SURROUNDED by waves of verdant green and limestone gray, a scene not often encountered in the Karst landscape, the air in Hengzhou, a county-level city in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is thick with a peculiar floral sweetness.
This is the scent of jasmine harvest season, a biological window measured in hours and not days, that drives the fortunes of a regional economy undergoing fast industrial transformations.
Official figures show Guangxi’s annual tea output stands about 140,000 tonnes, with the value of the whole industrial chain exceeding 70 billion yuan (US$10.24 billion).
Hengzhou supplies more than 60 per cent of the world’s jasmine flowers and over 80 per cent of China’s total. Roughly 340,000 people work in Hengzhou’s jasmine sector alone.
Traditionally, farmers head into the fields around midday, when the sun is fiercest and the blossoms are under maximum thermal stress.
“The volatility of essential oils peaks in the heat,” said Lei Shuiping, a third-gen. — Xinhua