About Zhumadian Television

Zhumadian Television

Overview

Zhumadian Television is the prefecture-level television station of Zhumadian in southern Henan, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now integrated into the Zhumadian converged media centre. Its flagship channel carries local news and agricultural programming in Mandarin. Zhumadian, a major grain and peanut-producing prefecture on the Huai River plain, is known for Chaya Mountain and for the Liang Zhu — the Butterfly Lovers — legend associated with Runan, themes reflected in the station's rural and cultural coverage.

The prefecture is one of Henan's great agricultural heartlands: a populous farming territory of plains and low mountains whose name records its history as a relay station on the imperial road south. Its broadcaster's centre of gravity is correspondingly rural — harvests, water, villages and the folk culture of the Central Plains — but its cultural inheritance includes one of the most famous love stories in the world, and its mountains include a landscape that Chinese television audiences know from a classic of the screen.

The city it serves

Zhumadian is a prefecture-level city in south-central Henan, on the Huai River plain where the province narrows toward the Dabie Mountains. It administers Yicheng District and a ring of counties — Queshan, Biyang, Pingyu, Xincai, Shangcai, Xiping, Runan, Zhengyang and Suiping. The city's name, meaning the horse-changing station, records its origin as a posting stop where travellers changed horses on the road between the Central Plains and the south; in older geography the region was Tianzhong, the centre under heaven, and in the Eastern Zhou period it held the heartland of the Cai state, whose capitals stood in present-day Shangcai and Xincai.

For the station, Zhumadian's identity is double: a working grain prefecture of wheat, maize, peanuts — it is one of China's leading peanut producers — sesame and livestock, and a treasury of story. Reporting runs from combine harvesters on the plain to temple fairs in old county towns, and the bulletins must serve farmers checking rain and prices with the same care as townspeople following schools and hospitals.

Chaya Mountain

The prefecture's scenic emblem is Chaya Mountain in Suiping County, a massif of fantastic granite peaks, cliffs and caves above the plain, designated a national geological park and a top-grade scenic area, with lakes such as Boshan reservoir at its feet. Its grotesque rock formations are woven into Chinese popular culture: the mountain scenery is associated with Journey to the West, the Ming novel of the pilgrim monk and his disciples, and the area served as a filming landscape for the story's screen adaptations, so that its peaks are read by Chinese visitors through the lens of the classic — monkeys, demons and pilgrims imagined among real granite towers.

Chaya gives the station a tourism economy to cover — visitor seasons, scenic-area investment, the farmhouse stays and produce sales of Suiping villages — and a reliable source of the prefecture's most striking pictures. Together with Lao Le Mountain, Jinding Mountain and the Tongshan hills, it forms the western rim of scenery that balances the flat farmland in the station's features, and its Journey to the West association makes Zhumadian's landscape programming recognisable to audiences across China.

The Butterfly Lovers of Runan

Zhumadian's deepest cultural claim is the legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai — the Butterfly Lovers, counted among China's four great folk tales and often called the Chinese Romeo and Juliet. Runan County claims the story's hometown: Liangzhu Town, renamed from Ma Township in 2007 after the legend, preserves the Liang-Zhu tomb, the villages of Liang and Zhu, Hongluoshan Academy where the pair are said to have studied, Cao Bridge where they swore brotherhood, and the road of the eighteen-mile farewell. In December 2005 Runan was named the hometown of Liang Zhu in China by the Chinese Folk Artists Association, and in June 2006 the Runan Liang Zhu legend was entered in the first batch of China's national intangible cultural heritage list.

The legend feeds a living culture the station documents: local opera, folk song, storytelling, paper-cutting and painting on the Butterfly Lovers theme, and the commemorative customs by which Runan people still honour the tomb at festival time. The story has generated one of China's most famous pieces of music, the Butterfly Lovers violin concerto, and its Runan roots give Zhumadian Television a cultural franchise of international reach — a love story known on every continent, anchored in one of its own county towns.

