focusing on the Yacha brand and on marketing, which demonstrates the determination and drive of the Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government to break through the prominent shortcomings and main bottlenecks of the Yacha industry with full effort. We hope that Ya’an and Yacha Group will further tap into Yacha’s industrial resources and cultural connotations, accelerate the building of a Yacha model integrating “tea culture, tea industry, and tea technology”, and speed up Yacha’s high-quality development.
Alai, Vice Chairman of the China Writers Association and Chairman of the Sichuan Writers Association, shares at the event.
Alai, Vice Chairman of the China Writers Association and Chairman of the Sichuan Writers Association, shared on site the story and meaning behind the two lines he once wrote: “Returning from Ya’an, one does not savor tea; returning from Mount Meng, one does not speak of tea.” The “Tong Yue” (Contract with a Servant) contains such records: “Slicing fish and stewing turtle, brewing tea with all utensils ready”; “Leading dogs and selling geese, buying tea at Wuyang.” These are the earliest records in China — and in the world — concerning drinking, buying, and growing tea. From this written record we can know that the Sichuan region was the earliest in the world to grow and drink tea; the Wuyang area (present-day Pengshan, Sichuan) was a major tea-producing region and a famous tea market at that time, complementing the tea history and culture of Wu Lizhen of Mount Mengding.
Zhu Chunxiu, Vice Chairperson of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the CPPCC, delivers remarks.
Zhu Chunxiu, Vice Chairperson of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the CPPCC, pointed out in her remarks that the Ya’an Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government’s grand holding of such a ceremony is of great significance for upgrading the province’s tea industry, promoting the revitalization of Sichuan tea, and carrying forward Chinese tea culture. The founding of Yacha Group should be taken as an opportunity to give full play to the capital and talent advantages of state-owned enterprises, drive growing private tea enterprises to become bigger and stronger, promote a favorable pattern in which a large state-owned leader guides and drives many dynamic tea enterprises to develop in competition, achieve win-win sharing and coordinated “single chessboard” development, build Ya’an into a demonstration benchmark where the tea industry promotes rural revitalization, and contribute Ya’an’s strength to the sustainable development of the hundred-billion-yuan Sichuan tea industry.
Reporters from the all-media team of China Cooperative Times · Tea Weekly learned that the newly established Sichuan Yacha Holding Group Co., Ltd. shoulders the mission of coordinating and integrating Ya’an’s tea industry resources. Going forward, in accordance with the principle of “government leadership, enterprise as the main body, and market-based operation”, it will build on strengths and shore up weaknesses, working around the priorities of “stabilizing tea sources, improving quality, building brands, energizing marketing, and pooling synergy”. By “setting standards, building brands, and developing markets”, Yacha Group will be cultivated into a state-owned leading enterprise guiding the high-quality development of the Sichuan tea and Yacha industries, comprehensively enhancing Yacha’s market share, brand influence, and overall development strength, and truly advancing the Yacha industry into a pillar industry that enriches the people and revitalizes the city.
The host of the unveiling ceremony interviews Gu Jin, Party Committee Secretary and Chairman of Yacha Group, on site.
Gu Jin, Chairman of Yacha Group, told reporters that after its establishment, Yacha Group will actively advance the construction of planting bases, accelerate the building of demonstration production lines, build the “Yacha” brand, and carry out multi-channel publicity and promotion. The company aims to have 5,000 mu of self-built planting bases by the end of 2024, and to build more than 50,000 mu of high-quality “Yacha” raw material bases through the “company + cooperative + farmer household” model; within three years, Yacha Group’s comprehensive revenue is to reach 800 million yuan; and by 2026, comprehensive revenue is to exceed 1 billion yuan, making it a first-class enterprise in the province. It is learned that Yacha Group will also open offline Yacha stores, mainly in Chengdu and Lhasa, advancing in parallel under a dual-brand model of the traditional tea brand “Yacha” and the new-style tea drink brand “TKungfu”. The Chengdu “TKungfu” store aims to open to the public in November. The plan is to open five “Yacha” offline sales stores and five new-style tea drink “TKungfu” stores each before the 2023 Spring Festival.
Reporters from the all-media team of China Cooperative Times · Tea Weekly noted that in 2021, Sichuan’s tea industry had already broken through the hundred-billion-yuan mark, with a tea garden area of 6 million mu, ranking third among the country’s tea-producing provinces; tea output of 375,000 tonnes, ranking fourth; and tea exports of 7,600 tonnes, ranking eighth. In recent years, governments at all levels in Sichuan have actively formed large state-owned leading enterprises to enter the tea industry: Yibin established the Sichuan Tea Group (Chuancha Group), Ya’an established Yacha Group, and the Sichuan Provincial Supply and Marketing Cooperative established Shucha Group, which is anchored in the development of the province-wide tea industry. Through the driving role of state-owned leading enterprises, the Sichuan tea industry is being made bigger and stronger as quickly as possible.
Produced by: China Cooperative Times · Tea Weekly All-Media
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Author: Lam Sam (LamSam), the Old Tea Head
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