Young people start businesses in Mt. Jingmai

Making facial masks and essential oil from tea leaves, running Bed&Breakfast hotel beside the tea garden, and filming for Mt. Jingmai, 29-year-old Bulang man Yan Kan is a local of Lancang and Lahu autonomous county of Pu’er city, southwest Yunnan province. After graduating from Minzu University of China in 2013, Yan came back home with new ideas as the first young man in his village achieving education in Beijing.

Yan worked with the elder locals and experts home and abroad to study the stories of Mt. Jingmai, the history and legends here, and the animals and plants in the rainforest. He explored new perspectives to describe Jingmai culture to the world, and established Wengwa rainforest exploration team to conduct further researches. The team protects and explains local culture with creative cuisines, dinning tables in the rainforest, primitive B&B, documentary filming, and other activities like trekking and hiking and holding art fairs.

In fact, there are many young people like Yan in Mt. Jingmai, they studied in other cities and went back home to start business. Xian Jin，now 22 years old famous to the locals, is a livestreaming hostess. She was the first tea planters with Douyin accounts selling goods, and was also the first people there who used Xiaohongshu.

Xian went to Shenzhen and Kunming to study at 16 and went back home at 18. After years of researching, she became a hostess at 21, filming video clips of Mt. Jingmai and selling tea online. With more than a year’s hard work, she can make 5000 yuan of turnover with each livestream show.

Now, the tea sold online accounts for 40% of her total revenue. She is also trying to attract more young people to her team. “Every piece of Mt. Jingmai, including us, the people, are heritages,” said Xian.“I will try my best to protect the culture and tea here that have exists generations. We treasure them, so I hope the culture can go further.”

Source: Pu’er News; trans-editing by Wang Yunya