Liu Kejia, a young and daring tea grower, made a decisive decision to return to his hometown from Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, in the spring of 2018. He established the Hejia Manor Ecological Tea Industry in Tongbai Mountain and contracted the Sanjia Tea Mountain in Hedong Group and Dazhangzhuang Group of Liziyuan Village, Chengwan Town, Tongbai County. He manages 1,126 mu of forest tea, including 580 mu of pure tea. This place is at the junction of Henan and Hubei provinces. The mist shrouds the Shibu Lake along the northern corridor. The mountains are layered with lush forests of pine and oak, providing an ideal environment for planting pure ecological forest tea.
The three forest tea slopes of Liu Kejia's, when seen from an aerial view, are like the smiling faces of three green dolls. Some are exquisitely innocent, some are charmingly naive, and some are romantically lively. Liu Kejia, the tea grower, is determined to focus on the tea in the mountains and pine forests. With the support of his family and relatives and friends, he used all the 3.69 million yuan accumulated from his family's previous business in auto parts and auto repair as the startup capital for his ecological tea garden. He insists on not using pesticides and fertilizers in the forest ecological tea garden. Instead, he uses the nearby weeds as green manure for the tea plants. Although the growth is slow, the quality is reassuring.
He resolutely sold his new Audi Q5 SUV, and then successively sold the two-story commercial shops in Zhengzhou that his partners were once proud of, the residential house in Tongbai County seat, the land plots for the pre-planned auto parts and repair factory, etc., and devoted himself wholeheartedly to the development of the tea industry. He is determined to lead more tea farmers on the path of improving ecological quality and building a prosperous business with healthy brands.
Inspired by Han Tingwang, the leader of the Chengwan Fuling Brick Tea industry, Liu Kejia placed the "chess piece" of Hejia Ecological Manor in the large, medium and small "chessboards" of Chengwan Town, Tongbai County, Nanyang City and Henan Province to measure and make moves. He carefully learned from Han Tingwang's spring green tea, summer and autumn Fuling brick tea and dark tea, from the Yufeng spring green tea and summer black tea of the ten-thousand-mu wild tea mountain in Heiming Temple, from the Tongbai Yuye and Tongbai Maojian made by Zheng Baomian in Shitouzhuang, and from the practical experience of tea grower Liu Hewei in Taohuaya. He boldly blazed a new trail of making green tea in spring and white tea in summer and autumn. They are all tanned with a reddish hue by the mountain wind and sunlight, just like the vigorous, dark green and sturdy tea bushes.
Liu Kejia is sensitive to scientific planning. Combining the characteristics of Chengwan Town, such as its long history of tea production, scattered tea gardens and large areas interspersed with mountains and forests, he began to plan and build an ecological tea industrial planting demonstration base and an ecological tea processing base in early 2021. Benefiting from the strong support of the relevant assistance policies of the Tongbai County Party Committee and the County Government, and with the multiple on-site counseling and assistance from the tea industry service team of the science and technology special commissioners in Nanyang City, all the work has been carried out in an orderly manner. They are concerned about the urgent needs of the tea farmers and provide modern tea production technical services such as ecological tea cultivation, deep processing technology demonstration, low-yield tea garden renovation, three-dimensional planting, comprehensive pest control, formula fertilization, scientific pruning and picking, reasonable tea garden cultivation, ground cover, machine pruning and machine picking for the tea farmers of Hejia Manor.
The tea growers in Chengwan have changed the thousand-year-old convention in Tongbai County of only picking spring tea and not picking summer and autumn tea, which caused a waste of resources. Summer tea has a high yield, and autumn tea has a strong flavor. The summer and autumn white tea made by Liu Kejia has been evaluated by experts. It can remove toxins from the body, soften the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems, nourish the brain, improve mental state and eyesight, and enhance digestion ability. He sent the water quality and soil quality to the provincial professional scientific research institutions for testing. The water contains a relatively high amount of strontium. If one drinks an appropriate amount of strontium-containing white tea daily, it can strengthen bones, promote growth and development, protect the cardiovascular system, and has a good auxiliary effect on sleep.
The soil in Chengwan contains many trace elements such as selenium. Drinking an appropriate amount of selenium-containing tea can improve the human body's immunity, have antioxidant effects, prevent liver cirrhosis, and protect the gastric mucosa.
Chengwan produces green tea, black tea, dark tea, white tea and purple tea, which can be called the rainbow tea of red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue and purple. The white tea of Liu Kejia and the dark tea of Han Tingwang can be called magpie tea, because the feathers of magpies are only black and white, simple, beautiful and generous.
