About Dingxi Television

Dingxi Television

Overview

Dingxi Television is the prefecture-level television station of Dingxi in central Gansu, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now integrated into the Dingxi converged media centre. Its flagship channel carries local news and agricultural programming in Mandarin. Dingxi, on the Loess Plateau between Lanzhou and the upper Wei River, is nationally known as China's potato capital and for its Chinese herbal-medicine production — danggui and huangqi above all — and the station's rural coverage reflects that economy.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. The documented position — prefecture-level broadcaster, converged media centre, flagship news and agricultural channel — and the farming economy its record describes are the factual foundation of this profile.

Dingxi in central Gansu: gateway to Lanzhou

Dingxi is a prefecture-level city in central Gansu, known in regional terms as Longzhong, the centre of the Long region. It covers about 19,600 square kilometres at the meeting of the Loess Plateau, the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau's edge and the West Qinling Mountains, and administers one district, Anding, and six counties: Tongwei, Lintao, Zhangxian, Minxian, Weiyuan and Longxi. It neighbours Lanzhou and Baiyin to the north, Pingliang and Tianshui to the east, Longnan to the south and Gannan and Linxia to the west.

Position is Dingxi's historic asset. It stands about 98 kilometres from Lanzhou, the provincial capital, and is described as the throat of Gansu and the eastern gateway of Lanzhou, an important town on the ancient Silk Road and a place travellers on the route between the capital and the northwest had to pass. The upper Wei River — the Weihe of the city's own tourism slogan, "where the Weihe River originates" — rises in its territory. A prefecture-level broadcaster here serves a corridor city: close to the capital, yet with a deeply rural hinterland of loess hills, terraced fields and herb-growing counties.

The flagship channel and agricultural programming

The flagship channel carries local news and agricultural programming in Mandarin. In Dingxi the pairing is exact: this is a prefecture where the overwhelming majority of households farm, where the leading industries are crops — potatoes and medicinal herbs — and where agricultural information is therefore core public-service broadcasting rather than a specialist strand.

Within the Dingxi converged media centre, television is produced alongside radio and new-media output from one organisation. Convergence lets a single newsroom follow a potato price, a herb-market opening or a county road project across broadcast and digital platforms, reaching both the Anding District city audience and farming households in Lintao, Minxian or Longxi who may watch at different times and on different screens.

China's Potato Capital

Dingxi's best-known title is China's Potato Capital. Potato is described in regional accounts as the first leading industry of Dingxi, and the city is counted one of the three major potato production areas in China. Dingxi is also one of the country's first regional potato seed breeding bases — a detail that matters, because seed potato production, not only table potatoes, anchors the industry: healthy seed grown in Dingxi's cool loess highlands supplies planting far beyond the prefecture.

The potato's importance in Dingxi is also a story of land and livelihood. On dry loess hills where rainfall limits what will grow, the potato became the reliable crop around which farming incomes, processing — Dingxi potato noodles and starch products appear among the city's noted foods — storage and trading were organised. For Dingxi Television, potato coverage is consequently year-round economic journalism: seed selection and planting, field management and weather, harvest, grading, storage, processing and prices, each stage a service item for the households whose year depends on it.

The Millennium Medicine Town

Dingxi's second great industry is older still in reputation: it is known as a Millennium Medicine Town, a famous producing area of traditional Chinese medicine. Reporting on the China (Gansu) Traditional Chinese Medicine Industry Expo, held in Dingxi, records that the city is home to 135 of the 363 major medicinal varieties identified in a national survey. Its planting area for Chinese medicinal materials has been described as stable at about 1.5 million mu and ranking first among prefecture-level cities in China, and the city is a core area of China's comprehensive experimental zone for the TCM industry's development.

The scale is social as well as botanical. A 2023 People's Daily report on Dingxi's herb economy recorded more than 500,000 peasant households in the city, with over 60 percent engaged in planting Chinese herbs, each household planting on average more than six mu; income from herb cultivation and processing accounted for a substantial share — reported at 20.5 percent for 2022 — of farmers' per capita disposable income. The TCM expo itself, bringing government and industry together in Dingxi to discuss modernising and standardising the trade, is a recurring fixture in the station's news diary.

