About Longnan Television

Longnan Television

Overview

Longnan Television is the municipal television station of Longnan in southeastern Gansu, based in Wudu District and run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within its converged media centre. Its main channel broadcasts local news and livelihood programming in Mandarin. Longnan, where Gansu meets Sichuan and Shaanxi in the Qinba mountains, is the province's greenest prefecture, known for Sichuan pepper, walnuts, olive oil and the Baima Tibetan culture, themes central to the station's output.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. The documented position — municipal broadcaster based in Wudu, converged media centre, main channel carrying local news and livelihood programming in Mandarin — and the balance its record describes between mountain agriculture, river-valley scenery and ethnic culture are the factual foundation of this profile.

Where three provinces meet in the Qinba mountains

Longnan sits in the southeastern part of Gansu, where Gansu, Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces meet. It lies in the Qinba mountains, a rugged, deeply folded landscape of river valleys and steep slopes that looks and feels very different from the dry loess country most people associate with Gansu. Within the province, Longnan borders Tianshui to the north and Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture to the west, and it serves as an important transportation hub between Gansu and Sichuan.

Longnan is described in official tourism accounts as the only city in Gansu that sits fully within the Yangtze River basin, and People's Daily has made the same point in reporting on its olive industry: Longnan is the only city in the province fully within the Yangtze basin. Wudu District, the station's home, lies in the Bailong River valley, part of that Yangtze system. A mild climate, distinct seasons and abundant sunlight and water resources, in People's Daily's description of Wudu, give this corner of Gansu a greener character than the rest of the province — the reason Longnan is called Gansu's greenest prefecture. For a municipal broadcaster, that geography is the setting of almost every story: terraced fields above a river, mountain villages, and a city stretched along the Bailong River curves.

The main channel and local programming

The main channel broadcasts local news and livelihood programming in Mandarin. Its agenda, as the station record frames it, is built around the products and cultures for which Longnan is known: Sichuan pepper, walnuts, olive oil and the Baima Tibetan culture of Wenxian County. Those are not decorative themes. Pepper and olives are income for hundreds of villages, walnuts are a mountain staple, and Baima song and dance are living heritage in the prefecture's southern counties.

Within the city's converged media centre, television reporting is produced alongside radio and new-media output. Longnan administers one urban district, Wudu, and eight counties, with many towns and villages spread through difficult mountain terrain. A single municipal channel remains the common screen on which a dispersed prefecture sees itself — harvest news from the pepper terraces, olive pressing in the Bailong valley, festival coverage from Tibetan townships, and the public-service information that livelihood programming carries to remote settlements.

Wudu Sichuan pepper: a national first

Wudu District is one of China's premier regions for cultivating Sichuan pepper and one of its traditional places of origin, enjoying a mild climate, distinct seasons and abundant sunlight and water. People's Daily reported in October 2025 that Wudu today leads the nation in five key measures: Sichuan pepper planting area, output, total value, quality and farmers' income from the crop. The district has become China's largest high-quality Sichuan pepper production base and the country's hub for product research and development, distribution, information exchange and price formation.

The scale is recorded in the same reporting. Wudu is home to eight Sichuan pepper production bases each spanning over 10,000 mu, and 108 bases exceeding 1,000 mu, covering 650 villages in 37 townships, towns and subdistricts. In 2025, Wudu's total Sichuan pepper output reached 34,500 tonnes. The high-quality peppers are sold across China and exported to more than 20 countries and regions, including South Korea, Japan and the United States. The best-known variety is Da Hong Pao, valued in accounts of Wudu pepper for its red colour, large full grains, rich fragrance and mellow numbing flavour.

In 2024, a Sichuan pepper industry expo hall opened in Wudu — China's only exhibition hall dedicated to the Sichuan pepper industry — showcasing the crop's history, cultural heritage, cultivation and processing techniques and marketing practices. The district has also extended the chain into pepper oil, pepper sprouts, pepper powder and dried pepper, and into derivatives such as pepper-scented candles, perfumes, essential oils and pepper soap. For Longnan Television, pepper is a year-round rural beat: planting and picking on the terraces, prices formed in Wudu's markets, processing plants, and the expo hall as a symbol of a spice turned into an industry.

Olive oil in the Bailong River valley

If pepper is Longnan's oldest signature, olives are its most surprising one. Olive trees were first introduced to China in 1964 and planted on a trial basis at sites across the Yangtze River basin. Wudu District, which receives about 600 millimetres of rain a year and benefits from abundant sunshine and suitable soil, has been identified by Chinese and international experts as China's most suitable region for olive cultivation, and Longnan is now widely described as the hometown of Chinese olives.

