A tea garden in Huangshan. [Photo/Huangshan Daily]
As a major tea production base, Huangshan has been improving legislation to promote the development of the tea industry.
The recently approved Huangshan City Traditional Famous Tea Protection Regulations are set to come into effect on Jan 1, 2025. Consisting of 26 articles, the regulations focus on defining traditional famous teas, promoting tea culture, and safeguarding tea brands.
In recent years, the city has prioritized the development of the tea industry chain to bolster the income of tea farmers, improve operational efficiency for tea enterprises, and foster prosperity in tea-growing regions. Despite this progress, challenges such as inadequate resource protection, lack of production standardization, and persistent issues related to counterfeit Huangshan traditional teas persist. Therefore, the establishment of the regulations holds considerable significance.
The regulations specifically identify teas such as Huangshan Maofeng, Qimen Black Tea, and Taiping Houkui, whose production techniques are listed in the "Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity" as "traditional famous teas".
Additionally, the regulations outline provisions for the promotion of tea culture promotion, preservation of historical sites, inheritance of intangible cultural heritage, talent cultivation, and more.
For instance, they encourage promoting and displaying tea culture in historic and cultural districts, exhibition halls, hotels, and other venues. Additionally, they call for the investigation and registration of historically significant tea gardens, tea paths, tea monuments, tea factories, and tea houses to establish a protection directory. The regulations also support representative heritage bearers in apprenticeship, inheritance, dissemination, and innovative development.
To strengthen the construction and protection of Huangshan's traditional famous tea brands, the regulations introduce a system for the exclusive identification of Huangshan traditional famous teas. This system mandates placing special identifiers for Huangshan's traditional famous teas on the packaging.
Leveraging the Huangshan traditional tea digital management platform, the regulations aim to digitize and trace the entire process of planting, harvesting, processing, packaging, and selling traditional teas. This digitalization is set to provide consumers with more product information and services, including details on the year of production, origin, tea tree varieties, and fresh leaf harvesting and processing.
Taiping Houkui, a famous tea of Huangshan. [Photo/Huangshan Daily]