One of China’s most famous teas has a university behind its standards. Xinyang Maojian, the celebrated green tea of central China, was the subject of a national standard drafted by faculty of Xinyang Agriculture and Forestry University (XYAFU), a school that has studied tea in its home city for more than a century. The tea connection runs deep: XYAFU operates a dedicated school of tea science, one of 18 schools on campus, and its five provincial industry-technology innovation alliances include the Henan Tea Industry Alliance alongside alliances for reservoir fisheries, edible and medicinal fungi, camellia oil and Dabie Mountain herbal medicines.
The university’s roots reach back to 1910, when the Runingfu Middle Industrial School was founded in the region. Through wars and hardship it never closed, evolving into the Xinyang Agricultural College and, in 2013, into today’s university, a rare case of a century-old agricultural school that still bears its original purpose. Today the campus covers about 120 hectares with 28,000-plus students, and 49 undergraduate programs span agriculture, engineering and management, 17 of them in agriculture and forestry. Three disciplines, agriculture, food and nutrition, and agricultural entomology and pest control, hold provincial key status, and six programs are provincial first-class.
Research and service are built around the region’s resources. Twenty-eight municipal-or-higher key laboratories and nine provincial engineering centers support work from tea science to aquaculture, producing more than 1,400 patents and other intellectual property. Faculty have also written three national standards and six provincial ones for local products, and a service network of 1,360 science-and-technology specialists links the campus to farms and firms across the old revolutionary base area.
The campus keeps the region’s memory: a biodiversity specimen museum of the Dabie Mountains and a farming-and-reading culture center preserve its heritage, while the motto, “aiming high in aspirations and meticulous in learning,” still guides the students who now fill the lecture halls. A 1910 industrial school that is now the standard-setter of a national tea: the university’s fields have not changed, only grown.
Data Source: XYAFU Official Website (as of 2025)
