Guizhou's Tongren sees bright future in its green tea leaves

Green tea has long been the favorite drink in Southwest China's Guizhou province. Now, the region has started to brew something new - matcha, and the sales are burgeoning. The province aims to sell its matcha products to Starbucks, export more products to Japan and further expand the domestic market.

Tongren, a city located in northeast Guizhou, hopes to become a global culture and trade center of matcha, by leveraging its advantages of a subtropical climate, clean air and rich variety of high-quality teas.

So far, Tongren has built special bases of 6,700 hectares and two manufacturing lines of matcha, a finely ground powder of specially grown and processed green tea leaves. Since the establishment of its production lines in May 2018 through the end of last year, they had created matcha output of 200 metric tons, worth 5.6 million yuan ($833,000).