1. Why Read Gansu's Liquor Through a Corridor

The best way to study Gansu's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing is not to start with the companies, but with the map.

Gansu's territory is long and narrow, running northwest to southeast like a jade scepter wedged into China's west. Its industrial weight does not sit in any single city; it is distributed along two threads. One runs to the southeastern tip, the mountains of Longnan — humid and rainy, nicknamed the "Jiangnan of Gansu," producing strong-aroma baijiu. The other runs across the west: the Hexi Corridor, a strip of Gobi over a thousand kilometres long, from Wushaoling in the east to Yumen Pass in the west, pressed between the Qilian Mountains and the Beishan range, with abundant sunlight and wide day-night temperature swings — here grow the wine grapes, and here cluster the barley for beer. Between the two threads sits the provincial capital, Lanzhou, guarding the Yellow River, the traditional base for beer and beverages.

Placing these seemingly scattered industries — liquor, beverages, refined tea — side by side, Gansu offers a clear sample: its industrial pattern was not piled up by capital, but written by natural endowment. Where which liquor is made can almost be read off latitude, altitude, rainfall and sunlight. That is why the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute chose to observe this industry through geography.

A caveat first: Gansu is not a first-tier province for baijiu or wine. Its leading firms are not large by national standards, and the operating data of many small and mid-sized distilleries and beverage firms are not public. This report covers only what public information can confirm; where data cannot be found or verified, it leaves a blank rather than fills it in.

2. Hui County, Longnan: Jinhui and a County's Baijiu

The first face of Gansu baijiu falls in the southeastern corner, Hui County in Longnan.

Hui County lies in southeastern Gansu, on the southern slope of the West Qinling Mountains. Its climate is humid, and its brewing history reaches back to the Western Han, making it a renowned "western liquor town" in Ming and Qing times. Carrying that banner today is Jinhui Liquor Co., Ltd. Its distillery was founded in 1951; after several restructurings it came under the control of Gansu Yate Group in 2006, grew within about a decade into the largest baijiu producer in Gansu, and listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2016.

Jinhui makes strong-aroma baijiu. According to its public annual report, in 2023 it posted revenue of about 2.548 billion yuan, up 26.64 percent year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of about 329 million yuan. That scale does not rank high among listed baijiu firms nationally, but it has one distinct trait: heavy reliance on its home province. In 2023, Jinhui's revenue within Gansu was about 1.921 billion yuan, roughly 75 percent of the total; outside the province it was about 585 million yuan, under a quarter. In other words, of every four yuan of revenue, three come from within Gansu.

This "home-base dependence" is the typical condition of a regional liquor maker. It is both a moat and a ceiling: in-province channels, reputation and emotional loyalty build a barrier others struggle to shake, yet expansion outside the province stays slow. Jinhui's ownership has also changed hands several times — Fosun Group took control in 2020, and two years later control returned to the original shareholder, Gansu Yate. Capital comes and goes; what remains is the distillery rooted in Hui County. For Gansu baijiu, whether Jinhui can step beyond Hexi and Longnan to stand firm in the broader northern market is the most-watched suspense of this industry.

3. Minle, Zhangye: Binhe and a Self-Created Aroma

If Jinhui represents scale, then the Binhe Group in Minle, Zhangye, in the middle of the Hexi Corridor, represents another way of existing — standing on an aroma it defined itself.

Gansu Binhe Food Industry Group traces back to the Gansu Binhe Distillery founded in 1984, growing from an initial output of just 150 tons a year to a baijiu output of roughly 12,000 tons today. What it is best known for in the trade is not output but having created the "nine-grain aroma." In the lineage of Chinese baijiu aromas, strong, sauce and light aromas are the mainstream, and establishing an aroma type takes long accumulation of craft and standards. Brewing with nine grains, Binhe turned the nine-grain aroma into a new aroma category in Chinese baijiu, secured several national patents, and had the related techniques listed in Gansu's intangible cultural heritage register.

The significance of the nine-grain aroma is not that it must be better than the mainstream aromas, but that it gave an inland distillery of limited scale a differentiated path. When a regional liquor maker can hardly outfight the top brands in the red ocean of strong and sauce aromas, defining its own aroma is the equivalent of opening a territory where it need not compete head-on. This is a rare sample in Gansu baijiu of winning by craft definition rather than by scale.

It must be said plainly that a self-created aroma also carries the cost of market education: for a new aroma to be widely accepted takes time, and continual brand investment. Binhe's scale limits the resources it can commit, and how far the nine-grain aroma can travel remains an open question.

4. The Hexi Corridor: A Wine Region on a Thousand Kilometres of Gobi

Moving from baijiu to wine, the most noteworthy part of Gansu is the Hexi Corridor wine region.

This is a land selected by natural conditions. The Hexi Corridor lies between 36 and 40 degrees north latitude, squarely on the world's recognized "golden belt" for wine grapes; here annual sunshine exceeds 3,000 hours — over a thousand hours more than Bordeaux at the same latitude — with day-night temperature differences often above 15 degrees, dry with little rain and light pest pressure. Stacked together, these conditions make it one of the domestically cited high-quality wine-grape regions.

In 2012, Hexi Corridor wine received national geographical indication protection, covering more than a dozen counties and districts across five cities — Wuwei, Jinchang, Zhangye, Jiuquan and Jiayuguan — over an area of about one million mu; that same year Wuwei was named "China's first wine city." Within the region, several relatively concentrated production bases gradually took shape in Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiayuguan and Jiuquan, with wine-grape planting expanding to over 300,000 mu by around 2017.

