Shuyi Grass Jelly Brand Guidelines: A 2007 Chengdu Tea Shop, a New Name and a Red Rabbit

A Chengdu tea shop with a borrowed name.

Shuyi Grass Jelly, written 书亦烧仙草 and romanised as Shuyi Shaoxiancao, is a tea-drink chain from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. The second half of its Chinese name, shaoxiancao, is the word for grass jelly, the dark, herbal jelly that the chain built its menu around. According to a profile by the business outlet Bright Company (明亮公司), carried by the retail-property trade site Winshang in October 2023, the first shop opened in Chengdu in 2007 under a different name, “85°C tea.” A second Winshang article, written by the trade title Drinks News (饮品报) in October 2024, gives the same founding year and the same early name, and cites the company’s own website for both.

The early years were slow by later standards. Bright Company reported that the business did not hurry to open shops and had only a little over 50 stores by 2013. In 2015, it wrote, the founder Wang Bin moved the business from a sole trader to a company, setting up Sichuan Shuyi Catering Management (四川书亦餐饮管理有限公司), building a team and opening the first shop outside Sichuan in the same year.

The menu took its familiar shape around 2016. Bright Company described how the founder combined the traditional grass jelly snack with milk tea, turning a bowl dessert into a drink in a cup, and how a run of grass jelly variations followed, among them versions with mango and pomelo, with small taro balls and with yoghurt. At the end of that year, the same report said, the bakery chain 85°C brought an infringement suit over the name, and the tea chain chose to rename itself. Both Winshang articles date the new name, Shuyi Shaoxiancao, to 2017.

The rename came just before rapid growth. Bright Company reported more than 500 stores in 2017, a central-China branch company in Changsha and operating centres in Chongqing, Wuhan and Xi’an. By 2018, it said, the chain had about 1,300 stores and had opened a shop in Toronto, its start abroad. That year the brand also adopted the line “half a cup is toppings,” a promise that matched its heavily topped cups.

Black, then green, then black again.

Shuyi’s visual story is unusually well documented because the brand changed its look twice in two years and the trade press followed both changes. Before 2022 its shopfronts used what Drinks News called “grass jelly black” as the main colour, alongside red and white, with the Chinese character 书 (shu, “book”) as the mark.

In April 2022, Bright Company reported, Shuyi began a full brand upgrade. It recast itself as a maker of “plant-based new tea drinks,” with grass jelly as the main plant ingredient. The look changed with the strategy. The avatar on its official accounts switched from the 书 character to a red rabbit character named Xiandi (仙蒂), and more than 100 stores opened in the new style, which dropped the classic red-and-white scheme for a fresh, tender green and used natural stone and plain, unpatterned wood.

The rabbit had a story behind it. According to Drinks News, the company said the character drew on the Chinese legend of the Jade Rabbit pounding herbs on the moon, reread for the brand as “an immortal rabbit making immortal grass,” a play on xiancao, the grass in grass jelly. The same article noted that the 2022 period also brought new drink lines in a lighter style, among them an orange-based series whose packaging matched that lighter look.

The change did not last. Drinks News reported that some franchisees said in public that the red rabbit on a green shopfront looked cheap and could be mistaken for a copycat shop, and that some regular customers said the brand no longer felt familiar. At the end of 2023, it wrote, Shuyi moved to what it called version 4.0: shops returned to a Chinese style, the logo went back to the 书 character, and the shopfront colours returned to red, white and black. The publication judged the 4.0 look close to the pre-2022 identity.

Design and documentation.

China’s tea-drink, coffee, burger and restaurant chains present themselves first at street level. A shopfront, a cup and a paper bag are often the first things a customer sees of the brand, and many chains add a mascot, a theme song or a recurring character that appears on signs, packaging and social media at the same time. Some keep their shops small and built for takeaway; others put the same care into seating, lighting and a bakery counter as into the drinks.

Menus are usually organised by named drinks and dishes rather than by codes. Fruit teas, cheese-topped teas, lemon drinks, soft-serve ice cream, fried chicken and hotpot appear under house names, and chains that move abroad often add local flavours while keeping the core list the same. The names, the cups and the colours of the shop carry the brand from one city to the next.

The size of a network is something these companies publish themselves, in annual reports, listing documents and on their own sites, and the press repeats those counts with a date attached. Some chains run every shop directly; others rely mainly on franchisees, and several have moved from one model to the other. Store networks now reach Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and North America as well as the home market.

Ownership is usually set out plainly on corporate pages: who founded the business and where, which group owns it now, and whether its shares trade in Hong Kong, on a mainland exchange or in New York. This guide follows those published facts, attributes counts to dated sources, and treats each chain’s visual identity as a design subject rather than a claim about its food or drinks.

A franchise map that reaches well beyond Sichuan.

Shuyi grew mainly through franchising, and its shop counts have been tracked closely by Chinese chain-monitoring services, whose figures differ. Drinks News wrote that the brand announced passing 5,000 stores in July 2020 and that it topped 7,000 in 2021. Citing the tracker Jihai, Bright Company counted 8,325 stores in 31 provinces and 324 cities as of October 2023. A year later, citing a different tracker, Zhaimen Canyan, Drinks News gave 5,585 stores as of 7 October 2024 and described a period of closures alongside new openings.

The network’s centre of gravity is not its home city. In the October 2023 count, Bright Company placed the most stores in Hunan, ahead of Sichuan, and the most in any city in Changsha, ahead of Chengdu. Central and south-west China together held about two thirds of the shops, and the brand had largely stayed out of the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai area. The same report listed a headquarters in Chengdu and seven branch companies, in Changsha, Wuhan, Foshan, Zhengzhou, Nanning, Xi’an and Jinan. It also reported that a large share of stores sat near housing estates, with smaller shares in shopping centres, offices and schools.

For a design guide, Shuyi Grass Jelly shows how a single ingredient can carry a name, a cup and a shopfront, and how quickly a franchise brand may return to its earlier look when a new one does not take. Compare it with Guming, a Zhejiang tea chain that also grew through franchising in smaller cities, and with Heytea, another Chinese tea-drink chain. For this guide we use grass-jelly black, lacquer red, rice white and a muted herb green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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