BEIJING, May 22 (Xinhua) -- A champion of traditional culture, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken a keen personal interest in the growth of China's tea industry and frequently encourages tea-centric cultural exchanges.

East China's Fujian Province, where Xi served as a local official early in his career, boasts a tea-growing history of more than 1,600 years and produces a diverse array of varieties, including black, white and oolong tea.

"I worked in Fujian Province for 17 and a half years," Xi once said. "During my years there, I mainly drank Gongfu tea," he added, referring to the traditional Chinese brewing method known for revealing the evolving flavors of the tea leaves from one infusion to the next. "But I didn't have that much leisure time," he joked.

Decades of local governance experience in Fujian and later in east China's Zhejiang Province, famed for its Longjing tea, equipped Xi with a profound, first-hand insight into tea culture and the industry.

In 1988, Xi became the party chief of Ningde, then an underdeveloped prefecture in Fujian. A grounded and dedicated local official in his thirties, he traveled extensively across Ningde's counties and townships, recognizing how the humble tea leaf could help alleviate poverty and unlock local economic potential.

Tanyang, a tea-growing village in the prefecture, is the cradle of a black tea that gained international renown more than a century ago and was once favored by the British royal family.

Villagers recalled that Xi arrived plainly dressed and wore a warm smile throughout his first visit to Tanyang. He asked detailed questions about tea planting and processing while speaking with the village chief, then climbed a nearby tea-covered hill in a light rain, his shoes caked in mud.

Over several follow-up visits, Xi championed scientific management techniques to upgrade tea yields and quality, urging locals to build a strong brand identity that would restore the tea's historic popularity. Today, Tanyang and dozens of neighboring villages have successfully cast off poverty, transformed by the economic power of their native tea leaves.

Throughout his subsequent tenures as provincial leader of Zhejiang and later as Chinese president, Xi has frequently inspected tea farms across various provinces. He has been pushing for coordinated efforts to promote tea culture, advance the industry, and integrate technology into the sector -- underscoring the beverage's vital role in China's cultural heritage, rural revitalization and green development.