Minxian, hometown of danggui

Within Dingxi, Minxian — Min County — is viewed as the hometown of Chinese angelica, danggui, one of the most valued herbs in Chinese medicine. Reporting from Minxian records that the county has a long history of planting danggui together with huangqi, Astragalus, and dangshen, Codonopsis; that traditional Chinese medicinal plants have occupied more than 40,000 hectares there, accounting for about half the county's arable land in the account given by a county official; and that revenue from herbal medicine sales accounted for nearly 60 percent of local farmers' per capita net income in that reporting.

Longxi County, at Dingxi's other herb centre, is associated particularly with huangqi and dangshen, and its herb seeds have even entered space-breeding experiments reported in 2024. Minxian's experience also shows the industry's modern turn: e-commerce firms in the county packing angelica, astragalus and codonopsis products for online customers in southern provinces, where the herbs are bought for soups and teas, with more than a thousand online stores reported in the county in earlier coverage. Herb coverage for the station therefore spans field, market, processing line and parcel depot.

An ancient Silk Road town and the Wei River country

Dingxi's history reaches well beyond its modern crop brands. Regional accounts give the city more than 2,200 years of history, tracing it to the setting up of Longxi county in the Warring States period, and place it among the birthplaces of Yellow River civilisation: it is the naming place of Majiayao culture, the celebrated Neolithic painted-pottery culture, and a landscape where Qijia, Siwa, Xindian and other prehistoric cultures intersected. Longxi also claims a special place in surname history as an ancestral home of the Li family, marked by the Li Family Dragon Palace, the clan's ancestral hall complex.

The Wei River thread runs through the same story: the river that watered the Guanzhong plain and the early capitals of China has its source country in Dingxi's hills, at the Weihe River Source scenic area in the prefecture. Heritage coverage from Dingxi Television can therefore move from painted pottery and clan halls to river-source landscapes — the deep background against which a potato-and-herb economy might otherwise look purely modern.

Rural coverage for a farming prefecture

The station record says plainly that Dingxi Television's rural coverage reflects its economy, and the figures behind that phrase show why. When more than 60 percent of farm households plant medicinal herbs, when potatoes are the first leading industry, and when herb income forms a fifth or more of farmers' disposable income, agricultural programming is the prefecture's economic news service. Planting guidance, standardisation of herb cultivation — Dingxi has built extensive standardised herb bases and seed and seedling breeding bases reported in provincial accounts — market prices, processing development and rural e-commerce are the subjects on which viewers judge the channel's usefulness.

That service role also explains the flagship channel's tone as described: local news first, agricultural programming at its core, in Mandarin, for a prefecture whose county towns — Tongwei, Lintao, Zhangxian, Minxian, Weiyuan, Longxi — each have their own crop specialities and market days. The station binds those counties into one Dingxi story, in which a Minxian herb price and an Anding potato harvest are news for the whole prefecture.

Converged media and the prefecture's image

Dingxi's broadcaster now works within the city's converged media centre, producing television with radio and digital services from one organisation. For a prefecture branding itself nationally as China's potato capital and a millennium medicine town — while also working towards titles its planners list such as a medicine capital of China and a national characteristic seed industry base — converged production lets one newsroom present those identities consistently across platforms.

Digital reach matters commercially as well as editorially. The same e-commerce channels that carry Minxian's herbs to buyers in Guangdong carry Dingxi's image; converged reporting that follows local products into online marketplaces connects the station's rural service mission with the prefecture's development story, while the flagship channel keeps its focus on residents' daily news.

Why Dingxi Television matters

Dingxi Television matters because Dingxi is the clearest example in Gansu of a prefecture built on crops: China's potato capital, one of its three major potato areas, and a millennium medicine town where angelica, astragalus and codonopsis planting touches most farm households — all in a Silk Road corridor city 98 kilometres from Lanzhou, at the source of the Wei River. The prefecture-level station is where that economy is reported and serviced daily, in Mandarin news and agricultural programmes made for the loess counties of central Gansu.