Yuancun

Yuancun

Shangyou County’s Meishui Township Yuancun Village is located by the Dashuihu Lake, a national 4A-level forest park, and is 14 kilometers from the county seat. The area boasts abundant mountainous resources. The entire county has 180,000 mu of mountain land, with a forest coverage rate of 87.2%, 199,600 mu of forested land, and 40,600 mu of bamboo forests. The village itself has 13,000 mu of mountain land and 912 mu of arable land. Surrounded by rolling hills, Yuancun features beautiful tea plantation scenery and lies along the Shangtai route. It is close to the Jingming Resort. Nestled among mountains, the village can be viewed in its entirety from a central vantage point, taking on a rounded, pot-like shape—hence the name Yuancun (literally “Round Pot Village”).

Yuancun is a well-known tea specialty village with well-preserved ecology and high forest coverage. It highlights key local assets such as being the “No. 1 Village for Hakka Door Plaques,” a tea industry specialty village, the Nine-Bend Eco Rafting experience, a thousand-year-old paper-making workshop, and the best-preserved forest mini train in China. Especially this year, over 6 million yuan has been invested to comprehensively upgrade the Nine-Bend Eco Rafting, aiming to develop Yuancun into a rural tourism destination that combines sightseeing, history exploration, immersive experiences, and entertainment. In 2010, Yuancun was recognized as a “Provincial-Level Rural Tourism Demonstration Site.”

In terms of the tea industry, the village has built premium tea gardens, a tea museum, and tea tasting gardens, forming a complete industrial chain covering tea cultivation, planting, picking, processing, tasting, and tea art performances. This allows visitors to admire the tea plantations while immersing themselves in the unique tea culture, making it hard to leave. Currently, Yuancun in Meishui sees a continuous stream of tourists coming to view the tea gardens. While expanding and strengthening the tea industry, the village continues to explore the cultural essence of tea and Hakka traditions. Leveraging its exceptional natural resources, it vigorously develops tea sightseeing and experiential tourism projects to extend the tea industry chain. The village has newly built a tea art performance center, tea garden walking trails, viewing platforms, and formed a Hakka tea art performance team, initially creating an experiential tourism package integrating tea picking, tea processing, tea tasting, tea cuisine, and tea art performances.

The scenic area now covers more than 1,200 mu and offers leisure activities such as the Yuancun Green Tea Tasting Pavilion, Nine-Bend River Rafting, Dongkeng Paper-Making Workshop, recreational fishing pond, forest mini railway, and farmstay dining. It has been honored as a “Jiangxi Eco-New Countryside” and a “Jiangxi Province Rural Tourism Demonstration Site.”