Gurkha’s first release celebrating the Chinese New Year and the zodiac calendar from is now on the way to retailers.

The Gurkha Year of the Dragon 2024 is a 6 3/4 x 52 figurado priced at $25 each that is made up of an unspecified “proprietary blend” of tobaccos rolled at the Tabacalera El Artista factory in the Dominican Republic. There are just 1,000 individually numbered boxes of 15 cigars. When Gurkha showed off the Year of the Dragon at the 2023 PCA Convention & Trade Show earlier this year, the cigars were offered to retailers “by invitation only.”

While this is the first time that Gurkha has released a cigar meant to commemorate the Chinese New Year, a host of other companies have done so in the past, a list that includes Davidoff, Drew Estate, Habanos S.A., Maya Selva, Plasencia, Scandinavian Tobacco Group and Tabacalera S.L.U. Like the vast majority of these releases, Gurkha is using red and gold for its Chinese zodiac calendar-themed released. In Chinese culture, red symbolizes good fortune and joy; while yellow or gold symbolizes wealth.

Update (March 14, 2024) — Gurkha has announced that it created 100 samplers containing five cigars, one each of the five cigars, that are being sold exclusively through Smoke Inn.

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Brooks Whittington

I have been smoking cigars for over eight years. A documentary wedding photographer by trade, I spent seven years as a photojournalist for the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram. I started the cigar blog SmokingStogie in 2008 after realizing that there was a need for a cigar blog with better photographs and more in-depth information about each release. SmokingStogie quickly became one of the more influential cigar blogs on the internet, known for reviewing preproduction, prerelease, rare, extremely hard-to-find and expensive cigars. I am a co-founder of halfwheel and now serve as an editor for halfwheel.