People's Daily reported that Wudu has developed 108 olive varieties in recent years, planted mainly in towns, townships and subdistricts along the Bailong River basin, and that the industry has lifted incomes for more than 200,000 people in 320 villages across 28 towns and townships. By the end of 2024, Wudu's olive groves stretched across 641,300 mu. That year the district produced 56,900 tonnes of fresh olives and 8,200 tonnes of virgin olive oil, generating a total industry value of 4 billion yuan, and it led China in olive cultivation, fresh yield, virgin olive oil production and quality, as well as overall economic returns. Sixteen processing facilities had been set up to support more than 80 products in ten major categories, from edible olive oil and health supplements to olive oil chilli sauce, canned olives, cosmetics and olive leaf extract, and Wudu's olive products had picked up 102 awards abroad and 89 at home, by the same reporting.

Terraced groves above the river, mills at harvest time and award-winning oil sold to other provinces give the station an agricultural success story with a Mediterranean echo in the mountains of northwest China — a story no other Gansu prefecture station can tell in the same way.

Walnuts and the mountain economy

The station record also names walnuts among Longnan's defining products, alongside pepper and olive oil. Walnuts belong to the wider mountain economy of the Qinba ranges, where tree crops suit slopes too steep for grain and where olives, pepper, tea, ginkgo and medicinal herbs all appear in accounts of the prefecture's local products. That mix matters editorially: Longnan's rural coverage is not about a single crop but about a mountain prefecture that has built its farm income on trees and terraces — pepper for the national spice trade, olives for oil, walnuts and other produce for food markets.

Longnan's history deepens that coverage. The area was settled by humans at least 7,000 years ago, civilisations developed along the Xihanshui and Bailong rivers several thousand years ago, and Longnan is considered an early home of Qin culture — the culture of the dynasty that first united China. Bikou town, at the junction of Gansu, Sichuan and Shaanxi on the Bailong River, began as a water market town in the Ming dynasty and became an important port for transporting wood and medicinal materials from deep in the mountains. Mountain trade, in other words, is centuries old here; television now follows its modern, branded form.

Baima Tibetan culture in Wenxian

In Wenxian County, in the south of the prefecture, live the Baima Tibetans, described in travel and cultural accounts as an old branch of the Tibetan people. Baima communities are found around Tielou Tibetan Township near the Wenxian county seat and in the Baima River area, which cultural accounts describe as the ancestral home of the Baima Tibetans and a national AAAA-level scenic spot for ecological folk customs.

The Baima are renowned for their singing and dancing. Accounts describe a people who lead simple lives in traditional houses, wear distinctive costumes — including, in descriptions of Baima dress, white felt hats with cock feathers — and follow their own folkways, shepherding, keeping bees, growing crops and weaving cloth. Their worship embraces the sun, moon, mountains, rivers, wind, rain, thunder, lightning, animals and plants, and grand sacrificial activities are held each year for their most revered gods: the ancestor god, the sun god and the grain god. Villages such as Caoheba, a Baima Tibetan town with a history of about a thousand years, are marked by pillars carved with mask totems, houses with red eaves and white ridges, ancient trees, small bridges and bluestone paths, and visitors are treated to mask dance performances.

For Longnan Television, Baima culture is a signature cultural subject: festivals, mask dances, songs and village life in Wenxian give the prefecture a distinctive identity within Gansu, and the station record names that culture among the central themes of its output.

Rivers, reserves and the green prefecture

Longnan's scenery underpins its tourism coverage. Wanxiang Cave, on the south bank of the Bailong River, is a large karst cave landform described as having existed for 250 to 300 million years. Wenxian Tianchi is an alpine lake set in a national forest park, mirroring the surrounding mountains. The Baishuijiang National Nature Reserve in Wenxian County is a major protected area, and accounts of Longnan note that it contains the largest population of wild giant pandas in Gansu — a reminder that this green corner of the province is also wildlife habitat of national importance.

Spring arrives early in the Bailong River valley, where the warm, humid climate brings rapeseed flowers into bloom earlier than in other parts of Gansu, spreading golden fields along the valley past Tibetan wooden houses and white-walled villages. Festivals recorded for Longnan include a peach blossom festival in April and a tea picking festival around the Qingming Festival. Rivers, caves, lakes, pandas and early spring flowers give the municipal station a tourism beat built on being Gansu's green exception.

Converged media and the prefecture's image

Longnan's broadcaster now works within the city's converged media centre, producing television alongside radio and digital services from one organisation. Convergence suits a prefecture whose calling cards are products and places: Wudu pepper priced for the whole country, olive oil winning awards abroad, Baima dances in Wenxian and pandas in Baishuijiang. A converged centre can carry those stories across broadcast and online platforms together, while the main channel keeps its focus on the news and livelihood services residents need across one district and eight mountain counties.

Why Longnan Television matters

Longnan Television matters because Longnan is Gansu's exception: the province's only prefecture fully in the Yangtze basin, its greenest territory, a place where three provinces meet in the Qinba mountains. It is China's largest high-quality Sichuan pepper base, the hometown of Chinese olives, a walnut and mountain-produce economy, and home to the Baima Tibetans of Wenxian. The municipal station in Wudu is where those identities meet daily — in Mandarin news, livelihood and cultural programmes made for a mountain prefecture that faces Sichuan as much as it faces the rest of Gansu.