About Lüliang Television

Lüliang Television

Overview

Lüliang Television is the municipal television station of Lüliang in western Shanxi, operated by the Lüliang radio and television broadcaster as part of the prefecture's converged media centre. Its flagship channel provides news, livelihood and agricultural programming in Mandarin across a largely mountainous prefecture along the Yellow River. Lüliang, named for the Lüliang Mountains, is known for coal and coking, for Fenjiu liquor distilled at Xinghuacun in Fenyang, for red dates and small grains, and for loess landscapes and Yellow River scenery at Liulin and Qikou.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. What is documented is its municipal ownership, converged-media structure and editorial territory: a big, poor-soil, mountainous prefecture whose television needs are unusually weighted toward agriculture, rural affairs and the Yellow River counties.

A mountain prefecture on the Yellow River

Lüliang is a prefecture-level city in western Shanxi, geographically defined by rugged terrain and by the Yellow River, which forms its western boundary with Shaanxi. Named after the Lüliang Mountains that run through it, the prefecture includes the city of Lishi at its centre and counties and county-level cities spread across loess hills and river valleys: Fenyang, Xiaoyi, Liulin, Lin County, Xing County, Jiaocheng and others.

Travel and reference sources describe Lüliang as a historic trade corridor along the Yellow River and a land of loess plateau scenery — gullies, terraces and cave dwellings — quite different from the Fen valley cities to its east. That geography explains the station record's emphasis: in a prefecture where many communities are villages in the hills, agricultural and livelihood programming is not a minority interest but the core of local television.

The flagship channel and rural programming

The flagship channel provides news, livelihood and agricultural programming in Mandarin across the prefecture. The agricultural strand deserves emphasis. Farming in the Lüliang hills means small grains, potatoes, red dates and walnuts grown on terraced loess, subject to drought and erosion; planting and harvest seasons, water, roads and market prices are information rural households actively need, and a prefecture station is their natural supplier.

News coverage spans the prefecture's county towns as well as Lishi itself: coal and coking centres such as Liulin and Xiaoyi, the liquor city of Fenyang, and the Yellow River ports of Lin County. Within the converged media centre, the channel's reporting also feeds digital services that increasingly reach younger viewers and Lüliang people working outside the prefecture.

Fenjiu and Xinghuacun: the liquor heritage

Lüliang is renowned as the home of Fenjiu, one of China's most famous baijiu spirits, distilled at Xinghuacun — Apricot Blossom Village — in Fenyang. Fenjiu is the archetypal light-flavour (qingxiang) baijiu, celebrated for a clean, crisp finish and floral aroma, with a history stretching back, by local account, thousands of years. Xinghuacun is also celebrated in Chinese literary culture as the setting evoked by the Tang dynasty poet Du Mu's famous lines about asking where a tavern might be found, and being pointed toward Apricot Blossom Village.

The Fenjiu cultural scenic area in Fenyang presents the brewing tradition through a museum, brewing demonstrations and tastings, and the distillery economy is one of the prefecture's industrial pillars. For Lüliang Television, Fenjiu is at once an industry story — jobs, brands and sales — and a cultural story linking the prefecture to one of the most quoted poems in the Chinese language. The station record lists Fenjiu liquor distilled at Xinghuacun among the defining facts of its prefecture, and liquor heritage duly recurs in local cultural programming.

Qikou, Lijiashan and Yellow River culture

At Lin County on the Yellow River stands Qikou, an ancient trading town described as the first town of the winding Yellow River. In the Ming and Qing dynasties Qikou was a major hub of Yellow River water transport, where goods moving between Shanxi and the northwest changed between boat and caravan. Its Heilong — Black Dragon — Temple overlooks the river, and its old streets preserve the atmosphere of the port in its commercial prime.

Above Qikou, the village of Lijiashan preserves more than a hundred Ming and Qing cave dwellings built by a Li family enriched by Shanxi merchant trade, arranged in layered tiers on the hillside in a layout likened to a phoenix and praised by the painter Wu Guanzhong as like a Han tomb, yet like a paradise on earth. Residents still live among the cave houses, drying red dates at their doors. Yellow River scenery at Liulin and Qikou is named in the station record as central to its rural and cultural output, and Qikou's combination of river, temple and cave architecture is among the most televisual landscapes in western Shanxi.

Red dates, small grains and loess agriculture

Red dates — jujubes — are Lüliang's signature crop. Liulin County's date-growing history is put at more than 1,300 years, its Mu date variety counted among China's top ten dates, and a belt of date forest runs for nearly a hundred miles along the Yellow River in the county. A red date cultural festival in Liulin has featured displays including a giant national flag made, by local report, of 350,000 red dates representing the county's people. The county's loess ravine setting — low altitude, strong sunlight, dry climate and large day–night temperature differences — is credited with promoting the sugar accumulation that makes its dates prized.

Walnuts from Fenyang, sea buckthorn, and the small grains and coarse cereals of the hills — millets, beans and oats used in dishes such as youmian kaolaolao, oat noodles — complete an agricultural profile that dominates the prefecture's rural economy. Agricultural programming on Lüliang Television follows these crops through their seasons, from blossom and drought-watch to harvest and festival.

Coal, coking and the industrial counties

Lüliang is also a coal prefecture. Coal and coking, named first in the station record's list of its themes, are centred on counties such as Liulin, Xiaoyi and Lishi's surroundings, where mining and coke ovens have provided industrial employment in an otherwise agricultural region. The balance between that industry — its jobs, its revenues and its environmental costs on fragile loess — and the prefecture's farming and river landscapes is the central economic question of Lüliang's public life.

Revolutionary history adds another strand: Xing County's Caijiaya was a capital of the Jin-Sui border area during the war against Japan, and its memorial hall preserves thousands of revolutionary relics. Wenshui County, meanwhile, is the ancestral home of Wu Zetian, China's only female emperor. A prefecture station's cultural programming in Lüliang moves among all of these: mines, memorials, liquor, dates and the Yellow River.

North Wudang and the prefecture's landscapes

The prefecture's natural and religious landscapes include North Wudang Mountain, a Taoist sanctuary whose main peak, Xianglu Peak, rises to 1,983 metres, and the Pangquangou National Nature Reserve, a large area of primeval forest known as a habitat of the brown eared pheasant. The Yellow River's first great bend at Shilou, where the river turns in a near-circle known as Qiankun Bay, adds a further signature landscape.

Such places give the station's feature and tourism programming strong visual material across the seasons — apricot blossom in spring, forest summers, red leaves and date harvests in autumn — and support a visitor economy that local authorities promote as a complement to coal and liquor.

Converged media across the mountains

Lüliang's broadcaster works as part of the prefecture's converged media centre, uniting television with radio and new-media production. In a prefecture of dispersed mountain communities, converged distribution — broadcast channels plus mobile and online services from one newsroom — is the practical means of maintaining a single Lüliang-wide public conversation.

Why Lüliang Television matters

Lüliang Television matters because its prefecture is one of the most distinctive in Shanxi: a loess mountain world along the Yellow River that produced Fenjiu, feeds itself on dates and small grains, remembers a revolutionary border-area capital, and still mines coal in its valleys. Its flagship channel, with agricultural programming at its heart, is built for that world — the screen on which Qikou rivermen, Fenyang distillers, Liulin date farmers and Lishi townspeople appear in the same local news.