Great Wall Cigars

Great Wall — 長城 — is the cigar brand of the Chinese state monopoly, rolled in Shifang, two hours north of Chengdu, in Sichuan. The factory was born in 1918 as Yichuan Industry Society, ahead of any other cigar factory in the country according to the trade press, in a town that has grown tobacco for four centuries. In the 1960s it rolled for Mao Zedong a cigar whose blend he approved and which was then put on the market: the 132, hand-rolled and pre-cut, remains the name every Chinese enthusiast knows, and the rollers of the 132 team are the house's elders, in photographs on the walls.

The current site, completed in 2007, covers two hundred thousand square metres and makes mostly machine-made cigars — five hundred and sixty million a year at the time of the report, against a hundred and twenty-six million in 2003. This atlas does not carry those. It carries the hand-rolled cigar building, set apart on the site: a million and a half cigars a year, nearly a hundred rollers overseen by three masters, four hundred thousand cigars ageing, a Cuban seed introduced in the early 2000s, trials on Hainan island, leaf purchases in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Indonesia, and technical partnerships with Altadis and Agio — a Dominican roller comes to train the teams.

The market was domestic. It is opening: after three distribution agreements in 2024, China Tobacco International (HK) signed on 23 July 2025, at the factory itself, an exclusive worldwide agreement outside mainland China. This atlas opens China as a producing country for this house, without setting a zone or a variety: the press has described the factory, not yet the fields.

Range Depth

• 132

  Wrapper Chinese · Strength Medium

  The cigar rolled for Mao in the 1960s, hand-made and pre-cut — the name every Chinese enthusiast knows.

• Great Wall

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium-Full

  The hand-rolled lines of the separate building — Cuban seed from Sichuan, leaf bought in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Indonesia. Six new releases shown at Inter-tabac 2025.