EVERY morning at around 7 o’clock, Li Guanrong, 65, walks to a nearby hill covered with oil-tea camellia trees, a habit he has kept for over a decade.

After his retirement in 2009, Li returned to his hometown of Jufeng Township in Shiqian County, Guizhou Province. Together with his brother, he contracted a wild oil-tea base of more than 5,000 mu (333.33 hectares).

Jufeng Township is warm in winter and cool in summer. Since ancient times, the local people have planted oil-tea camellia, a vital source of edible oil obtained from its seeds.

Du Chao, deputy Party chief of the township, said Jufeng has built a modern ecological oil-tea demonstration park.

“Camellia trees have well-developed roots, which can conserve water and prevent soil erosion. Tea seeds can produce oil, while the pressed cakes of tea seeds can also be made into daily chemical supplies and fertilizer,” Li said.

To increase the added value of camellia trees, Li founded a company in 2011 and built a processing plant covering. After over a decade of development, the company’s sales volume of tea-seed oil increased from less than one ton at the beginning to more than 90 tons in 2019, creating about 3,000 jobs annually on average.

As the market demand for tea-seed oil increased year by year, Li seized the opportunity to develop camellia oil series products and sold them to the metropolises of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, with the annual output value of up to 15 million yuan (US$2.17 million).(Xinhua)