There are many companies that are involved in helping us to bring Nine Rivers Distillery to reality – today we start to bring these companies into the spotlight, starting with Fujian Rong Tian Construction Company – our construction partner.
Rong Tian
Fujian Rong Tian Construction Company are the company that recently won the tender to build our distillery in Longyan, something we announced back on 11th December (CLICK HERE to catch up and read that article if you missed it). Let’s start with hearing from the boss himself.
黄华荣 Huang Hua Rong
“I first heard about the Nine Rivers Distillery project back in 2020 in Dongguan, Guangdong. A group of whisky loving friends were talking about it one afternoon when I caught up with them for lunch. Some of the group were part of the Dongguan Whisky Networking community and had met some of the people involved. There was some curiosity about the project because it seemed to be so unique, and so ambitious! A bunch of whisky lovers coming together to take on the big players in the industry? Was it even possible? But honestly after that day, I totally forgot about it – until 2022.”
“During 2022 I heard the name of Nine Rivers Distillery circulating more and more both within Guangdong and also within Fujian, where our company, Rong Tian, is based. Some of my friends in Guangdong started to forward me WeChat official account articles. The whisky lovers had gone from talking about it to actually doing something. They had land in Longyan – a significant piece of land too! I remember checking a map and seeing their site was just in the next district of Longyan from where our company headquarters were. It was an interesting coincidence, but again, I didn’t really think much of it.”
“Eventually I heard about a tender to provide the construction services for this project. I asked one of my staff to look into it and they came back to me with one of the most interesting architectures I’ve seen in more than two decades of leading our company. I didn’t know what a “typical distillery” would or should look like, but I expected it would be a boring, typical factory building. When I saw the vision that these whisky lovers had put together on their website, I knew at that point I wanted to be involved in this project.”
“We’re not the biggest construction company in Longyan, let alone Fujian province. But we have had some good success over these last 20 years and it has given us the ability to be able to choose some of the more interesting projects. As you get older you realise there’s more to life that just winning construction projects and successfully delivering them. There’s the need for challenge and to do new things. We’ve built so many factories, roads, residential developments and even railway infrastructure, that it just get a bit, well, too easy.”
“We’ve never built a distillery so I wanted this project for chance to push our skills and talents into new areas. I also wanted the professional pride of building something that is, in all honest, quite beautiful. Buildings with style and character that are combining so many interesting styles of design and architecture. The type of buildings that I can photograph, put on my office wall and look at every day and be proud that we, Rong Tian, we built that.”
“I assigned this project to the best people I have. They were brief with the simple statement that WE NEED THIS PROJECT – this will define Rong Tian for 2023 and beyond. This will be the project that will underpin our future success. I made the right decision. We won the project. So here’s to 2023 and beyond!”
罗发叶 Luo Fa Ye
The team from Rong Tian is led by 罗发叶 Luo Fa Ye, and here are his thoughts.
“It has been an exciting few months to get to this point. Initially the entire tendering process, which was a massive piece of work for us to do in such a short space of time. We were bidding against some really amazing companies – some much bigger than us with a much richer portfolio of achievements. But every single one of them were highly respect companies. The best of the best. It meant that we, as Rong Tian, had to work harder to create a proposal that wasn’t just technically correct and commercially correct – it also had to convey the fact that we, as Rong Tian, could deliver to the quality standards that were expected.”
“In hindsight, I think this is where we had the advantage. This project was never about making profit for us as a company. Sure, we can’t afford to make a loss. But the future value of having such a beautiful, showcase example of the very best of Chinese craftsmanship on a project that will get global attention -this is what mattered to us as Rong Tian.”
“I’m really proud that we won this project and I’m enjoying working with the team at Nine Rivers Distillery. It’s giving me a really good opportunity to practice my English!
Hayden Zou
I’d like to start by saying that the tendering process to choose our construction partner was a really difficult decision for us to make. We had 8 proposals from 8 really amazing companies. Every single one of them were more than capable to deliver our project. So to help us to make the right decision, we worked with an independent third party company who are experts in this process.
Under the guidance of the third party expert company, we chose Rong Tian and we’re confident that it was the right decision for us to make.
So far, everything is going to plan and to schedule and I’m really excited to finally see our project transition from the ambition of a couple of hundred whisky lovers, into something real.
Would You Like To Read More?
If you enjoyed reading this, and you would like to catch up with some of our past articles, then please CLICK HERE and go to our News Section, where most of our other content is published.
Follow Us
If you have enjoyed reading this and want to learn more about Nine Rivers Distillery then choose from the links below – or use the QR code to follow us on WeChat.
LinkedIn users you can CLICK HERE to follow us. Facebook users, you can CLICK HERE. YouTube users, you can CLICK HERE.
Pretty awesome.