Yunnan's new brew pours across borders

One wrong step, and my broken leg might be the least of my injuries.

My quest to understand China's coffee culture led me to cling to a cliffside with two cracked bones below my ankle in remote Yunnan province 16 years ago.

I'd fractured my foot just days before traveling to Zhukula village, Yunnan, where French missionaries planted China's first coffee trees in 1892. No road led to this then-isolated hamlet when I visited in 2010.

Villagers had to carry the arabica beans they'd begun selling to international brands like Starbucks by hauling them on a narrow footpath that stretched for several kilometers along the side of a sheer cliff, which I limped along.

I visited the original 24 coffee trees the Jesuits had planted, and the thousands more the villagers had cultivated over the following century.

I learned how these farmers not only produced but also consumed coffee. Then, I hobbled back out along the footpath, hundreds of meters high, stabilizing myself on improvised crutches — a branch under one arm and a local official under the other. From that day on, I regularly buy Yunnan coffee and pack it in my luggage wherever I travel around the world.

But finding any coffee at all required a cab ride across downtown Beijing when I first arrived in 2005, because 20 years ago, China's coffee culture had barely begun percolating.

In my earliest days in the city, you had to take a special trip to the Friendship Store for grounds and head to Sanlitun or Lidu for a fresh cuppa. Two years later, in 2007, I wrote a story for China Daily titled, Is coffee the new black?

In China, back then, it was still a question. Was the then-nascent interest a short-term fad that would quickly evaporate? Or would it boil over into a long-term trend?

While there were many reasons more Chinese people were increasingly curious about coffee at that time, a main inspiration was the US sitcom, Friends. It felt like Friends was even more popular in China than stateside. I remember when a replica of the TV show's Central Perk coffee shop opened in Beijing in 2010, followed by another in Shanghai.

In my 2007 story, I quoted a local cafe-goer as saying, "China doesn't have its own coffee culture yet."

Fast-forward nearly two decades, and China is shaping global coffee culture. Rather than traveling across town in the nation's metropolises, you likely only need to walk a few steps down the street to get a cup. It's even commonplace in towns and smaller settlements.

To answer that 2007 question today: Coffee isn't the new black in China. By now, it's the "old black".

Its new blends aren't limited to arabica and robusta, but also the very art and science of all things that give these magic beans their buzz. In China's cafes, human creativity meets digital technology — from beverages with indigenous ingredients, such as Sichuan peppercorns, to 3D-printed latte art and cafes staffed solely by robot baristas.

The nation's coffee culture is continuing to evolve, infused by increasing innovation. Like those original trees in Zhukula, China's coffee-culture heritage remains rooted deep in China's southwestern corner. Now, it's branching out to every place on our planet.

These beans are the seeds of an exchange that is steeped in globalization, in which the word "blend" extends beyond fine grounds to whole civilizations, and where connection pours across borders one cup at a time.

It flavors, stirs, and energizes a buzz we feel worldwide.

erik_nilsson@chinadaily.com.cn