In Honor of Kings, You Can Now Grow Your Own Tea — And It's a Collab With a Real Tea Giant

On July 24, tea brand Bawang Chaji (霸王茶姬) did something that sounds like a stoner idea but is apparently very real: it partnered with
Honor of Kings
and
Honor of Kings: World
to let players grow tea leaves inside a MOBA.

The collaboration is built around "Qingmo Guanyin" (青沫观音), a jasmine-scented oolong the brand is bringing back for summer. Sourced from the Xianghua and Longjuan sub-regions of Anxi — the Fujian county famous for Tieguanyin — the drink is described as floral, mellow, and something tea loyalists have been begging to see return.

And here's where it gets weird-good:
Honor of Kings
has a homestead/farming mode, and the devs actually built a tea-growing mechanic into it for this campaign. Players plant, tend, and harvest virtual tea leaves, and if they participate, they can snag a 0.1 RMB coupon for the real drink. That's not a discount — that's essentially a free tea, priced lower than the cup it comes in.

Offline, Bawang Chaji went all in. The limited-edition cup is a seafoam green, with a peel-away sleeve that reveals a hidden hero portrait underneath. There are themed fridge magnets — each one redesigned around a specific hero with tiny Easter eggs tucked into the details — plus stickers, transparent cup decals, and enamel pins rolling out over the coming weeks.

From July 25–28, themed stores across China are running on-the-ground activations: complete tasks in-store and walk away with mini cards, waterfall-style photo cards, and hanging charms. Five hero cosplayers will also show up as "one-day baristas" at pop-up stores, serving tea and posing for photos.

The campaign is effectively a three-way handshake — Bawang Chaji,
Honor of Kings
, and
Honor of Kings: World
— knitting together a tea-growing origin story, a game mechanic, and a physical product you can actually drink. Tea isn't the backdrop. It's the gameplay.

For a global audience: Bawang Chaji is one of China's fastest-rising tea chains, known for packaging and branding that punch well above its price point, and
Honor of Kings
is the mobile MOBA so dominant that Tencent once had to impose playtime limits on minors. Seeing these two collaborate isn't the surprise — it's that the collab is built around a farming sim mechanic and anchored in a specific tea-growing region. Most brand crossovers slap a logo on a skin. This one built a miniature supply chain inside a game, then connected it to real taste.

The tea's good. The peel-away cup sleeve is clever. But the real move here is making players feel like they
earned
their drink — not with in-game currency, but with the oldest ritual there is: growing something.