Sheqi Three Flours

Sheqi Three Flours

　　Sheqi Three Flours refer to the collective name for the locally produced sweet potato vermicelli, sweet potato starch sheets, and sweet potato starch flour in Sheqi County, which has long been known as the “Hometown of Three Flours.” The vermicelli here is as fine as silk, the starch sheets as thin as paper, and the starch flour smooth and white in color—products that have gained widespread popularity. With vast arable land and undulating hills, Sheqi County is a major sweet potato-producing area. Every winter, villagers engage in grinding sweet potatoes and making vermicelli, and in recent years, this production has become a major agricultural processing industry in rural areas. Apart from being consumed locally in Nanyang, the “Three Flours” are also sold in large quantities to provinces such as Hubei, Sichuan, and Shaanxi, with some even exported abroad.

　　Sheqi County is widely renowned as the “Hometown of Three Flours” and a distribution hub for these products, with a long history of Three Flours production. For over 300 years, the county’s pure sweet potato–based “Three Flours” have enjoyed a strong reputation nationally and have entered the international market, becoming the county’s leading pillar industry. As early as the 4th year of the Republic of China (1915), Sheqi’s Tianjia Flour and Dejia Flour—Guangzhuang Fine Flour—made their way out of Asia and into the world. At the Panama–Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco, USA, the county’s starch sheets were exhibited. With 120 sheets per kilogram, and known for being thin, round, large, and shiny, they received praise from friends across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The county exported a total of 13.614 million kilograms of Shedian starch flour and 515,000 kilograms of vermicelli, which were transported to ports such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, and subsequently sold to more than 30 countries and regions including Hong Kong, Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia and Singapore, and European countries such as Italy.

　　In 2009, Sheqi County planted 300,000 mu of virus-free sweet potatoes and had 140 “Three Flours” production lines, yielding 207,000 jin of “Three Flours” annually, with a total output value of over 100 million yuan.