Coffee culture has always been a top-down pyramid communication.

In the first decade, instant coffee was almost synonymous with coffee, until a group of Taiwanese transplanted bright window tables, comfortable seats and coffee pots with brown bubbles to the mainland. In the 1990s, Shangdao Coffee and carving time, best known to mainlanders, appeared on the scene. Shangdao Coffee defines the business function of coffee. At that time, drinking tens of yuan a cup of coffee in the soft coffee shop was undoubtedly a luxury, and only business businessmen were willing to pay for it.

The early cafes were indeed a thankless business. When Chuang Tsai, a Taiwanese, opened his first sculpture time near the Halloween Book Garden at Peking University in 1997, he had no idea where to buy a coffee maker and coffee beans. At that time, there were very few coffee makers in China, so they could only ask people everywhere for inquiries. It didn't take long for the first coffee machine to break down, and Chuang Tsai discovered that what he bought at a high price turned out to be secondhand.

In the first few months, the cafe had only a handful of customers every day. In order to attract guests, Chuang Tsai began to show movies in the store, and the works were of a small taste, which coincided with the position of the coffee shop-- the main guests were students and teachers from Peking University and Tsinghua University. "in my feeling, it smells like the left bank of the Seine." Chuang Tsai said to the Timeline.

Different from the business demands of Shangdao, the literary and artistic style revealed everywhere in the carving time intoxicated the petty-bourgeois youth. Since then, small cafes of different styles have sprung up, and most people who run cafes, like Chuang Tsai, are usually driven by a complex rather than a commercial drive.

In this period of coffee trend, coffee culture has always been a top-down pyramid spread. Businessmen bear the cost of cafes, while students act as pioneers of coffee culture. Many cafes choose to open near universities, where young people are willing to accept new things.

Unfortunately, this brief romance was soon overwhelmed by a stronger trend, and when another group of Taiwanese swam across the sea with Starbucks mermaids, American-packaged espresso will reshape the coffee taste of the Chinese in an irresistible way.