Sina Finance tells the story of highly educated talent returning home to deepen their work in the Chinese lacquer industry and driving the modernization of traditional crafts. An in-depth report on the same subject also appeared in State Grid News: 'From the City to the Deep Mountains: A Post-80s and Chinese Lacquer, a Two-Way Journey'.

Key points of the report

• Returned from the city to the deep Qinba mountains and chose to become a 'lacquer craftsman covered in the smell of lacquer';
• Invited Professor Huang Xiaohua of Northwest A&F University to tackle lacquer tree diseases and pests, doubling the county's raw lacquer output within a year;
• Established Shaanxi Longtou Guoqi Cultural Industry Co., Ltd. and adopted a 'company + cooperative + lacquer farmer' model;
• Moved the industry from selling raw materials to deep processing and branding, raising the added value of products;
• In 2023, intelligent mixing equipment was introduced, raising the transparency of the lacquer liquid from 72% under traditional processes to 89%.

Further reading

In the report, Pingli County has been known since ancient times as the 'Home of China's Lacquer Trees'; the raw lacquer it produces is 'clear as oil, bright to the eye' and was a royal tribute during the Ming and Qing dynasties. How to turn this natural endowment into sustainable industrial capacity is the question that leading enterprises in the area have been answering for more than a decade.

This article is a summary of the report; the original was published by Sina Finance.