About Qingyang Television

Qingyang Television

Overview

Qingyang Television is the municipal television station of Qingyang in eastern Gansu, run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within its converged media centre. Its main channel broadcasts local news, folk-culture and agricultural programming in Mandarin. Qingyang, on the Loess Plateau's Dongzhi tableland, is known as a cradle of Chinese folk arts — shadow puppetry, sachets and paper-cutting — and for its red-apple and energy industries, all recurring subjects for the station.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. The documented position — municipal broadcaster, converged media centre, main channel carrying news, folk-culture and agricultural programming — and the folk-art inheritance its record describes are the factual foundation of this profile.

Qingyang and the Dongzhi tableland

Qingyang lies in eastern Gansu — habitually called Longdong, the east of the province's Long region — bordering Shaanxi to the east and north and Ningxia to the west, with Pingliang as its neighbour within Gansu to the south. It is a prefecture-level city of one district, Xifeng, and seven counties, among them Qingcheng, Huanxian, Huachi, Heshui, Zhengning, Ningxian and Zhenyuan, spread over roughly 27,000 square kilometres in the middle reaches of the Yellow River.

Its defining landform is the Dongzhi tableland, or Dongzhi Yuan: a vast, flat-topped expanse of loess, described in regional accounts as part of the largest and best-preserved loess tableland country in the world, where deep gullies cut the yellow earth into plateaus, ridges and valleys. Qingyang is remembered as an early home of Chinese farming — tradition holds that Buku, an ancestor of the Zhou dynasty, taught farming here, beginning a cultivation history that earned the region its reputation as the Longdong Granary, productive in wheat, corn, buckwheat and other grains. A municipal broadcaster here serves a farming civilisation that understands itself to be very old.

The main channel and local programming

The station's main channel broadcasts local news, folk-culture and agricultural programming in Mandarin. That three-part description in the station record is unusually revealing: in Qingyang, folk culture is not a weekend supplement but one of the channel's three stated pillars, alongside the news of the day and the farming information its rural audience depends on.

Within the city's converged media centre, television reporting is produced alongside radio and new-media output. For a prefecture whose fame rests on crafts practised in villages — sachet embroidery, paper-cutting, shadow puppetry — convergence lets the station record performances and makers once and carry them to city viewers, county households and Qingyang people living away from home, while the main channel remains the shared screen of the prefecture.

The Qingyang sachet: xiangbao

The best known of Qingyang's folk arts is the xiangbao, the scented sachet: a small embroidered pouch filled with aromatic herbs, worn for decoration and traditionally for health and good fortune, especially around the Dragon Boat Festival. Qingyang's sachet tradition dates back centuries — local accounts note a centuries-old sachet excavated here — and the craft was inscribed on China's national intangible cultural heritage list in 2008.

The sachet has its own national festival. The Qingyang Xiangbao Folk Culture Festival, described as the only national-level folk culture event in China dedicated exclusively to the scented sachet, reached its 21st edition in June 2026, held at the Qingyang Folk Culture Industry Park through the Dragon Boat Festival holiday. Its programme combined intangible-heritage experiences, folk art exhibitions and performances, a creative cultural-products market and regional food, with artisans demonstrating sachet embroidery alongside paper-cutting, shadow puppetry and pottery. For Qingyang Television, the festival is a signature annual assignment: a home-grown event that turns a village craft into a prefecture-wide celebration and a cultural industry.

Huanxian Daoqing shadow puppetry

In Huanxian — Huan County, under Qingyang — shadow puppetry took a distinctive local form: Daoqing shadow play, combining leather shadow figures with Daoqing singing, a narrative vocal tradition with Taoist associations. Huanxian Daoqing shadow play was inscribed in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage in 2006, listed as traditional drama, with Huanxian as its home and centre, from which it spread to neighbouring counties across the Gansu–Shaanxi–Ningxia border country.

