China News Service, Yunnan Pu'er, September 17th. Title: The third anniversary of the successful application of Jingmai Mountain as a World Heritage: New scenes "grow" in the ancient tea forest
China News Service reporter Han Shuainan
In early autumn, thousands of acres of ancient tea forests in Jingmai Mountain, Pu'er, Yunnan, are covered with greenery. The ancient villages of the Dai and Bulang ethnic groups are scattered in a patchwork manner, sometimes hidden or visible among the forest sea, clouds and mist. On September 17, 2023, the "Pu'er Jingmai Mountain Ancient Tea Forest Cultural Landscape" was successfully included in the World Heritage List, becoming the world's first tea-themed world cultural heritage.
In three years, this land, which carries thousands of years of tea culture and ecological wisdom, has been iteratively upgraded and "grown" into a new scene while adhering to its traditional roots. The reporter recently followed the online theme promotion activity "Why China·Thousand-Year Tea Ceremony - World Heritage Jingmai Mountain" to explore the new password of thousand-year-old tea.
Next to the ancient iron pot, the aroma of tea has a new expression.
San Wen is a native of Jingmai Mountain, a tea man of the Blang ethnic group. Born in 1988, he followed his elders in the tea forest at the age of three or four, picking tea, frying tea, and kneading tea, which are all family skills. To this day, he still keeps an iron pot and inherits the ancient hand-made tea making skills of Jingmai Mountain.
After Jingmai Mountain was successfully applied for World Heritage status, this remote mountain ancient tea came into public view and changed the production and marketing model of local tea farmers. "In the past, we wholesaled tea to middlemen, with low profits and passive sales." Sanwen said. Now, relying on the popularity of World Heritage, he has opened an ancient tea-making experience project. During the peak tourist season, he can receive up to 40 or 50 tourists in a single day to immerse themselves in the whole process of picking and making tea, which also drives the sales of his own tea products.
Facing foreign tourists, Sanwen also has a new way - using AI translation tools to communicate so that international friends can understand the story of Jingmai Mountain.
Also making tea, tea master Li Dongchun's innovation is even more bold. She breaks the traditional drinking mode of Pu'er tea and explores local specialty ingredients. She combines local ingredients such as tamarind, mango, lemongrass, and tamarillo with raw and cooked Pu'er tea, and innovatively develops special tea drinks such as "Good Morning Jingmai Mountain". Through new techniques such as low-temperature slow cooking and dry ice flavoring, the tea aroma and fruity aroma are combined to weaken the heavy feeling of Pu'er.
"I always feel that Pu'er tea is far away from young people, so I use a special blend to make it easier for them to drink." Li Dongchun said, she also creatively used dry ice to enhance the aroma of tea, allowing guests to smell the aroma first and then taste the tea, turning tea drinking into a five-sense experience.
In the fireworks of the ancient village, nostalgia sprouted new business forms.
With blue-tiled wooden buildings, ancient stone alleys, and the Nuogan Ancient Village on Jingmai Mountain, the traditional stilt-style dwellings of the Dai people have been completely preserved, and the smoke from the kitchen stoves is full of pastoral nostalgia. At the end of 2019, Xianjin, a young Dai man who had worked abroad for many years, returned to his hometown to start a business, witnessing the new look of the ancient village in the three years since it was declared a World Heritage Site.
"In the past, most of the tea raw materials were wholesaled offline in the village. Sales were narrow and profits were difficult. Young people all wanted to go out to work." Xianjin said that in the past three years, the popularity of Jingmai Mountain has continued to rise. With the addition of self-media traffic empowerment, tourists from all over the country have come here. The ancient village has completely bid farewell to its "desertedness". Now she opens her door at eight o'clock in the morning to welcome customers and closes at eight or nine o'clock at night, receiving visitors from all over the world on a regular basis.
The integrated development of culture and tourism benefits the whole village. B&Bs, new tea drinks, cultural and creative spaces, travel photography and other business formats are emerging one after another. Elderly people in villages no longer need to go to the mountains and forests to work. They can increase their income by selling local specialties and making roasted milk tea at their doorsteps. The fireworks of the ancient village and the vitality of the new business formats are symbiotic.
According to statistics, Jingmai Mountain will receive 445,000 tourists in 2024, an increase of 247% compared with before the successful application for World Heritage; it will reach 694,300 tourists in 2025, an increase of 56.27% year-on-year. The tourist reception volume and growth rate rank first in Pu'er City's national 4A tourist attractions, becoming a new engine for regional cultural tourism growth.
Under the thousand-year instruction, the guardian uses the "wisdom eye".
"Care for the tea tree as you care for your own eyes" - the ancient teaching of the ancestors of Jingmai Mountain is still the daily guideline of tea farmers.
The tea farmers in Mangjing Village are afraid of immortals every year, and adhere to the ancient precepts every year. They only harvest fresh leaves in spring and autumn, and let the ancient tea trees rest in winter and summer. "With more tourists, tea sales will be better, but if the ancient tea forests are destroyed, the good times will not last long."
In her view, protecting the ancient tea forest is to protect the long-term livelihood of the family. It is the simple perseverance of thousands of tea farmers that allows the thousand-year-old tea forest to remain luxuriant despite the years.
Protection relies not only on consciousness, but also on systems and technology. According to Pu'er Jingmai Mountain Ancient Tea Forest Protection Management Bureau, in the past three years, the local area has built an intelligent monitoring and early warning platform covering 60 monitoring indicators in 19 categories, including tea culture, ethnic culture, cultural relics diseases, and natural ecology. It integrates 152 high-definition cameras, meteorological monitoring stations, water quality monitoring equipment and other front-end facilities, combined with the "Jingmai Mountain Monitoring Cloud" App used by inspectors and satellite remote sensing, drone aerial photography and other technologies to achieve all-weather protection of the 191 square kilometers of heritage areas and buffer zones.
At the legal level, the "Pu'er City Jingmai Mountain Ancient Tea Forest Cultural Landscape Protection Regulations" and supporting management measures have been promulgated one after another, clarifying the "six prohibitions" code of conduct, and delineating the control boundaries of the core area and buffer zone; each village revised the village regulations and civil covenants, writing forest protection and tea protection into daily life, forming a large-scale protection pattern of "party committee and government leadership, department coordination, and villagers' autonomy".
In the three years since its application as a World Heritage Site, the ancient tea forest cultural landscape heritage protection practice of Jingmai Mountain has been selected as an outstanding example of world heritage contribution to the sustainable development goal of "environment and resilience" due to its outstanding results in ecological governance.
Three years, a blink of an eye. However, in the natural cycle of replacement of new leaves and old branches on ancient tea trees, changes are quietly happening. You see, in the mountains, the old craftsmanship is still flying in the iron pot; in the village, young people have developed new tea business; in the heart, what remains unchanged is the harmonious coexistence between people and green waters and mountains, and the unity and harmony between people. The thousand-year-old tea forest is still the same forest, but the life of the tea mountain is becoming different day by day.
