Coffee in China

As a passionate learner and practitioner of coffee, I founded a Coffee Club at my school to celebrate the culture and allure of this beloved beverage. As an 11th-grade student with a family-run coffee business, my immersion in the world of coffee has deepened my enthusiasm and understanding of it.

I have observed that coffee, a widely popular Western beverage, has sparked an intriguing fusion with Chinese culinary traditions. This intersection has led to the creation of coffee beverages infused with tea and other local flavors, which are gaining significant popularity in the Chinese market. This article reflects my insights into the captivating blend of coffee, a Western staple, with Chinese food culture, as well as the bold innovations emerging from this dynamic relationship.

A glimpse of Coffee in China: How I See Chinese Culture

Coffee, as one of the most popular drink among the world, has a long history.

Wild coffee plants, known as Coffea spp. , were originally from ancient Ethiopian plateau. At some point, coffee plants were taken across the Red Sea to southern Arabia, Sufi monks in ancient Yemen area were among the first to brew coffee as a beverage and used the stimulation to pray through the night. As coffee plants got its popularity in Arabia, Ottoman Empire brought the beverage to many more place around 16th and 17th centuries, and finally introduced to Europe thanks to Pope Clement VIII.

The Ottoman Turks' 16th-century coffee roasting techniques made it preservable, thus transformed coffee into tradable commodities. Using stone mortars to grind dark-roasted beans, they brewed spices like cardamom and cinnamon in long-handled brass pots together with coffee beans, consuming both grounds and liquid—a robust tradition preserved along Mediterranean coasts nowadays. When Venetian merchants introduced silk filters to Europe, they birthed espresso prototypes. Transatlantic voyages carried coffee to the Americas, where post-Boston Tea Party Americans crafted standardized "coffee-milk-sugar" rituals.

When Ottoman Turks brewed spiced coffee in copper pots, they could never have imagined this dark elixir would, five centuries later, undergo an alchemical fusion with Chinese culture. When coffee started to take its place in Asian countries in 20th century, While Japan elevated pour-over to artisan craft and Korea cultivated café sociality, we Chinese seemed to find our own way with this magical drink. From Starbucks' 1999 mainland debut to Luckin Coffee's disruptive 2017 emergence, China's coffee market compressed a century of Western evolution into two decades, erupting with seismic creativity over the past seven years. With the eruption of Chinese Coffee brands, these constraints were shattered: Tianjin's jianbing-guozi coffee, Xi'an's chili-oil latte, and Suzhou's Biluochun espresso—each city in China reinvents coffee through hyper-local ingredients, reinventing their own flavors.

Chinese kaleidoscopic coffee creations were based from our multipolarization culinary culture. While Mediterranean cuisine centers on singular protagonists (grilled lamb in Turkey, steak in France), Chinese gastronomy thrives on dynamic equilibrium—take scrambled eggs with tomatoes (鸡蛋炒番茄) where sour-sweet balance overpowers neither ingredient, or Muxu pork (木须肉) weaving meat, fungi, and lily buds into symphonic complexity. This inherent pluralism, codified through millennia, is the key of phenomenal polycentric modern Chinese coffee creations. When Luckin Coffee combine traditional Chinese alcohol favor “Maotai” with lattes, 5.42 million daily sales proved that five thousand years of flavor calculus could derive new equations where West + East = Future. This isn't mere fusion, but cultural recombination.

Furthermore, Chinses multipolarization culinary culture and our tendency of being inclusive is the foundation of our Imagination and innovation toward coffee products. As civilization origin from the alluvial plains where the Yellow River breed 56 different ethnic communities, Chinese had a long history of evolving as a continental crucible——not through conquest, but through the patient embracement and smart innovation. From the Silk Road and Zheng He’s great voyage to today’s novel coffee combinations, reflecting a main idea in Chinese culture: “Harmony in Diversity”.

I like the concept of the “Harmony in Diversity” in the same way I like try different coffee mixtures. Beijing, as the capital of China, also shared the concept of “Harmony in Diversity” during its development. You can find a bit of everything all of the time in this international city, with little insult and kind respect, Beijing, as well as Chinese culture, is like a melting pot. Each cultural element tossed into this perpetual reaction vessel undergoes exciting excitation, popping up our own unique and attractive bubbles, just like those kinky coffee beverages we have nowadays.

Talking back to coffee itself, In the crucible of globalization versus localization, Chinese coffee culture has forged a distinctive "third way"—neither wholesale Westernization nor nostalgic traditionalism, but an emergent species born of civilizational dialogue. When we cradle springtime lattes infused with qingtuan's mugwort scents, we savor not merely caffeine, but the cosmopolitan ethos of Chinese civilization that has absorbed cultural tributaries for millennia. This creative alchemy—where Ottoman coffee pots philosophize with Song dynasty tea bowls—may hold the genetic code to China's uninterrupted 5,000-year civilizational continuity. The concept of “Harmony in Diversity” now percolating through Yunnan coffee farms to Shanghai smart cafés, offered a possible solution for reconciling global homogenization and cultural conflicts.

In commercial aspect, coffee in China also showed great potential. As local cultivar, Yunnan's coffee renaissance illuminates civilizational dialogue mechanics. Former Starbucks suppliers now command premium markets through "micro-lot auctions." Torch Coffee Lab's "Dianhong Sun-Drying Method" propelled Yunnan beans to 93+ Coffee Review scores—a supply chain leap from commodity producer to cultural exporter.

Market validation proves compelling: Seesaw gain RMB 12 billion valuation in 2023, with 45% of it provided by Chinese Tea-Coffee series. M Stand's "Concrete Cookie Latte" selling 1,000+ cups daily demonstrate cultural premiumization's economic viability. Luckin Coffee, as mentioned before, 63% of its new products originate from social media trends. What’s more, this innovation now boomerangs globally: “%Arabica” a Kyoto coffee brand, give matcha-genmai coffee hybrid as a directly responds to Chinese market creativity.

If you may have a chance travel in China, take a seat at any coffee table—where every "weird" concoction is a love letter to cultural symbiosis, and every sip rewrites the boundaries between tradition and tomorrow. While trying out those combinations with different flavor: sour, spice, even alcohol, hope you can have a preliminary understanding about the concept of “Harmony in Diversity”.

Or just enjoy your own cup of coffee ;).