1. A Land of Liquor Rich in History but Long Short of Brands

Studying Henan's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing means confronting a contrast: the province has almost no shortage of history, yet has long lacked a single brand that resonates nationwide.

Traces of grain fermentation have been found in Yangshao-culture painted pottery; Luyi is said to be the home of Du Kang, the legendary ancestor of brewing; and residues of a fermented beverage from nine thousand years ago, unearthed at the Jiahu site in Wuyang, are regarded by some researchers as among the earliest evidence of alcohol in the world. The brewing memory of this land runs deeper than that of most major liquor provinces. And yet, in modern times, Henan has long been a province that "drinks a lot but makes little": local consumption is enormous, famous out-of-province liquors march straight in, and home-grown brands are instead squeezed in their own market.

One set of public figures captures this situation. By the statistical caliber of Henan's liquor distribution sector, the province's baijiu market reached about 66.8 billion yuan in 2023, one of the largest consumption pools in the country; yet within this huge business, Henan's own "Yu-liquor" brands together did not hold the advantage, with a sizeable share taken by out-of-province names. In other words, the people of Henan drink a great deal, but not all of it is Henan liquor. It is precisely this gap between "big market, weak brand" that makes the province's sector worth studying — it is at once a consumption lowland and a testing ground for industrial revival. This is why the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute chooses to read Henan's sector through aroma and geography.

A note first: many of the firms discussed here are unlisted, their operating data are not fully public, and some figures conflict between sources. What follows is confined to what public information can confirm; where data are missing, disputed or uncertain, we would rather note it honestly than fill the gaps.

2. Yangshao in Mianchi: Turning an Aroma Into the Thirteenth Type

The leading face of Henan baijiu today rests in Mianchi County, in Sanmenxia in the west of the province — the small city famous for the Yangshao culture.

The brand carrying this banner is Yangshao Liquor. Its home base lies in Mianchi, the cradle of the Yangshao culture, and what it does is unusual: rather than fighting head-on in the red ocean of strong-aroma (nongxiang) and sauce-aroma (jiangxiang) liquors, it defined an aroma of its own. Using a process described as "nine grains, four potteries, multiple aromas fused," Yangshao crafted a flavour recognised by the industry as the Chinese tao-rong aroma (known as tao aroma) — an independent aroma type beyond the traditional mainstream ones, and the home-grown, widely acknowledged aroma that Henan developed itself. Its core Caitaofang series contributes the great majority of the company's revenue.

Beyond aroma, what draws the most attention to Yangshao is its scale and its in-province standing. According to public reports, in 2023 Yangshao publicly claimed sales revenue exceeding 5 billion yuan, firmly atop Yu-liquor; yet in the same year, in the caliber it filed for the Henan Federation of Industry and Commerce's top-enterprise ranking, its revenue was about 3.57 billion yuan — a considerable gap between the two figures. This discrepancy is itself worth recording honestly: it reminds outsiders to keep a measure of caution about the scale of an unlisted regional distiller, and not to treat a company's self-reported sales caliber as audited revenue.

By either caliber, Yangshao is the sample closest to a national breakthrough among Henan's baijiu. The province's liquor-revival action plan explicitly places the task of "striving to break ten billion yuan" on it. A self-created aroma gives it a differentiated path that avoids colliding head-on with the top brands, but a new aroma needs long-term market education and brand investment to be widely accepted outside the province, and Yangshao's core products are relatively concentrated. Whether it can carry the tao-rong aroma beyond Henan and truly reach the ten-billion tier is the most-watched suspense in this sector.

3. Songhe in Luyi: From National-Famous Liquor to Bankruptcy Restructuring

If Yangshao stands for today's attacker, then Songhe in Luyi, in eastern Henan, stands for the heaviest chapter in the province's baijiu history.

Songhe Liquor traces its origins to the state-run Luyi Distillery of 1968. Its highest moment came in 1989, when Songhe Liangye won the national-famous-liquor title and entered the seventeen famous liquors then designated — to this day it remains the only strong-aroma baijiu in Henan ever to hold the "China Famous Liquor" title. The weight of this golden signboard is unmatched within Yu-liquor. Into the new century, Songhe once led the province; public records show its revenue reached over two billion yuan around 2012, making it the first Henan baijiu firm to break two billion.

