Jingdong Flue-Cured Tobacco

Jingdong Flue-Cured Tobacco

　　Tobacco leaves, an annual herbaceous plant of the Solanaceae family. The plant is covered in glandular hairs and grows to about 1 meter in height. The petiole is not prominent or forms a wing-like structure. When touched, the leaves feel sticky. The inflorescence is terminal and conical. The calyx is tubular, and the corolla is funnel-shaped, resembling a bugle, with a pinkish tip. The fruit is a capsule, and the seeds are yellow-brown. Originally from South America, it is cultivated worldwide. Tobacco leaves are the raw material for the tobacco industry.

Flue-cured tobacco is one of the key pillar industries of Jingdong County in Yunnan Province. The county Party committee and government attach great importance to it and focus on vigorously developing the flue-cured tobacco industry by highlighting “three distinctive features”: emphasizing the integrated mountain–plain feature—capitalizing on the high quality of mountain-grown tobacco leaves in Jingdong and the easy management of contiguous planting in plain areas—adhering to mountainous tobacco production as the foundation and valley-field tobacco as the breakthrough point, focusing on expanding coverage in mountainous areas and establishing model sites in plain areas, with the aim of gaining experience in modern tobacco agriculture in model sites before further promoting it across wider areas, thus achieving results from model experiences and outputs from broader applications; highlighting varietal features—the county focuses on the K326 variety as the base while striving to cultivate and develop the new KRK26 variety; highlighting ecological features—adhering to a path of distinctive development guided by the philosophy that “distinctiveness = ecology + technology + moderate scale,” to lead the development of Jingdong’s flue-cured tobacco industry. Leveraging the natural ecological advantage of “forests growing at the edge of fields and tobacco flourishing within forests,” the county showcases the ecological characteristics of its tobacco leaves.