On June 10, 2026, a delegation of more than 50 overseas Chinese merchants, returned overseas representatives and officials from the Sichuan Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese visited Mingshan District in Yaan, Sichuan, to explore new opportunities in the Mengding Mountain tea industry. The visit was organized under the Belt and Road Overseas Chinese Cooperation and Development Conference, using overseas community networks to build bridges between local tea culture and international markets.
The delegation traveled from Chengdu to Hongxing Town, the first stop of the field study. Walking along tea mountain trails, guests observed standardized, large-scale plantations and the ecological landscape known as the Thousand-Mile Rivers and Mountains tea tourism picture. They watched the Longxing Shiba Shi tea art performance, sat among the hills for an immersive tasting of authentic Mengding Mountain tea, and learned about the region from the perspectives of natural ecology, intangible heritage craft, thousand-year culture and industrial structure.
Visitors praised both the scenery and the tea. Hu Xiaojun, chairman of the US-China Catering Industry Association, said it was a pleasure to visit Qianlijiangshan and taste Mengding Mountain tea, feeling the craftsmanship in every leaf. Wang Shihuang, chairman of the Veneto Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Italy, noted the superior ecology, the livable environment and the outstanding quality of the tea.
Mengding Mountain is recognized as the birthplace of world tea culture. According to local records, the tea ancestor Wu Liren planted tea here during the Western Han dynasty, and the mountain supplied tribute tea for more than a thousand years from the Tang dynasty onward. It is also the southern starting point of the ancient Tea Horse Road, through which tea traveled to Southeast Asia for centuries. Today Yaan forms a complete chain of planting, processing, cultural products and export across roughly one million mu of ecological tea gardens, and Mengding Mountain tea, as a national geographic indication product, keeps expanding into ASEAN and other overseas markets.
PandaTea, an ecological tea brand rooted in the Mengding Mountain core zone, carries this heritage forward. It combines high-altitude ecological cultivation, traditional handcrafted processing and full-chain traceability with cultural storytelling, offering authentic ecological Chinese tea to a global audience. The strong interest from overseas merchants reflects a rising global appetite for ecological and organic tea, and shows how platforms such as the Belt and Road help connect Mengding Mountain tea with international consumers and tea-tourism partners.
From a single leaf to a shared cup across borders, Mengding Mountain tea is writing a new chapter of international exchange, one that lets the world taste the serenity of a panda homeland.