Often drinking dark tea and white tea can make people subtly develop a magpie-like mentality, being optimistic, lively and having active thinking. It can help people have a firm core in the whirlpool of a noisy and busy life and calmly resist pressure. Drinking the "magpie tea" made by Han Tingwang and Liu Kejia more is beneficial. The market potential and the reputation among tea lovers will become more and more promising. Looking at the lush growth of the tea seedlings, the old partners secretly feel happy while working.
The coordinated development of the "Three Teas" takes tea culture as the vanguard, the revitalization of the tea industry as the core, and the strengthening of tea science and technology as the late-blooming driving force. The tea bushes interplanted with forests grow among the pine forests, mixed with the fragrance of pine pollen and all kinds of wildflowers. They hoe the weeds several times a year to use them as green manure to nourish the ecological tea garden. On March 11, 2022, under the enthusiastic leadership of the Science and Technology Bureau of Tongbai County, the tea service team of the science and technology special commissioners in Henan Province, including Li Gang, Secretary of the Party Committee of the College of Life Sciences of Xinyang Normal University, and Yuan Zhengfang, the team leader, and other seven experts went deep into Chengwan Town to carry out scientific and technological services for tea tree selection and seedling cultivation. They presented 10,000 high-quality tea seedlings to Hejia Manor.
Presided over by Ma Bin, Deputy Secretary of the Tongbai County Party Committee and Secretary of the Party Committee of Chengwan Town, the College of Life Sciences of Xinyang Normal University and Nanyang Jia Agriculture and Forestry Technology Co., Ltd. held a signing ceremony for industry-university-research cooperation. The Party Committee of the College of Life Sciences of Xinyang Normal University and the Party Committee of Chengwan Town, Tongbai County held a "Pairing and Co-construction" signing ceremony. The College of Life Sciences of Xinyang Normal University and Chengwan Town, Tongbai County held a strategic cooperation signing ceremony.
The Hejia Ecological Manor cooperated with the School of Biological and Chemical Engineering of Nanyang Institute of Technology to establish the Nanyang Engineering Technology Research Center for Ecological Tea Cultivation and Processing. The tea raw material base has passed 1 organic food certification and 4 green food certifications by relevant national departments, has 11 registered trademark certifications, 2 work copyrights, has applied for 1 invention patent, obtained 5 utility model patents, and has obtained 1 national geographical indication and 2 public regional brand use authorizations. It has held various trainings for more than 500 person-times, creating a profit of more than 16 million yuan for the enterprise.
Over the years, Hejia Ecological Tea Enterprise has attached great importance to science and technology and has been certified as a training and assistance enterprise for the brand certification of "Three Products and One Mark" of e-commerce poverty alleviation products in Henan Province. Seven products of Hejia Manor brand, such as "Tongbai Yuye", have been rated as national 832 consumption poverty alleviation products. Three products of "Hejia Manor" brand, such as Tongbai black tea, have been selected into the catalog of well-known agricultural products brands in Nanyang City, and the enterprise has been rated as a well-known agricultural product production enterprise in the Hanjiang River Basin. "Hejia Manor" Tongbai black tea has been selected into the brand of characteristic agricultural products in Henan Province and the demonstration project of migrant workers returning home to start businesses in Nanyang City. It has won the Excellence Award in the Growth Group of the Nanyang Sub-competition of the "Phoenix Returns to the Central Plains" Returning Home Entrepreneurship Competition, the first place in the comprehensive evaluation of excellent projects of migrant workers returning home to start businesses and helping rural revitalization in Nanyang City, and has been selected into the demonstration project library of returning home to start businesses in Henan Province. "Hejia Manor" Fuling brick tea has been selected into the well-known agricultural products brand in Nanyang City. "Hejia Manor" has been selected into the well-known agricultural enterprise brand at the Nanyang City level, the demonstration base for the display of agricultural science and technology in Nanyang City, the advanced collective of the "Thousand Enterprises Helping Thousand Villages" activity in Nanyang City, the second prize in the Entrepreneurship Group of the Nanyang Competition Area of the Fifth "Yu Chuang Tianxia" Professional Innovation Competition, and the third prize in the Start-up Group of the "Luokai Cup" Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition for High-quality Farmers in Henan Province in 2022.
Drinking the tea of "Hejia Manor" makes people feel the gentle breeze and harmonious atmosphere, and enables them to taste the unique charm of "the gentleman is harmonious but different" and "it smiles among the bushes", and transforms into the truth, goodness and beauty of "harmony brings prosperity". With its good mountains, good water, good sunshine, good clouds and mist, as well as the excellent tea-making skills and tea-related connections they have gathered from all over the country, the tea of Hejia Manor, with its emphasis on harmony, has great market potential.
Outstanding talents come from remote mountains. Although the Hejia Ecological Tea Manor started relatively late, it has the momentum of a new and promising force that can catch up with and surpass others. Its future is very promising.