Education for China

Tea-related cultural heritage is an integral part of globally important agricultural cultural heritage. For a long time, an increasing number of women have been engaged in tea production and services, playing a unique role in the dynamic inheritance and innovation of tea-related cultural heritage, thanks to the people-nature characteristics of the tea production system. Investing more and faster towards gender equality and women’s empowerment can improve food security, livelihoods, economic conditions, and social well-being for everyone. In the experience of the Anxi Tieguanyin tea culture system, women play a pivotal role, engaging in every aspect of production, processing, distribution, consumption, culture, and tourism. Due to a lack of emphasis on education in the 1960s and 1970s, combined with the social background of Anxi being classified as a “poverty-stricken county” and the constraints of early traditional feudal culture, some women lacked professional skills and were illiterate. To provide more women with learning and employment opportunities, He Huanzhu established the first training platform with women at its core in the tea industry in China in 2019 – the Anxi Tieguanyin Female Tea Master Intangible Cultural Heritage Institute.

The Anxi Tieguanyin Female Tea Master Intangible Cultural Heritage Institute, relying on years of experience in nurturing female talents, broke new ground in the tea industry by establishing the first female-led intangible cultural heritage training and entrepreneurship platform in the country, gathering expertise wisdom from tea experts in countries like South Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Egypt, and others. By integrating tea industry scientific and technological achievements and through the collective efforts of its members, it created a rural revitalization (female) talent incubation model called “12345,” developed a distinctive learning mechanism called “Master-Leads-Apprentice,” formulated a systematic training program for women in the tea industry, summarized operational strategies for the Intangible Cultural Heritage Institute, and worked to build a shared life between people and tea, striving to preserve intangible cultural production techniques and providing experience and models for the incubation of women’s talents in rural revitalization across various regions.