About Chengde Television

Chengde Television

Overview

Chengde Television is the prefecture-level television station of Chengde in northeastern Hebei, run by the Chengde radio and television broadcaster within its media centre. Its main channel provides local news, livelihood and tourism programming in Mandarin across a large, mountainous prefecture. Chengde is known worldwide for the Mountain Resort, the Qing emperors' summer palace, and its outlying temples, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and for the Saihanba forest farm story.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. What is documented is the station's municipal ownership and media-centre structure, and an editorial territory dominated — as its record states — by tourism, ecology and the prefecture's Manchu and Mongol heritage, alongside news from its mining and agricultural counties.

A large mountain prefecture

Chengde is one of Hebei's largest prefectures by area, a mountainous territory northeast of Beijing, about 230 kilometres from the capital. Its counties and districts stretch from the urban centre at Shuangqiao and Shuangluan to Weichang Manchu and Mongol Autonomous County in the far north, Fengning Manchu Autonomous County, Longhua, Luanping, Xinglong, Pingquan and the mining and farming counties of the Yanshan mountains. Ethnic Manchu and Mongol heritage, named in the station record, reflects the autonomous counties that make up much of this territory.

For a prefecture station, Chengde's scale is the defining operational fact: a single flagship channel must serve a city famous across the world and remote mountain counties whose daily concerns — farming, mining, roads and weather — rarely reach national media. Local news, livelihood and tourism programming, the three genres named in the station record, correspond exactly to those needs.

The flagship channel and tourism programming

The main channel provides local news, livelihood and tourism programming in Mandarin across the prefecture. Tourism programming is not an optional extra in Chengde: the visitor economy built on the Mountain Resort, the outlying temples and the Saihanba forests is one of the prefecture's principal industries, and its seasons — summer at the resort, autumn colour in the mountains, winter at Saihanba — structure the local calendar the station reports.

Within the media centre, the channel's journalism also supplies digital output through which Chengde presents itself to the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region on its doorstep. The prefecture's proximity to the capital makes it a weekend and holiday destination for millions, and its own station is both a service to residents and a window through which that visitor audience first meets the city.

The Mountain Resort: a second capital

The Chengde Mountain Resort — Bishu Shanzhuang, the Mountain Villa for Escaping the Heat — was the summer palace of the Qing dynasty. Construction began in 1703 under the Kangxi Emperor and was completed in 1792, spanning the reigns of Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong over eighty-nine years. Covering about 5.64 million square metres, it is described by UNESCO and Chinese authorities as the largest existing classical imperial garden in the world, and it was inscribed, with its outlying temples, on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994. Kangxi bestowed its name and plaque in 1711.

The resort was far more than a retreat. In the early Qing, important political, military, ethnic and diplomatic affairs were handled here; it became a second political centre outside Beijing where emperors received religious and political leaders from ethnic minority regions and foreign envoys, consolidating the unity of the Qing realm. Emperors spent so much of the year at Chengde that the Jiaqing and Xianfeng emperors both died here, in 1820 and 1861. The palace area, modelled in part on the Forbidden City, the lake district and the mountain scenery together formed a miniature of China's landscapes within one walled garden.

The outlying temples and a multi-ethnic empire

Around the resort, on the eastern and northern hills, stand the outlying temples — twelve imperial temples originally, of which eight survive in the group known historically as the Eight Outlying Temples — built between 1713 and 1780 in the architectural styles of the Tibetan, Mongolian, Han and Uyghur peoples. UNESCO describes the complete property as an integration of Han, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan cultural influences and of several religious traditions.

The two most famous temples make the point in architecture. The Putuozongcheng Temple, built 1767–1771, is modelled on Lhasa's Potala Palace at reduced scale; the Xumifushou Temple of 1780 is modelled on the Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, Tibet. For Chengde Television, the temples are a standing cultural beat: conservation, religious observance, exhibitions and the steady interpretation of a landscape that embodies the Qing court's management of a multi-ethnic empire — a theme that resonates with the Manchu and Mongol communities of the prefecture itself.

Saihanba: the forest farm epic

North of Chengde, in Weichang County on the former Mulan imperial hunting grounds established by Kangxi in 1681, lies Saihanba, described as the world's largest man-made forest. After the hunting grounds were opened to logging and reclamation from 1863, the forests deteriorated into barren desert, and sand threatened the cities to the south. In February 1962 the Chengde Saihanba Mechanical Forest Farm was established, and a first team of 369 afforestation workers — 127 of them graduates recruited from across the country, with an average age of twenty-three — began planting in a highland where winter temperatures can drop below minus forty degrees.

The first two years' seedlings survived at a rate of only about eight percent. In the spring of 1964, at Matikeng, the farm achieved a breakthrough planting with survival above ninety percent. After three generations of effort, forest coverage at Saihanba rose from 11.4 percent to eighty percent over some 75,000 hectares, creating an ecological barrier protecting Beijing and Tianjin from sandstorms, supplying, by UN figures, 137 million cubic metres of clean water a year. In December 2017 the Saihanba afforestation community received the United Nations' Champions of the Earth award. The Saihanba story — the spirit of Saihanba — is now a nationally taught exemplar of ecological civilisation, and it is Chengde's own story, covered by its station as local news with national meaning.

Ecology, mining and the counties

Beyond the famous sites, Chengde's counties combine agriculture, mining and forestry across the Yanshan range. The prefecture's rivers — the Luan River above all — supply water toward Tianjin and Beijing, giving Chengde an ecological responsibility to the whole region that figures regularly in local public affairs: water protection, forest management and the balance between mining income and mountain ecology.

Livelihood programming connects those large themes to households: farm and forest incomes, county-town services, mountain road transport and the seasonal work of a tourism economy. The station record's summary — tourism, ecology and Manchu and Mongol heritage featuring heavily alongside news from mining and agricultural counties — is an accurate map of a prefecture station's week in Chengde.

Converged media in the media centre

Chengde's broadcaster operates within its media centre, the converged structure uniting television, radio and new media. For a prefecture whose fame rests on visual landscapes — lakes and palaces, temple skylines, a sea of planted forest — converged production lets one newsroom carry Chengde's images across broadcast and digital platforms together, while the flagship channel keeps its focus on the prefecture's residents.

Why Chengde Television matters

Chengde Television matters because Chengde holds two of China's most instructive landscapes: the Qing emperors' summer capital, where an empire governed its diversity from a garden, and Saihanba, where three generations planted a forest back from desert. A municipal station reporting those landscapes alongside the ordinary life of a vast mountain prefecture gives Chengde's residents — Manchu, Mongol and Han, urban and rural — a shared screen proportioned to their remarkable home.