About Xishuangbanna Television

Xishuangbanna Television

Overview

Xishuangbanna Television is the prefecture-level television station of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in far southern Yunnan, based in Jinghong and operated by the prefecture's radio and television broadcaster, now part of the Xishuangbanna converged media centre. Its channels broadcast in Mandarin and Dai, in the Tai Lue language of the prefecture's titular people. Xishuangbanna is China's tropical rainforest region, a Mekong borderland of elephants, tea mountains and Theravada temples, and its station is one of the most distinctive local broadcasters in the country.

The prefecture borders Myanmar and Laos along the Lancang River, the Mekong, and its culture belongs as much to the Tai world of mainland Southeast Asia as to China: Dai villages of stilt houses and peacock dances, golden temples, water festivals and tropical markets. A television station broadcasting in Dai from Jinghong therefore serves a cross-border cultural world as well as a Chinese prefecture, and its programming, in news, festival coverage and cultural features, reflects that double belonging.

The Tropical South of Yunnan

Xishuangbanna occupies the far south of Yunnan, where the Lancang River leaves China to become the Mekong of Southeast Asia. The prefecture administers Jinghong city and the counties of Menghai and Mengla, a land of low tropical valleys and forested ridges with a monsoon climate of heat and heavy rain, the southernmost and warmest territory in Yunnan. Jinghong, the capital, stands on the Lancang's banks, a city of palms, temples and night markets that has grown into one of China's best-known tropical tourist destinations.

The region is China's principal tropical rainforest, with reserves protecting some of the country's richest biodiversity. The Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden at Menglun, in Mengla county, is a famous research and visitor site, and the prefecture's forests shelter wild Asian elephants, whose herds move through the valleys of Mengyang and the Wild Elephant Valley north of Jinghong. For the station, this environment is both a news beat, conservation, weather, tourism, and the visual identity of everything it broadcasts.

Organisation and the Converged Media Centre

Xishuangbanna Television operates within the prefecture's converged media centre, formed under China's national programme integrating local television, radio and new media into single organisations. The centre gathers news once and distributes it across television and digital platforms, with channels broadcasting in Mandarin and Dai from Jinghong. The bilingual structure is built into the prefecture's media, reflecting an autonomous prefecture in which the titular people's language is a language of public life.

Convergence extends the station's tropical brief to new audiences. Elephant movements, festival livestreams, tea-harvest reports and border-trade news can move from the television channel to mobile platforms used by Dai villagers, Jinghong residents and the tourists who crowd the city in season. The centre also sustains Dai-language production, a specialism requiring presenters, translators and cultural knowledge that a pooled prefecture media can maintain. In Xishuangbanna, media convergence is thus also language policy in practice: the Dai voice of the prefecture, carried on every modern platform.

Local News and Border Public Affairs

News is the service's foundation. Xishuangbanna Television reports the prefectural government in Jinghong, the administrations of Menghai and Mengla, infrastructure, education, health and public services across the prefecture. Border affairs are a constant theme: the ports of Mohan on the Laos frontier, where the China-Laos railway crosses, Guanlei river port on the Mekong and Daluo facing Myanmar, together with the trade, tourism and cross-border movement they carry, are standing subjects in the station's public-affairs coverage.

Livelihood programming serves farmers, townspeople and the tourism workforce together: rubber, tea, banana and tropical-fruit prices, planting and tapping guidance, employment in Jinghong's hotels and attractions, and services for the Dai, Hani, Jinuo, Bulang and other communities of the hills and valleys. The Jinuo, recognised as China's fifty-sixth and last officially recognised ethnic group, live in the Jinuo mountains within the prefecture, one of many small peoples whose affairs the station covers as home news.

The Water-Splashing Festival and Dai Culture

The prefecture's greatest cultural event, and the station's greatest annual assignment, is the Water-Splashing Festival, the Dai New Year, held in mid-April. For several days Jinghong and the Dai towns fill with celebration: Buddha-bathing at the temples, dragon-boat racing and fireworks on the Lancang, markets and processions, and the famous communal water-splashing in which crowds drench one another in blessing for the year ahead. It is the largest and most influential of Yunnan's minority festivals, and the station's coverage, in Mandarin and Dai, carries it across the prefecture and to national audiences.

