The History of Coffee Culture and the Centennial memory of Yunnan Coffee

A hundred years ago, when the French missionary Tian Deneng planted a coffee tree seedling on the land of Jukula, a small mountain village, China has been destined for coffee ever since.

In Binchuan County, Dali City, Yunnan Province, there is a hidden mountain village, the whole village is covered by a piece of green trees, you will find that these green trees are almost all coffee trees. Only through the coffee forests surrounded by layers can you enter the village. Coffee trees are planted in front and behind every house in the village.

This village is called Zhukula, and it was here that coffee trees first appeared on Chinese soil.

French source

In 1904, Tian Deneng, a French Catholic missionary, received an arrangement from the Dali diocese to take another French missionary Lu Hongru and a Chinese servant Deng Peigen to the Binchuan area under the jurisdiction of Dali to preach the will of the Lord. Tian Deneng and Lu Hongru are both Chinese names.

Among the items they carry with them, in addition to the Bible, personal clothing, some production tools and medicines, as well as coffee beans and coffee seedlings they buy when passing through Vietnam, because Tian Deneng loves to drink coffee. Although the French have grown coffee in Vietnam and Laos since the early 19th century, missionaries in Dali in China are often unable to drink fresh coffee because of inconvenient transportation.

With the belief to bring the gospel of God to the farthest places, and perhaps the idea of finding a suitable place to grow coffee, the trio meandered through the mountains of Binchuan.

The three Tian Deneng, whose legs were wrapped in soil, walked more than 100 kilometers to a small mountain depression by the Yupao River and saw a small mountain village built by the mountain. The whole village is covered by green trees, and there are layers of green terraces in front of the village, and the clouds hanging on the horizon can be seen from afar.

The priest decided to stay and preach in this paradise. He built a church with green tiles and white walls outside the village according to the appearance of the house here. Coffee seedlings were planted outside the church, and he did not know that the ancestors of these coffee seedlings could be traced back to the one given by the Dutch coffee merchants to King Louis XIV of France in 1715.

After coming to Yunnan with coffee seedlings of "aristocratic" blood, I felt as if I had found the feeling of hometown, and immediately adapted to the altitude, soil, temperature and precipitation of the laterite plateau, and slowly bred into a coffee forest. And Father Tian's missionary career is getting better and better.

At that time, the Yupao River area Dongsheng "Shunjiang King" Zhang Yiqing was domineering and occupied land and population, and the people were very angry. Yi Qi Ganwen and others asked Tian Deneng to help with the lawsuit. as a reward, Tian Deneng got a lot of land after winning the lawsuit, and Catholics quickly grew to hundreds.

In addition to preaching, Tian Deneng is also carefully cultivating these coffee trees. In addition to drinking coffee, it also provides the Catholic church in Dali. However, the good times did not last long. Four years later, there was a church case in Binchuan, and Father Tian was forced to leave Jugula.

Past events of Yunnan

During the period of the Republic of China, the Catholic Church still sent Father Xu, Father Gu and Father Duan to Binchuan. These missionaries taught the villagers to read the Bible, set up a church primary school, and brought basketball. Although missionaries are different, they all like to drink coffee, and they continue to grow seedlings and expand the territory of coffee trees.

But Jukula's coffee is only for priests to drink, and there are local villagers who fell in love with coffee with priests. To this day, coffee is still given to guests in this remote rural area of southwestern China. They will bake it in a big iron pot where they cook, then grind the coffee powder on the stone mill of the noodles, and finally, like Turkish coffee, wrap it in gauze and cook it in a teapot.

Jugula's Yi name is "Ruokelai". Perhaps its pronunciation is so similar to French (CHocolat, chocolate) that Tian Deneng gave it a French village name. China's first coffee was planted when two cultures inadvertently met. In the turbulent 20th century, this is only a small detail that China was dragged into the world system.

This is how the isolated village becomes attached to coffee. But the outside world, the coffee memories in Yunnan cities, is written in a different way.

Just the year after Tian Deneng planted coffee, his French compatriots opened the first coffee bar in Yunnan in Mengzi. In 1887, after the end of the Sino-French War, the Qing government signed a contract with France and was forced to open Yunnan Mengzi as a trade port. This was the earliest trading port in Yunnan and soon attracted foreign businessmen. Foreign firms from France, Britain, the United States, Japan, Italy, Germany and Greece landed here one after another. it even included the famous American Mobil, British American Tobacco and Paris department stores at that time.

As a result, many foreign products have come along, such as coffee, which is the favorite of "foreigners" (a dialect in which they call themselves foreigners). The "Yunnan-Vietnam Railway Bar" located at the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway Station is the product of this time.

Although it is called a bar, it actually sells coffee, a practice that originated in France, where cafes are characterized by a mixture of cafes and taverns. To this day, many cafes opened by foreigners in Kunming, Lijiang, Dali and other places still sell coffee during the day and become places for backpackers to meet and drink beer at night.

This is just the beginning of the future popularity of coffee. In 1938, when the Sino-Japanese War broke out, Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai formed the famous National Southwest Associated University and moved southward to Kunming. At that time, famous scholars, such as Wen Yiduo, Chen Yinke, Chen Daisun, Qian Mu, Wu Mi, and Zheng Tianting, all lived at the Gelushi Hotel on the edge of the South Lake in Mengzi. It was a French building with yellow walls and white tiles and large shutters.

