Blooming 'flower economy': Heze's peony industry boosts development, cultural exchanges

In 2000, Li Xiaoqi, a graduate from China Agricultural University, returned to his hometown of Heze City in east China's Shandong Province and devoted himself to the peony industry. 

After years of hard work, Li expanded his family's peony field, which originally had less than 10 mu (about 0.67 hectares), to 2,200 mu, and built a modern peony industrial park featuring a seedling and fresh-cut flower export processing plant, a cold storage, a laboratory and office facilities.

While developing his own business, Li also led hundreds of local farmers to engage in the peony industry, and helped them master peony production and cultivation techniques, contributing greatly to the local poverty alleviation efforts and effectively promoting the development of the local peony industry.

The thriving peony industry has enabled Heze – "the peony capital of China" – to foster four major development sectors focusing on seedling breeding, flower cultivation, deep processing and cultural tourism.

The 2025 World Peony Conference and the 34th Heze International Peony Cultural Tourism Festival, collectively referred to as the 2025 Heze Peony Festival, officially kicked off on Tuesday. Featuring four sub-forums and 29 activities, the festival will last one month.

Blooming 'flower economy'

As the world's largest peony planting and scientific research and processing base, in recent years, Heze has continued to tap the advantages of peonies in areas such as variety cultivation, industrial expansion, and cultural and tourism integration.

The city has currently cultivated nine color systems, 10 flower shapes and 1,308 varieties, with its planting area and number of varieties ranking first globally.

Besides the peony, Heze has developed the cultivation of other flowers such as the herbaceous peony, rose and gerbera jamesonii. Last year, the city's sales of fresh-cut herbaceous peony flowers reached 120 million pieces, which were exported to more than 20 countries and regions in the world.

In terms of industrial development, Heze has built a complete industrial chain from planting and processing to tourism and cultural creativity.

Having more than 120 peony production and processing enterprises and 20 scientific research institutions, the city has developed over 260 peony-derived products, ranging from seed oil, cosmetics and cultural products. Last year, the total output value of the peony industry reached 13 billion yuan (about $1.8 billion).

As Heze's most beautiful business card, peony has become a powerful engine for the high-quality development of cultural tourism, said Yu Jiannan, head of the Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism.

Promoting cultural exchanges

On Wednesday and Thursday, the Heze Peony International Communication Forum was held. A series of activities, such as the digital interpretation of paintings which converts static paintings into dynamic images, and digital images of peonies generated by ChatGPT, have injected new impetus into the international dissemination of peony culture through technological empowerment.

In recent years, Heze has deeply explored the values of peonies, and actively created a friendly cultural symbol for global communication.

In addition to the holding of the forum, the city has established overseas sub-venues of the Peony Festival in countries such as the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea.

It has also set up peony culture communication stations in Brazil, Malaysia, Romania and other countries, and held award events related to the peony to introduce the beauty of peonies to more than 50 Belt and Road partner countries, offering an intriguing window into the popular perception of peony culture.

The festival has built an important platform for enhancing friendship, strengthening cooperation and cultural exchanges, said Yu.