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Coffee in China, and what happened to Yunnan's crop
China grows coffee, almost all of it in Yunnan, and almost nobody outside the industry knew for the first thirty years. The plant arrived with French missionaries in the late nineteenth century and stayed marginal until the late 1980s, when a Nestlé project in Pu'er and Dehong set out to build a commercial crop. It worked: Yunnan now produces the large majority of Chinese coffee, somewhere over a hundred thousand tonnes in a good year, which makes China a middling world producer — small against Brazil or Vietnam, and not negligible. The growing conditions are genuinely good, and 老板娘's explanation is the real one: much of southern Yunnan sits between 1,000 and 1,800 metres with warm days, cold nights and a dry harvest season, which is close to what arabica wants. The problem for a long time was not the terrain but the market. The crop was grown for instant-coffee multinationals, bought by weight as a commodity at prices tied to the New York C market, and processed for volume rather than flavour — so Yunnan acquired a reputation for dull coffee that had more to do with the incentives than the beans. That has changed sharply in the last decade, and the café in this dialogue is the change. A domestic speciality market appeared, Chinese urban coffee consumption grew at a rate nobody predicted, and some growers and cooperatives began processing carefully for flavour and selling directly at many times the commodity price. Shanghai now has more coffee shops than any city in the world by most counts, and a good deal of what they serve is Yunnanese. Prices to farmers remain volatile, smallholdings are small, and the gap between the best lots and the bulk crop is wide — but the trajectory is one of the more cheerful stories in Chinese agriculture. For a visitor, three things. If you are offered 云南豆 in a serious café, take it — it is usually good and it is a subject the person behind the counter will want to talk about at length, which is excellent listening practice. Coffee in China is a young-and-urban drink, so a café is one of the few settings where the register will be closer to your own age group than the teahouse in lesson 69. And do not assume tea versus coffee is a competition: plenty of people drink both, in the same day, and 老板娘 would sell you either.