The turning point came from capital. Its controlling shareholder, the Furen group, was exposed to a financial crisis in 2019, and the resulting debt distress directly dragged Songhe down. In November 2022, insolvent, Songhe Liquor filed for bankruptcy restructuring, with publicly counted liabilities reaching into the tens of billions of yuan. A one-time "king of Henan liquor" thus fell to its lowest point. Only at the end of 2024 did its restructuring plan pass a vote of the creditors' meeting, with the province's Guoquan group taking over as the restructuring investor, giving Songhe a chance at rebirth.

Songhe's rise and fall is a textbook script of a regional famous liquor "made by capital, undone by capital." A national-famous-liquor signboard can lie dormant, but it is hard to make it vanish from nothing; yet making it valuable again depends not only on capital injection but on a systematic rebuild of product, channel and brand. Whether Songhe can turn around through restructuring is a question time must answer.

4. Du Kang in Luoyang, Baofeng in Pingdingshan, and the "Six Golden Flowers"

Henan baijiu is not a one- or two-firm show, but a string of old names each with its own lineage.

Du Kang Holdings in Luoyang, drawing on the ancient legend of "Du Kang made liquor," brews strong-aroma baijiu using Du Kang spring water, sorghum and wheat, and its growth on the Yu-liquor distribution side has been striking in recent years. Baofeng liquor in Pingdingshan took another road: led by light-aroma (qingxiang) with strong-aroma as secondary, its brewing craft is listed in the national intangible cultural heritage catalogue, making it the representative of Henan's light-aroma baijiu. There are also Shedian Laojiu in Nanyang, Zhanggong in Shangqiu, Wuguchun and Huanggou in Xinyang, Jiahu in Luohe and a batch of local brands; together with Yangshao and Songhe, they are popularly called the "Six Golden Flowers" of Yu-liquor.

Lining up these names reveals two features of Henan baijiu. First, its aroma lineage is more mixed than that of most provinces: strong-aroma, light-aroma and the self-created tao-rong aroma coexist — a result of historical sediment, but also one that leaves Yu-liquor without a single unified flavour label. Second, the tiers are vastly uneven: at the top, Yangshao by its own caliber nears or passes five billion, while many firms in the third and fourth tiers have long hovered at a few hundred million yuan, with the strong and the weak differing by tens of times. The revival of Henan baijiu is, in essence, about producing one or two more names from this string of old brands that can go national.

5. One Leaf in Xinyang: The Thickest Block of Refined Tea

Shifting from liquor to tea, the heaviest and most systematic link in Henan's sector lies in Xinyang, in the south of the province.

Xinyang sits on the upper Huai River, at the northern foot of the Dabie Mountains — the ancient producing area of the saying "of Huainan tea, Xinyang is first," and the home of Xinyang Maojian, one of China's traditional famous teas. Tea is no optional ornament in Henan: according to Xinyang's public data, by the end of 2023 the city had about 2.16 million mu of tea gardens, a total tea output of roughly 90,000 tonnes, and a comprehensive output value of about 16.1 billion yuan, with both garden area and output accounting for over ninety percent of the whole province, and more than a million people engaged in tea. The regional public-brand value of Xinyang Maojian has ranked among the national front for many years. One could say the bulk of Henan's refined-tea manufacturing rests on this single leaf in Xinyang.

For this sector, refined tea matters not only in output value but in linking agriculture and manufacturing into a relatively complete chain: from garden cultivation and leaf picking, through the primary steps of fixing, rolling and roasting, to the refining steps of blending, aroma-raising and packaging, plus the supporting trades around tea-ware, packaging and processing equipment, Xinyang has formed an industrial system from growing to making and from making to selling. By comparison, although Henan's baijiu is larger in scale, its integration of producing area and brand is not necessarily higher than Xinyang tea's.

6. The Beverage Belt Along Two Rivers and the Upstream-Downstream Chain

Beyond liquor and tea, the sector has a thread easily overlooked — beverage manufacturing.

Henan is a populous province and a major food-industry province; drawing on huge local consumption and an agricultural base, it has grown a batch of sizeable beverage firms. Zhongwo Industry in Jiyuan, in the north-west of the province, is a representative: its main lines are functional drinks, soda water, lactic-acid and plant-protein beverages, and so on; it runs many modern production lines with an annual capacity reaching into the hundreds of thousands of tonnes, and is one of Henan's key agricultural-industrialisation leading enterprises. Luohe, Zhengzhou and other places, resting on their developed local food processing, also cluster a fair number of beverage and soft-drink firms. Beverage manufacturing is nested into Henan's wheat, maize, fruit and vegetable resources — it is not an isolated bottling step.