Agriculture on the Huai plain

The prefecture's economy stands on the plain. Zhumadian is a major grain base of Henan — wheat and summer maize in rotation — and a nationally significant producer of peanuts and sesame, with oilseed processing, flour and food industries and a large livestock sector. Zhengyang's peanuts, Pingyu's sesame and white sesame products, and the counties' wheat are brands the station's rural coverage follows from field to market: sowing guidance, plant protection, harvest progress, purchasing prices and the weather — above all the Huai basin's summer rains and the flood and waterlogging risks of a low plain — on which the prefecture's income depends.

Water structures the farm year. The prefecture holds Suya Lake in Runan, celebrated as Asia's largest plain reservoir — a vast shallow artificial lake on the Ru River, built by mass labour in the mid-twentieth century, ringed by a hundred-mile dike and willow banks, and now a wetland habitat where thousands of migratory birds gather in autumn and winter. Boshan and Banqiao reservoirs in the western hills complete the system. Reservoir management, irrigation releases and flood control are therefore standing items in the station's service journalism, as practical to its audience as any politics.

History across the counties

Zhumadian's counties carry deep history that the station's cultural teams mine continuously. Shangcai and Xincai were capitals of the Cai state in the Eastern Zhou; the prefecture's ground includes the ancient city sites and tombs of that era; Queshan, in the southern hills, holds a place in modern revolutionary history as a base of guerrilla resistance and the home region of the national hero Yang Jingyu's early organisation — and in the commune era, Queshan's Chaya Mountain satellite commune was among the first people's communes in China, a chapter of rural history now exhibited at the site. Nanhai Temple in Runan, among the largest single temple halls in Asia by local account, adds a religious landmark to the county circuit.

This layered past — Cai-state antiquity, folk legend, revolutionary and commune history — gives cultural programming a range from archaeology to living memory. The station's documentaries and features treat the prefecture's villages as archives: elders' recollections, temple-fair traditions, local operas and the specialised products and foods — Runan dried tofu, queshan crafts, the prefecture's soups and stewed chicken — by which counties know themselves.

News and programming remit

The flagship channel's recorded format — local news and agricultural programming in Mandarin — is an exact description of the prefecture's needs. Bulletins combine municipal government and county news with the agricultural service: weather for farming, pest and disease warnings, subsidy and land-policy explanations, harvest and price reports, and rural infrastructure — roads, water, electricity, schools and clinics in the villages. Livelihood programming covers the towns: employment, including the prefecture's large flow of migrant workers whose seasons away and returns at New Year structure family life, consumer information and public services.

Set pieces mark the station's year: spring ploughing and the wheat harvest's machinery fleets crossing the plain; the summer flood watch on the Huai tributaries; the peanut and sesame harvests; Chaya Mountain's visitor peaks; and the Liang Zhu cultural activities in Runan. Through them all runs the conversion of a farming prefecture into a more urban, connected one — county-town construction, returning entrepreneurs, e-commerce for farm produce — which the station chronicles as its central development story.

The converged media centre

Zhumadian Television now works within the Zhumadian converged media centre, the integrated structure that joins the city's radio, television and new-media operations in a single newsroom, as prefecture broadcasters across China have been reorganised. In a prefecture of dispersed villages, convergence is a distribution reform with teeth: agricultural warnings, weather and market prices gathered for the television bulletin can be pushed instantly to farmers' phones, and county correspondents' material can serve broadcast and mobile platforms from a single filing.

The centre's digital channels also carry the prefecture's cultural assets — Chaya's granite peaks, the Liang Zhu sites, Suya Lake's bird flocks — to national audiences in short-video form, supporting the tourism and produce branding on which county incomes increasingly depend. The flagship channel remains the shared civic service: the evening account in which Yicheng and the nine counties appear together as one prefecture.

Place in Henan's media landscape

Zhumadian Television is the prefecture voice of the southern Henan plain, between the provincial media in Zhengzhou and the county media centres of its own territory. Its distinctiveness lies in the warmth and weight of its materials: a top-grade granite mountain from a beloved classic, the hometown of the Butterfly Lovers, one of Asia's largest plain reservoirs, and some of the richest farmland in the Huai basin. Reporting that world daily — harvests and legends, flood warnings and folk opera, in Mandarin, for a farming prefecture in transition — is the station's continuing contribution to the media life of the Central Plains.