A sip of matcha soothes the heart
Guizhou Daily reporters Li Zhongdi, Yang Cong
During the National Day holiday, Mr. Shang, a tourist from Henan, visited the Fanjing Matcha Town in Taiping Town, Jiangkou County, Tongren City, Guizhou. A self-described “heavy matcha lover,” he tried matcha oolong and matcha latte, ate matcha pastries and tasted matcha noodles. “The matcha here tastes very pure,” said Mr. Shang.
Jiangkou County sits in the heart of the Wuling Mountains, with low latitude, high elevation and frequent mist — ideal for tea. In 2008 the locality began developing tea cultivation, and in 2017 it joined Guizhou Guicha (Group) Co., Ltd. to launch matcha processing. In 2025 Jiangkou’s matcha output and sales reached 2,500 tonnes, with products exported to 54 countries and regions.
At the end of May this year, Fanjing Matcha Town officially opened its streets as a local matcha distribution hub. Of its 51 merchants, 26 specialize in matcha products. The town gathers many local matcha brands, offering specialties such as matcha craft beer and matcha egg-yolk pastries; the dining zone also serves an exclusive “matcha banquet,” cooking with raw matcha powder into innovations like matcha dumplings, matcha sturgeon and matcha crispy pork. In just three months, Fanjing Matcha Town drew over 400,000 visits and broke 4 million yuan in revenue.
“During the summer rush, the queue for drinks stretched all the way to the street corner,” said Yang Wenjie, a clerk at one matcha beverage shop.
Most visitors to Matcha Town are young people. “For Jiangkou, this is a brand-new breakthrough,” said Yang Fang, head of the tourism division at the county’s Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau. Jiangkou is home to the Fanjing Mountain world natural heritage site, yet “hot on the mountain, cold below” and “too many elderly tourists” had long been headaches for local cultural tourism. Today, riding the pull of the matcha brand, waves of young visitors come seeking tea.
These two years, Jiangkou has seen a wave of new tea-drink shops aimed mainly at young consumers. To date, the county has gathered 96 matcha new-tea enterprises running 189 matcha stores. Meanwhile matcha food and beverage production is booming — 204 matcha foods developed (matcha mooncakes, matcha cookies and more) and 124 matcha drinks launched, including matcha rice wine and matcha coffee.
The same scene plays out at many of Jiangkou’s matcha brand stores. At one local food company’s production and warehousing workshop, packaged matcha craft beer ships nationwide by logistics; many tourists, after trying it in-store, place online orders — in just the week before this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, the company sold over 40,000 units of its matcha craft beer.
“Come to Jiangkou, eat matcha” has become a tea-mediated, all-domain deep-tourism experience linking industry, culture-tourism and livelihoods. Behind this journey stands an industrial foundation of 30,000 mu of standardized matcha raw-material bases and the world’s largest single-unit matcha production workshop. Every sip tourists taste translates concretely into income for local tea farmers and merchants. In the first eight months of this year, Jiangkou’s matcha output and sales reached 2,750 tonnes with output value above 550 million yuan, up 83.3% year on year, cumulatively lifting more than 8,600 tea-farming households to stable income gains.
A cup of coffee scents the whole city
Suzhou Daily reporters Zhu Xinguo, Zhan Zhangsun
On October 5, at a coffee shop on the lakeside boulevard of Dianshan Lake in Kunshan, Jiangsu, many cycling enthusiasts sipped coffee and rested — the spot has become a viral check-in point for cyclists across the Yangtze River Delta.
At the end of September, the 2026 International (Kunshan) Specialty Coffee Exhibition was held in Kunshan, with over 230 quality brands from 21 countries and regions on show.
Shanghai visitors Yu Chun and Wang Jie are coffee lovers; in the morning they toured the exhibition and bought plenty of specialty beans and coffee concentrate. Then they took the subway straight to a café on Nanhou Street — a “coffee check-in spot” they had been “planted” (recommended) online.
The café sits inside a nearly century-old residence, with white walls and dark tiles, antique and elegant. In mid-September the old house reopened in a “coffee space + cultural experience” format; since trial operation, about 40% of visitors have been from out of town.
Statistics show that 2 of every 3 cups of coffee nationwide are roasted from beans processed in Kunshan. More than 40 of the world’s top coffee brands have rooted here, and over 1,000 cafés dot the city.
The coffee aroma also drifts to the countryside. At a guesthouse in Jijiadun Village, Jinxi Town, Kunshan, a coffee machine hums. Sun Xiang, the guesthouse’s manager, was once an orthopedic doctor in Shanghai; on his first visit to Jijiadun with his wife, he was captivated and later settled down as a “new villager.”
Leveraging Kunshan’s southern water-town advantage, Jinxi Town attracts young talent back to start businesses, exploring “coffee + guesthouse,” “coffee + ancient town” and “coffee + performance” models of farm-cultural-tourism integration, forming more than 70 varied “village cafés.”
Tiny coffee beans string together a complete industrial chain in Kunshan. In 2026 Kunshan’s coffee-roasting capacity rose to 200,000 tonnes, with 150,000 tonnes of warehousing laid out in parallel. At the Asia-Pacific green-coffee distribution center in Kunshan Comprehensive Bonded Zone, neatly stacked green beans come from over 30 countries and regions including Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania.
Shao Zhiqiang, deputy director of the Kunshan Comprehensive Bonded Zone Administration, explained the cluster effect of Kunshan’s coffee chain — local supporting rate exceeds 90%, with green-bean trade, platform trading, R&D roasting and brand sales all connected; within a half-hour drive you can gather every enterprise from green bean to finished coffee.
In 2025 Kunshan’s coffee industry revenue exceeded 10 billion yuan. Around the “coffee+” theme, Kunshan has built signature carriers such as a coffee-industry creative center and a coffee museum. This March, the Kunshan Coffee Industry College was established, with its first 50 full-time order-class students enrolled, planning to train over 300 professionals a year.
Small coffee carries big culture-tourism: anchored on coffee, Kunshan has found its own development path amid the culture-tourism integration wave. In 2025 Kunshan received 28.025 million visitors, up 16% from the previous year.
People’s Daily (October 8, 2026, edition 10)
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