Building on Three Core Dimensions, Deepening the Integration of Tea and Tourism
2026-07-20
According to the recently released 2026 China Matcha Industry Development Report, China’s matcha output exceeded 12,000 tons in 2025, accounting for nearly 70% of the global total. The industry has achieved an average annual compound growth rate of 28.67% over the past five years, fully demonstrating the vigorous development momentum of China’s tea sector. With industrial upgrading, new tea-tourism integration models are accelerating implementation. Localities are actively transforming tea gardens into parks and tea mountains into scenic areas, leveraging high-quality ecological resources and profound tea cultural heritage to steadily convert the “green content” of ecology into the “golden content” of economic development. Deep integration of tea and tourism not only broadens rural employment and income channels, effectively driving the quality improvement of forestry and grassland industries, but also activates the cultural and tourism consumption market, injecting sustained endogenous power into high-quality economic development.
The dual empowerment of cultural heritage inheritance and people’s livelihood development through deepening tea-tourism integration is a vivid practice of promoting rural revitalization through characteristic industries. In the new era, advancing high-quality development of the tea industry must center on three core dimensions: ecology, culture, and people’s prosperity, and focus on the tea-tourism integration track to revitalize the traditional tea industry with new vitality.
Good tea relies on good landscapes; high-quality ecological environments are both the growth foundation of premium tea and the core competitiveness of the tea-tourism industry. Localities are promoting tea-tourism supporting infrastructure, creating business formats such as tea garden trails, natural learning centers, and mountain leisure camps. They always adhere to the bottom line of ecological protection, follow natural development laws, and integrate artificial facilities organically into the mountain landscape, achieving harmonious coexistence between natural landscapes and cultural tourism infrastructure. Ecological quality directly determines tea quality and tourism experience. Localities improve village regulations to standardize tea garden planting management, strictly prohibit illegal pesticide use, and uphold the quality bottom line of “ecological tea and clean tea.” Meanwhile, they vigorously promote green planting models, replacing chemical fertilizers with organic fertilizers and chemical pest control with biological control, strictly controlling agricultural pollution from the source. They optimize the ecological structure of tea mountains, promoting mixed planting of trees, shrubs, and grasses, retaining grass on terraced walls, and leaving trees in tea gardens, continuously improving the tea garden ecosystem and enriching biodiversity. The four-season-distinct tea mountain landscapes effectively enhance tourism experience and extend the consumption chain, making green ecology the distinctive backdrop of tea-tourism integration.
Deepening cultural connotation and adapting to consumption upgrades are key levers for improving the quality and efficiency of tea-tourism integration. Currently, residents’ consumption structure continues to upgrade. In fast-paced life, micro-vacations and emotional consumption focused on leisure healing and scenario-based experiences are rapidly rising, becoming new growth points in the consumption market. Unlike traditional physical consumption, emotional consumption emphasizes spiritual experience and emotional value, precisely meeting the public’s spiritual needs for relaxation and cultivation. Localities break away from the traditional mindset of low-price competition in tea raw materials and shatter the single production attribute of tea gardens. Relying on tea cultural resources, they create immersive experience scenarios, centering on traditional tea customs, tea art, and tea charm, upgrading and renovating tea garden spaces to build immersive consumption scenarios integrating cultural experience, leisure wellness, and aesthetic tasting. Through interactive projects like tea picking and processing, tea art performances, and tea cultural creative experiences, they construct a new business format of “tea + life aesthetics,” allowing tourists to feel the charm of tea culture in immersive experiences. Tea-tourism integration breaks away from the single sightseeing model, achieving an upgrade from product sales to cultural output, allowing a single tea leaf to carry the dual value of cultural heritage inheritance and consumption upgrade.
**People’s prosperity and benefit are the ultimate landing point of tea-tourism integration. Only by improving the farmer-linkage mechanism can the development dividends of the industry be shared by the people. Tea farmers who deeply cultivate tea mountains are familiar with local ecological endowments and proficient in traditional tea planting skills, serving as the main force of tea-tourism integration development. Localities adhere to the development model of “agriculture as the foundation, cultural tourism as the traffic driver,” using tea culture as a bond to link study tours, wellness, cultural creativity, and other diversified formats, opening up channels for converting agricultural resources into cultural tourism economy and ecological economy, and breaking the development dilemma of scattered tea farmers operating independently. Through order-based purchasing, factor equity participation, service linkage, and entrepreneurship incubation, they embed scattered farmers tightly into the entire tea-tourism industrial chain. Relying on the leading role of leading enterprises and professional cooperatives, they innovate development models like “enterprise + platform + farmer” and “internet + tea-tourism,” broadening production and sales channels. Through diverse methods such as tea garden employment, ecological protection, income dividends, and work-for-relief, they drive tea farmers to achieve local employment and stable income increase, allowing the masses to deeply participate in brand construction and share the value-added dividends of the industry. A well-established farmer-linkage mechanism gathers the powerful synergy of government-enterprise-farmer collaborative development, continuously stimulating rural development momentum, and making tea-tourism integration a solid support for promoting comprehensive rural revitalization and consolidating the foundation of common prosperity. (Looking Forward to the New Era)
Edit:WENWEN Responsible editor:LINXUAN
Source:Guangming Online - Guangming Daily
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