Dai culture fills the station's cultural programming year-round: Theravada Buddhist temples such as the Manchunman temple in the Dai Ethnic Park at Ganlanba, with a history of some 1,400 years, Manting Park in Jinghong, the former royal garden of the Dai kings, Dai brocade weaving, slow-wheel pottery, peacock dance and the hand-grabbed rice and pineapple rice of Dai cuisine. By broadcasting in Tai Lue and filming in the villages, the station acts as the Dai people's own television service, a role of cultural stewardship few stations in China are called to perform so fully.

Elephants, Rainforest and Conservation

Xishuangbanna is China's elephant country, home to a population of wild Asian elephants often numbered at around three hundred, and the station's environmental reporting is dominated by them. Wild Elephant Valley, at the junction of the Mengyang reserve's sections, offers visitors elevated walkways and a cable car for watching herds, and an Asian elephant museum interpreting the animals' ecology. The elephants also make news when herds wander beyond reserves into farms and towns, events the station covers with public-safety information and reporting on the compensation and corridor work by which people and elephants learn to share the prefecture.

Rainforest conservation is the wider frame. The station reports the prefecture's nature reserves, the botanical garden's research, anti-poaching and habitat protection, and the eco-tourism by which conservation earns its keep. In a prefecture whose global fame rests on living nature, elephants, rainforest, tropical plants, environmental journalism is not a niche but a core responsibility, and the station's cameras are among the principal means by which China watches its only wild elephants.

Tea Mountains and the Pu'er Economy

Xishuangbanna is one of the historic homelands of pu'er tea, and tea is central to the station's economic coverage. Menghai county is a capital of pu'er production, home to famous factory teas and to ancient tea mountains whose old trees, in places such as Bulang Mountain, Nannuo and the villages across the Lancang's west bank, yield leaves prized by collectors across East Asia. The Bulang and Hani peoples of those mountains are among the ancient tea-growing peoples of the region, and tea income underpins whole townships.

Programmes follow the spring and autumn harvests, ancient-tree protection, processing and the tea markets of Menghai and Jinghong, together with the rubber economy of the low valleys and the banana and tropical-fruit trades. Tourism completes the circuit, as tea travellers tour the mountains and Jinghong's night markets sell the prefecture's produce. For the station, tea reporting joins agriculture to culture: a story about a Bulang village's old trees is simultaneously about prices, heritage and the rainforest canopy under which the tea grows.

Tourism and the Mekong Gateway

Tourism is the prefecture's public face, and its coverage a major part of the station's output. Jinghong's attractions, Manting Park, the Mengle Great Buddhist Temple, the Gaozhuang Xishuangjing night market on the river, the Dai Ethnic Park at Ganlanba, the Olive Plain down the Lancang, draw visitors from across China, especially in the winter months when the tropical south offers escape from northern cold. The station presents these places, covers the visitor economy of hotels, guides and performers, and reports the management of peak seasons and festivals.

The opening of the China-Laos Railway, crossing at Mohan into Laos, has added a new dimension: Xishuangbanna as a rail gateway to Southeast Asia. The station's coverage follows the cross-border tourism and trade the railway brings, and the prefecture's growing role as China's tropical door to the Mekong countries. A broadcaster in Jinghong thus reports simultaneously on Dai village life and on international corridors, a span of subjects that captures the prefecture's position between the rainforest and the region.

Xishuangbanna Television Today

Today Xishuangbanna Television broadcasts from the prefecture's converged media centre in Jinghong, in Mandarin and Dai, across China's tropical south. Its defining subjects are the prefecture's own: the Water-Splashing Festival and the golden temples, wild elephants in the rainforest valleys, pu'er tea mountains and rubber groves, the Lancang flowing away to become the Mekong, and the border ports and railway that tie this Tai borderland to Southeast Asia.

There is no other station quite like it in China: a prefecture broadcaster speaking Tai Lue from a city of palms, covering elephant herds and tea harvests between its council reports. Xishuangbanna Television's bilingual, bicultural service embodies the purpose of autonomous-prefecture media, to give a distinctive people a modern voice in its own language while binding its homeland into the life of the nation. That is the work its channels perform every day on the banks of the Lancang.