Following these three threads down the chain, the roots of Henan's sector likewise lie in the land. Upstream are the sorghum and various brewing grains of eastern and southern Henan, the tea gardens of Xinyang, the fruit-vegetable and sugar sources of various places, and the water of the Yellow and Huai River systems; midstream are the brewing, tea-making, blending and bottling steps at distilleries, tea firms and beverage plants spread across the counties; and further down comes a whole chain of supports — glass bottles, caps, cans, label printing, brewing and bottling equipment, flavours and additives. A bottle of Yu-liquor, a tin of Maojian, a can of functional drink — each must travel this chain before reaching the market.

The supporting and manufacturing links along this chain are precisely the factory community that is easily overlooked yet truly exists. Sales teams supplying these distilleries, tea firms and beverage plants upstream can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter the factory directory and decision-maker contacts of Henan's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing along the two dimensions of region and industry, turning upstream customer development from inquiring firm by firm on experience into something traceable by map and by sector.

7. The Institute's View: History Does Not Become a Brand on Its Own

Drawing these three threads together, Henan's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing presents a pattern of "deep foundations, scattered signboards": its baijiu has nine thousand years of brewing memory, a self-created tao-rong aroma and a string of old names, yet long lacks a national brand that can stand head-on against the leaders of Sichuan and Guizhou; its refined tea is highly concentrated in Xinyang alone, complete as a system yet still mainly regional in brand; and its beverage manufacturing spreads steadily on the dividends of population and agriculture, but is more a scaled-up supporting force.

The crux of this pattern lies not in history but in conversion. History is the one thing Henan never lacks — the fermentation traces of Jiahu, the legend of Du Kang, the old glory of the seventeen famous liquors, the millennium-old fame of Xinyang Maojian; these are resources hard to replicate elsewhere. But history is a dormant asset; it does not turn on its own into a brand consumers will pay for. Yangshao's dispute over figures reminds people to stay clear-eyed about scale; Songhe's bankruptcy restructuring shows that an old signboard can be dragged down by capital too; and Xinyang tea's situation of "famous tea, few famous firms" is, in truth, the same problem as Yu-liquor's "famous liquor, few famous brands."

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's view is this: the real exam for Henan's sector is how to convert weighty history into brands and channels in the modern sense. Whether the tao-rong aroma can win acceptance outside the province, whether Songhe's signboard can be polished bright again, whether Xinyang Maojian can grow from one leaf into national firms one after another — the answers to these questions are written neither in the old distilleries nor on the tea hills of the past, but must be filled in over the coming decade by the people now seated at the table. History dealt Henan a good hand; how to play it is another matter.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of Henan liquor, beverage and refined-tea factories and related upstream suppliers, with industry data)
  • 2023 market report of Henan's liquor distribution sector: Henan baijiu market about 66.8 billion yuan
  • 21st Century Business Herald: Henan liquor market scale and the share of home-grown Yu-liquor brands
  • Sina Finance, Stockstar: Yangshao Liquor's 2023 revenue-caliber dispute (about 5 billion yuan self-reported sales versus about 3.57 billion yuan filed with the provincial federation of industry and commerce)
  • Tencent News: Yangshao Caitaofang and the tao-rong aroma (core-product share, recognition as an independent aroma type)
  • Henan's "Liquor Industry Revival Action Plan (2022–2025)": targets such as Yangshao striving to break ten billion yuan
  • Sina Finance, Jiemian, TMTPost: Songhe Liquor's history, the seventeen famous liquors, the Furen-group crisis, bankruptcy restructuring, and the takeover by Guoquan group
  • Wikipedia, Henan Department of Industry and Information Technology, China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network: Baofeng's light-aroma style and its national intangible-heritage brewing craft
  • Cnjiuzhi: Luoyang Du Kang Holdings' strong-aroma baijiu and Du Kang spring water
  • Henan Development and Reform Commission, Sina Finance: Xinyang Maojian's tea-garden area, output, comprehensive output value and brand value
  • Baidu Baike, food-industry materials: Zhongwo Industry's capacity and product system