Its performance style is famous for economy and virtuosity: in the traditional description, a single lead performer sings all the roles — the saying attached to the art has one mouth singing the affairs of the ages and two hands commanding millions of soldiers — while accompanists provide the music behind the screen. Performances traditionally run for hours. The art, reformed and perfected by the late-Qing master Xie Changchun in local accounts, has in recent years entered university classrooms: Xinhua reporting described a Daoqing shadow puppetry class at Longdong University taught by a Huanxian performer with more than five decades on stage. Qingyang Television's folk-culture programming can thus follow shadow puppetry from village temple fairs to heritage lists and lecture halls without leaving its own prefecture.

Qingyang paper-cutting

Qingyang paper-cutting, also inscribed as national intangible cultural heritage, completes the trio of crafts named in the station record. Scholarly and heritage accounts describe its style as plain, bold, simple and warm — a direct, vigorous manner distinct from the finer, more delicate paper-cutting traditions of other regions, and one that reflects the folk life of the loess country: farming scenes, animals, festival motifs and auspicious symbols cut for windows, weddings and New Year decoration.

Paper-cutting in Qingyang has traditionally been women's work passed within families, learned by doing rather than through formal schooling, and heritage research on the craft stresses oral transmission — patterns, meanings and techniques carried in memory and story from one generation of cutters to the next. That makes it a natural television subject in a particular way: the camera can show hands, paper and scissors at work, and record the maker explaining a motif, preserving on screen exactly the kind of knowledge that paper itself cannot hold.

Red apples, grain and energy

Folk art shares the main channel's agenda with a working economy. Qingyang has been approved as a strong apple production area — its red apples are named in the station record alongside its energy industries as the prefecture's modern economic pillars. Orchards on the tableland, grain production that sustains the Longdong Granary name, and other noted products in regional accounts, from buckwheat and day lilies to apricot products and pumpkin seeds, give the agricultural programming a year-round cycle of planting, management, harvest and marketing to follow.

The energy industries named in the record add the second, industrial Qingyang: resource development in the eastern Gansu hills brings projects, employment and infrastructure stories that sit at the hard-news end of the bulletin. The editorial balance the record describes — folk culture and farming on one side, apples and energy on the other — is the balance of Qingyang itself, a prefecture simultaneously marketing embroidered sachets and developing energy resources.

A cradle of folk arts

Taken together, Qingyang's crafts justify the description in the station record of the city as a cradle of Chinese folk arts. Few prefectures can point to three nationally listed intangible heritage crafts — sachets, shadow puppetry and paper-cutting — all rooted in the same loess villages, supplemented in regional accounts by folk song, yangge dance, shehuo festival performance and the pit and cave dwellings of loess architecture. Qingyang is styled in travel and cultural accounts as a hometown of sachet embroidery and a hometown of shadow puppetry, titles that function as civic brands as much as descriptions.

For the broadcaster, that density of heritage changes the meaning of folk-culture programming. It is not nostalgia content; it is coverage of a living cultural economy — festivals that draw visitors, crafts that generate income, inheritors who teach, and local government cultural-industry parks built around the sachet. Qingyang Television documents the process by which village arts become prefectural identity, year by year and festival by festival.

Converged media and the prefecture's image

Qingyang's broadcaster now works within the city's converged media centre, producing television with radio and digital services from one organisation. Convergence helps a folk-culture-rich prefecture present itself consistently: the sachet festival, the shadow-puppet stage, the paper-cutters and the apple harvests are Qingyang's national calling cards, and a converged centre can carry them across broadcast and online platforms together while keeping the main channel focused on residents' news and services.

The archive effect matters especially here. Intangible heritage survives by transmission from person to person; a converged newsroom's recordings of elderly inheritors performing and explaining their crafts become, over time, a resource for the transmission itself — material that teachers, researchers and younger makers in Qingyang can return to.

Why Qingyang Television matters

Qingyang Television matters because Qingyang condenses the Loess Plateau's cultural wealth into one prefecture: the Dongzhi tableland's ancient farming country, nationally listed sachet embroidery, Daoqing shadow puppetry and paper-cutting, alongside red-apple orchards and energy development. The municipal station is where that double identity is presented daily — in Mandarin news, agricultural service and the folk-culture programming its own record places at the centre of the channel.