'Hot Pepper City' producing hotter peppers

Wucheng, a county known as the "Hot Pepper City" in Shandong province, has more than a hundred years of hot pepper planting history. At its peak, 300,000 mu (20,000 hectares) of hot peppers were planted in the city.

In the late 1990s, it gradually formed the largest hot pepper trading market in the northern area of the Yangtze River. In 2002, Wucheng was named the "Hometown of Hot Pepper" and the "First City of Hot Pepper in China" by the Ministry of Agriculture. Meanwhile, "Wucheng hot pepper" has been identified as a geographical indication agricultural product by the ministry.

With the development of the hot pepper industry, Wucheng has gradually developed from a hot pepper planting and trading hub to a production and processing center, and formed a hot pepper industry cluster with Zhongjiao Yingchao Hot Pepper Industry Development Co at the core.

Yingchao pepper price index has even been viewed as the only price index in the national hot pepper industry, covering 19 varieties of hot peppers in 12 professional markets in 8 provinces, becoming the "weather vane" and "barometer" of the price of hot pepper in the north area of the Yangtze River.

In recent years, the construction of a "hot pepper signature town" has brought vitality to Wucheng. With the county as the core, a modern industrial cluster pattern, with one national, one provincial and two municipal agricultural enterprises as the leading, 54 key enterprises as the support and 84 new business entities as the supplement, has been formed.