Shanghai coffee culture

Coffee is an imported product. In the early years, coffee was translated into a variety of names, and there was even a translation of "getting fat".

With the opening of Shanghai, coffee sprang up in the concession. Many fashionable Shanghainese also go to taste fresh, often complaining bitterness and shouting "unexpectedly as bad as cough potion". However, with the popularity of western food in Shanghai, coffee is gradually accepted by most people. There are already poems about coffee in Zhu Wenbing's ci on the Sea (1909). At the beginning of the Republic of China, Zhou Lianjuan, a member of the Mandarin Butterfly School, "sipped bitterness and added evil, absolutely seemed to be lovesickness", which linked coffee with traditional images in Chinese literature, such as lovesickness, sorrow, sorrow, and so on.

Cafes appeared later in Shanghai. At first, many western restaurants in the Anglo-French concession served as cafes and tasted good coffee as well. Cafes sprang up in Shanghai like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, probably in the late 1920s and early 1930s. At first, the cafe was mainly set up to adapt to the leisure and gathering of aliens, and then gradually became a way of life for some citizens in Shanghai.

People like to go to cafes, on the one hand, as imported goods, they are very "foreign-style" in architectural decoration and drinking style, and they are a place to experience the western way of life, on the other hand, cafes also adapt to the characteristics of Shanghai. Soon, the coffee shop in Shanghai was no longer a place to drink coffee, but became a "public space" in the modern city. Lovers went to the coffee shop to date, and literary young people wrote in the coffee shop. At that time, many new literary writers wrote about the coffee shop in Shanghai. For example, Lin Huiyin's "Lady of the Flower Shop" and Wen Zichuan's "the handmaiden of the Coffee Shop", Zhang Ruogu simply took "Coffee discussion" as the title of his collection of essays.

However, cafes with their own characteristics appeared in Nanjing Road, Xiafei Road, North Sichuan Road and Yalpei Road in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1940s, but now they have become history and have been replaced by more and more international brand coffee chains.