The "South American Cafe" opened by Vietnamese expatriates here is one of the favorite cafes frequented by students of the United Nations University. it is said that a Vietnamese girl played the solo here, which attracted many admirers and some people wrote a poem for her: "sad pharynx in my native country, lazy makeup in southern Xinjiang, eyebrows and tears turn to my heart, sorrow to the end of the world, speechless vicissitudes." The worried single-stringed piano, the fragrant smell of coffee and the inscription of the talented man are the portrayal of the depression and serenity of Yunnan in the rear area.

At that time, there was also a legendary Vietnamese cafe in Kunming, the "New Vietnamese Western Restaurant" (later renamed "Nanlaisheng") located in the vicinity of Jinma Biji Square, Jinbi Road, Kunming. The boss is a beautiful single Vietnamese woman named Nguyen Min Xuan, who is said to be a distinguished family of Taiyuan in Vietnam. Fresh ground coffee is the signature here. Coffee beans come from Vietnam, and perhaps some Arabica coffee native to Yunnan. Because of its authentic taste, Chen Jiageng, a patriotic overseas Chinese, was once a regular guest here. Shen Congwen hosted Hu Shi here. Zhou Enlai also drank coffee here, thinking that the taste was almost the same as when he studied in France in his youth.

In his own cafe, Nguyen Min Xuan also met his compatriot Ho Chi Minh, the future general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. In 1940, Ho Chi Minh entered Kunming and co-founded the Vietnamese Communist Party "overseas Department" with Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap. At that time, Ho Chi Minh's public identity was the baker of "Xinyue".

In the chaotic years, a weak woman dared to direct the plot of this kind of film, which can be called a legend. The coffee she made and her story also made the old Kunming people sigh, and until the 1980s, the place was still full of customers. In the morning, Kunming people come here early in the morning wearing slippers and yawning to drink coffee. They are either the old people who formed the habit in the Republic of China or the overseas Chinese who returned home.

In 2009, with the transformation of the city, this legendary old store completely disappeared from the eyes of Kunming people.

Go to the world

In 1949, when the people's Republic of China was founded, the villagers of Jukula were still growing and drinking coffee. At that time, one jin of coffee could be exchanged for two jin of salt, so the village head Li Fusheng mobilized the villagers to grow coffee in a large area, with coffee trees as much as 60 mu at most.

But apart from exchanging it for salt and supplying it to Binchuan Taihe Farm, Jukula is no longer known to outsiders, and even today, when Yunnan begins to grow coffee on a large scale, people still forget it.

In the 1950s, Liang Jinshan, a patriotic overseas Chinese, returned to his hometown to vigorously promote coffee cultivation, and he also introduced new coffee seedlings from South Asia. Liang first went to Myanmar to do business. at the age of 23, he set up a silver factory in a joint venture with the British colonial authorities, and was praised by the Queen of England. He was specially summoned to London and given him a revolver, two shotguns and a silver knife.

During the War of Resistance against Japan, the legendary businessman also contributed money to the national army for many times. It was with his financial support that Yunnan technicians cultivated a high-yielding Lujiangba small-grain coffee, and he sent samples of his coffee to his old friend he Xiangning, who wrote back: "the coffee tastes excellent. Thank you very much for your hospitality."

At that time, Lujiang dam produced 210000 kilograms of coffee beans. In the mid-1950s, the planting area of coffee in Yunnan once reached 4000 hectares. Unfortunately, Sino-Soviet relations broke down after the 1960s, and 4000 mu of coffee plantations were artificially shelved or replanted with other crops.

Until the end of the "Cultural Revolution", only the Yunnan Burma Road roadside, or farm courtyard, can still see the shadow of coffee trees. In the remote village of Jugula, 24 coffee trees planted by Father Tian have been preserved for geographical reasons.

The coffee saplings have been sleeping quietly, waiting for those who wake them up. The task later fell to Baud, who was the first agronomist Nestl é sent to Pu'er to train farmers. In 1988, in order to reduce the influence of South American coffee planting base on coffee prices, Nestl é shifted its attention from Brazil, the largest coffee grower in the world, to Pu'er, which is the same latitude as Cuba, the hometown of coffee.

But unlike Binchuan in Dali or Dehong farmers in Dehong, Pu'er farmers have dealt with coffee in their ancestors. In order to get farmers to grow coffee, Baud often starts with what coffee is.

He planted the first coffee tree in Meiziao River and Hongxingba of Dehua Xiaohejiang River in Ning'er County, and a total of 70 mu coffee experimental fields also died due to lack of management experience and improper fertilization. It was not until 1990 that coffee in Ning'er County reached the standard set by Nestl é headquarters. Some people say that Nestl é experts successfully extracted the excellent genes of Bobang and iron pickup from the old saplings of Jugula village.

However, Pu'er farmers who drink tea since ancient times still do not like to grow this kind of food they do not drink because they feel that it has no economic value. As a result, Nestl é signed a 14-year agreement with the local government, in which it promised to buy coffee at the price of the spot market in the United States, uncapped as a guarantee of farmers' interests, and set a minimum purchase price.

The stimulation of multinational groups has finally revived the cultivation of coffee in Yunnan. By the end of 1997, the planting area of coffee in Yunnan had reached 7800 hectares, accounting for 83% of the country's output. In the same year, the Sculpture time Cafe in Beijing officially opened, China's urban middle class is gradually rising, and coffee has become a new way of life for urban white-collar workers. More multinational groups, including Maxwell and Starbucks, have also come to Yunnan. During this period, China's rapid economic development, gradually integrated into the global economic system, the small Yunnan coffee beans is the witness.

Now, 100 years later, Tian Deneng may not have imagined that his missionary career was interrupted by history, but the coffee he brought survived over time.