Abstract:
Tea–tourism integration, as a key pathway to revitalizing rural industries and promoting the diversified development of specialty agriculture, is now embracing new opportunities for high-quality development, driven by emerging quality productive forces in agriculture. This paper systematically explores how these forces facilitate tea–tourism integration through technological innovation, optimized factor allocation, and innovative business models. The findings reveal that these forces promote the coordinated upgrading of the tea industry chain, innovation ecosystem, and value network by optimizing factor allocation, accelerating technological iteration, and enhancing value transformation — thereby establishing a mutually reinforcing mechanism of “promoting tourism through tea and revitalizing tea through tourism.” A comparative case analysis demonstrates that tea–tourism integration fosters distinctive development models by integrating resources, applying digital technologies, and building strong brands, thus shaping diversified innovation pathways. Nevertheless, several challenges persist, such as insufficient industry chain extension, misalignment of innovation elements, and inadequate value chain coordination. Accordingly, this paper proposes several innovation strategies: leveraging technology to upgrade the industry chain, aligning talent and land resources to strengthen innovation capacity, and developing new business models to expand value creation — thereby driving the ecological, digital, and brand-led transformation of the integrated tea–tourism value chain.