The representative firm to emerge from the region is Mogao Co., Ltd., based in Liangzhou District, Wuwei. Founded in 1995 and listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2004, it mainly grows grapes and produces and sells wine, with a wine-grape base on the order of 10,000 mu and a capacity of about 25,000 tons of dry wine a year, and is a national key leading enterprise in agricultural industrialization. Together with other wineries and firms scattered across the corridor, it forms the backbone of this Gobi wine belt.

But the position of Hexi Corridor wine is not easy. It faces the broad predicament of domestic wine — long-term pressure from imports, shifting consumption habits, weak brand recognition. The region has good terroir, but not necessarily matching brand premium. This is the classic situation of "a region without a famous name," and the most concrete transformation challenge for Gansu wine.

5. Lanzhou, Beer and Beverages: Another Thread by the Yellow River

Baijiu is in Longnan and Hexi, wine is in the corridor; beer and beverages cluster more around the provincial capital, Lanzhou.

Lanzhou Yellow River Enterprise Co., Ltd. is the representative at this end. Its main businesses are beer, beverages, malt and packaging; "Yellow River" beer is its leading product, and the "Yellow River" trademark was recognized as a China Well-Known Trademark as early as 2002. Public records show the company has annual beer capacity on the order of several hundred thousand tons, with supporting malt capacity of considerable size — a point worth noting: barley malt is both a raw material for beer and a link to Hexi Corridor agriculture, so beer manufacturing in Gansu is not an isolated bottling step but a link embedded in the local farm-produce chain.

Refined tea is the thinnest part of this industry in Gansu. Gansu is not a traditional tea-producing province; tea manufacturing here appears more as processing, blending and distribution, and public industry data are limited. Listing it alongside liquor and beverages under the same industry statistical category owes more to classification than to any notable scale in this link. This report keeps the matter brief and does not overstate it.

6. Supply Chain and Upstream: How the Gobi Becomes Liquor

The supply chain of this industry in Gansu is rooted in the soil.

Looking upstream are the planting and raw materials of the Hexi Corridor and Longnan: wine grapes, sorghum and various brewing grains, beer barley, and water sources nourished by Qilian snowmelt. Midstream are the brewing, fermentation, bottling and packaging steps of distilleries, wineries, breweries and beverage firms scattered across the cities and counties. Further down come a whole supporting chain of packaging products, glass bottles, caps, label printing, brewing and bottling equipment, and flavor raw materials. A bottle of liquor that begins with Gobi grapes or Longnan sorghum must travel this whole chain before it reaches the table.

The supporting links on this chain are precisely the cluster of factories that is easily overlooked yet truly exists. Sales teams supplying these distilleries, wineries and breweries upstream can, through Tianxia Gongchang, filter the factory directory and decision-maker contacts of Gansu's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing along the two dimensions of region and industry, turning upstream customer development from house-by-house inquiry based on experience into a search grounded in map and industry.

7. The Institute's View: An Industry Written by Endowment, Still Cashed In by People

Drawing the threads together, Gansu's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing shows a pattern strongly shaped by natural endowment: Longnan's humidity yields baijiu, the Hexi Corridor's sunlight yields wine, Lanzhou's location guards beer — behind every industrial location stands a particular stretch of land.

This endowment-defined pattern is both Gansu's confidence and its limit. The confidence lies in resources hard to replicate elsewhere — the terroir of the Hexi Corridor, the craft of the nine-grain aroma, Jinhui's in-province roots. The limit lies in the fact that good terroir does not automatically become a good brand, and good craft does not automatically sell at a good price. Gansu wine "has a region but lacks a name," and Gansu baijiu "holds the province but cannot leave it" — in essence the same problem: endowment grants a starting point but will not run the course for you.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's view is this: the real test for this industry is not in natural conditions but in how people cash those conditions into brands and markets. The grapes of the Hexi Corridor have grown for over two thousand years, and the cellars of Hui County have burned for over a thousand; the land is long in place. Whether the three characters "Hexi Corridor" can become a name consumers are willing to pay for, and whether the nine-grain aroma can travel beyond Gansu — that is the question the distilleries on this land must answer in the next decade. Endowment is the hand Gansu was dealt; how to play it depends on the people at the table.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of Gansu liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturers and related upstream factories, and industry data)
  • Jinhui Liquor Co., Ltd.: 2023 Annual Report (revenue, net profit, in-province and out-of-province revenue shares)
  • Ruicaijing and Tencent News: analysis of Jinhui's 2023 annual report (home-province revenue share)
  • Soochow Securities Research Institute: in-depth company study of Jinhui (history of baijiu in Hui County, Longnan, and corporate evolution)
  • China Economic Net and Tencent News: changes in Jinhui's controlling stake (Gansu Yate, Fosun Group)
  • Gansu Liquor Industry Net and Zhangye Local Chronicles Office: Binhe Group's corporate evolution and the nine-grain aroma
  • Gansu Economic Daily: interview with Gansu Binhe Food Industry Group (capacity and aroma craft)
  • China Wine Information Net and Wine Information Net: Hexi Corridor region's geographical indication and planting area
  • Gansu Daily: survey of the Hexi Corridor wine industry
  • Mogao Co., Ltd. (Gansu Mogao Industrial Development Co., Ltd.): company profile and annual report (founding, listing, capacity, base)
  • Lanzhou Yellow River Enterprise Co., Ltd. official site and Baidu Baike: Yellow River beer's main business, capacity and well-known trademark