People’s Daily online 06/09/2026 1:50 p.m.
At a lotus planting base in Honghu, central China’s Hubei province, site manager Wang Wenjuan hosts a live sales session to sell freshly picked lotus seedlings. As she speaks enthusiastically in front of the camera, the orders flood in.
Wang Wenjuan picks lotus saplings from a lotus pond in Honghu, central China’s Hubei Province. (Zhang Jun / People’s Daily Online)
“Blooming e-commerce, combined with cold chain logistics and preservation technologies, allows freshly picked agricultural products to reach markets across the country directly,” said Zhou Yuting, director of the lotus root industry development center in Honghu.
Wang Wenjuan started selling lotus roots online in 2012. During that year’s Chinese New Year shopping festival, she received 3,000 orders a day.
“With the regional public brand ‘Honghu Lotus Root,’ we no longer have to worry about sales,” she said. Its business has grown from a daily turnover of just a few hundred yuan (1 yuan is about $0.15) to an annual income of nearly 8 million yuan last year, with annual profits approaching a million yuan.
Workers pack young lotus shoots at a factory in Honghu, central China’s Hubei province. (Wang Guoji / People’s Daily Online)
Inside the production workshop of the Hubei Huagui food group, the assembly lines are running at full speed. The young, tender lotus shoots are washed and packaged, while the older ones are processed into directly consumable pickled shoots.
Honghu established a lotus root industry development center and introduced targeted support measures, including 10 million yuan of special subsidies to help enterprises upgrade equipment and technology, while coordinating 1.5 billion yuan of financial loans to support industrial growth.
So far, the city has built seven standardized lotus root demonstration bases of 10,000 mu (about 670 hectares). The city’s lotus root industry generates more than 12 billion yuan in total output, with a brand value of 25.86 billion yuan, enabling 35,000 farming families to increase their annual income by an average of 960 yuan per mu.
(Web editor: Qianqian Wu, Yishuang Liu)
