The first coffee tree planted in Chinese mainland is the cultivation of Yunnan small coffee in Yunnan Province.

The first coffee recorded in history books was the planting of China's first coffee tree in Taiwan in 1884. In the tenth year of Guang Xu in the Qing Dynasty (AD 1884), a British tea merchant found that the climate of Taiwan was very similar to that of Central and South America, so it would be a good geography for growing coffee. As a result, the businessman introduced 100 Arabian coffee trees to Taiwan to grow, thus becoming the "ancestor" of Chinese coffee. The earliest coffee cultivation in mainland China began in Yunnan, where a French missionary brought the first coffee seedlings to Binchuan County in Yunnan Province at the beginning of the 20th century. Now in Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Taiwan and Xiamen in Fujian, coffee trees introduced more than a hundred years ago are planted, which is the so-called "Chinese coffee" (Chinese coffee).