In Linshu County, Linyi City, Shandong Province, a tangible-cultural-heritage plant-extraction craft has been passed down for generations. Using traditional techniques—cleaning and preparation, maceration and extraction, and distillation—the artisans precisely isolate active components from the region’s abundant plant resources to produce essential oils, medicinal preparations, fragrances and more. This skillset embodies centuries of local knowledge about plant properties and applications and stands as a shining gem in China’s heritage of traditional craftsmanship.
Chen Lei is the contemporary steward of this craft. Born into a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, she has incorporated the technique into daily life, quietly bringing the power of plants into every corner of the community.
Spring sunlight filters through the window, falling across the wooden table in the Chen’s heritage workshop. Seated at her bench, Chen holds a small bundle of freshly sorted mugwort. She gently places the herb into the extraction apparatus, adds water, applies heat and seals the system—every step carried out in orderly fashion. The fresh mugwort cycles slowly through the closed system; after distillation, cooling and phase separation over several hours, field greens condense into drops of clear mugwort essential oil.
In the transparent condenser, hydrosol trickles drop by drop. Chen opens a valve and pours a small cup forward. “Smell this—this is its soul,” she says, as a crisp herbal fragrance rises.
“Everything can be extracted,” Chen laughs—five words that capture the essence of this ancestral craft. Petals, leaves, bark and even the humblest fruits can become treasures in her hands. Put them in the still and you get hydrosol and essential oil; immerse them in oil and three months later you have the base for an ointment. Shelves in the workshop are filled with mugwort soap, comfrey salve, ginseng-ginger shampoo and plant masks, all produced bit by bit using the most traditional methods.
This innovative transformation of traditional resources has created new industrial value for local plants and opened a tangible income path for surrounding villages.
Seventy-year-old Wang from Zhouguanzhuang Village, who has limited mobility and cannot travel far, now sits in the workshop sorting mugwort and can earn 70–80 yuan a day. “I just move my fingers and make money; the hours are flexible—this is great,” she says with a smile, never pausing her work.
There are many people like Wang. The Chen workshop now provides stable employment for more than 200 villagers from ten nearby villages—some harvest, some sort and others package products. Through the workshop’s industry chain, more than 10,000 villagers have benefited from local employment opportunities.