For me, coffee is very special; its aphrodisiac effect has a concrete impact on life. Firstly, it determines my geographical living environment; secondly, it determines my psychological creative environment.
Zhou Xiaofeng, Preface to Yu Zemin’s Looking at Europe from a Café
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about cafés instead of teahouses, the answer is simple. The retail coffee business in China is a much bigger deal than its indigenous counterpart (though I will be touching on teahouses later as they’re part of the story). As noted in the Introduction, Shanghai alone has around 10,000 coffeehouses, more than any other city in the world and far more than its 1,739 teahouses. Per capita, Shanghai is topped by the hippest city in China you’ve never heard of, Guiyang in southwest Guizhou Province, with one coffeehouse for every 2,000 people, versus 3,000 in Shanghai (Ou, Wu & Ni). These are just two of the nation’s cities partaking in the coffee renaissance.
How things evolved from coffee’s origins in Shanghai a century ago and earlier, going back to the 1860s when China opened to Western immigration, is a story that would require a book. In fact, in recent years interest among Chinese writers and researchers in reconstructing the lost Shanghai of the 1920s–40s has burgeoned, providing a wealth of new information. Let’s recount some of the highlights of old Shanghai coffee and café culture before moving on to my main purpose, which is to trace this culture back as far I can from my own experiences and encounters.
Old Shanghai cafés
The “Paris of the East,” as old Shanghai was called, is extensively documented in literature, film, and photography. In present-day Shanghai, many of the original buildings of the era survive intact, carefully preserved by zoning laws and wealthy patronage, while history enthusiasts conduct plentiful walking tours. Nevertheless, it is difficult to convey how much has vanished. Coffee was absolutely central to Shanghai life a century ago. If it weren’t for the cultural devastation of the post-Liberation years (1949–76), when the city’s entertainment venues were forced to convert into proletarian eateries or shutter for good, many former cafés would still be around, as in Paris and Vienna today. We know about the names, ownership, and locations of the city’s former cafés; we are painstakingly reimagining the rest, enough to visualize and relive them from within.
The first establishments where coffee was served were the bars and restaurants opened by Westerners for their own clientele in the nineteenth century’s latter decades in the International Settlement (jointly governed by Britain and the U.S.) and the French Concession (W. Chen, “Study”). At the turn of the twentieth, two separate, polarized worlds remained. On the one hand, Chinese locals living in the claustrophobic walled city squeezed between the French Concession and the Huangpu River (the wall was torn down in 1912), along with the locals who had been migrating to the concessions, the men with their tea and tobacco water pipes and their women cooped up, effectively imprisoned, legs shackled by their bound feet, in their new homes; women’s liberation was still confined to the lively courtesan and prostitute communities. On the other, the Western elite, whose cafés operated out of the lobbies of the concession hotels (recapitulated in the 1980s–90s when the coffee industry again had to start from scratch and the only places serving coffee were five-star hotel lobbies, to which, as in the former era, locals were often denied entrance). The division was as much psychological as political. The Chinese could no more stomach the “cough medicine” known as coffee as racist Westerners could stomach Chinese company.
Hotel lobby cafés in the finest international hotels in China today can’t compete with the grandeur of the old Shanghai hotel cafés. These lobby venues formed in turn the model for the many independent cafés that soon sprang up in the concessions, boasting equally grandiose Victorian decor, vast atriums, spiral staircases, floor-to-ceiling windows, and towering potted plants. The line between ostentatious café, nightclub, and ballroom was a thin one. Any café worthy of the name required the full panoply of food and alcohol, a dance floor, and a state-of-the-art gramophone horn if not a live band. In an age without air conditioning, afternoon interiors in Shanghai’s heat could be insufferable. Most flocked to the cafés only in the evenings once the temperature had cooled and stayed until the early hours of the morning (W. Chen, “Study”). As the twenties got seriously underway, the younger generation of Chinese women whose feet were no longer bound started showing up, eager to dance. They also started appreciating coffee.
Almost everything we understand today about the art of coffee making had been perfected in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. According to William Ukers’ encyclopedic tome All About Coffee (pub. 1922), coffee artisans and scientists were unanimous, then as now, that a drip maker with a paper filter produced the best coffee, though paper contained chemical residues and some preferred cloth or muslin. Boiling water should be cooled to 195–205 F (90–95 C) before contact with coffee, and beans should be stored airtight and ground only before use. Colombian, Indonesian Java and Mandheling, and Brazilian Bourbon Santos were favorites, and precise blends recommended. Electric percolators were in widespread use but condemned by enthusiasts, as they overcooked the coffee; boiling coffee directly in a pot—“cowboy coffee”—was likewise a primitive holdover viewed with derision.
This coffee knowledge was imported and fully absorbed in China by the early decades of the twentieth century. A valuable photo survives, for what it reveals about how coffee was served in the 1930s, of Levy’s “Quality Coffee” Café in Shanghai. A relatively clear but cropped version appears in a Sixth Tone article and credits the Shanghai Library as its source (Huang). I was not able to acquire the original, but a grainier, uncropped version circulates online, pictured below (sharpened with AI tools). It shows a female attendant standing behind a counter selling coffee and coffee equipment. On the wall, surrounding wall-mounted hand grinders are cans of coffee, perhaps ground but surely whole beans as well, since in the center sits an electric coffee grinder that appears unplugged and therefore also for sale. To the right are traditional coffee pots and what look to be several Turkish cezves or ibriks. On the bottom shelf between two coffee cans is a Japanese Hario brand siphon coffee maker, whose design is unchanged till this day. Japanese siphons make superb coffee and I’ve used them for years.
Behind the lady, at left, are two large coffee urns of the sort used in restaurants and cafés, either for dispensing coffee or brewing it by drip, percolator or steam (a similar urn to the one in front is also visible at back in the accompanying Cityscape film still). Ukers tells us four types of urns were in use: the Napier steam coffee machine (a double urn, one for producing steam pumped to the other by pipe), the King Percolator (not a pumping percolator but a paper filter drip), an upward-infusion machine similar to the Italian Moka coffee maker (invented in 1938), and a pumping percolator. Due to is larger volume, the pumping percolator urn produced a superior brew to the smaller home-use varieties: “After the ground coffee has infused for about six minutes, a screw device raises the metal sieve, the pressure forcing the liquid through the cloth sack containing the ground coffee.” Curiously, the square-shaped urn behind her is mounted at the top with Turkey’s star-and-crescent symbol. Unless a coffee historian can enlighten us, the two urns in the picture remain unidentified.
Smaller cafés catered to more contemplative types. Early Chinese enthusiasts came up with the idiom to “incubate” (from fu or “hatch”) in the more subdued type of café with coffee and a book (Zhou). Shanghainese novelist and café aficionado Zhang Ailing (1920–95), known abroad as Eileen Chang, captured the tail-end of the era with nicely ironic portraits of the more intimate, bohemian coffeehouses and bakery cafés of the early 1940s. In an essay “Seeing with the Streets” she writes:
The Western-style coffee shop next door is filled with the clamor of machinery each night, lights blazing, turning out pastries and sweets. The smell of eggs and vanilla extract lingers until dawn before dissipating into the air. In a big city where “bills keep falling from the sky even when you’re inside,” it seems almost unreasonable that the owners allow us to enjoy the aroma without having to pay a cent. But the aroma of the cakes made by our sweet-smelling neighbor far outstrips their flavor, a fact that becomes apparent as soon as you’ve eaten one. Perhaps everything under heaven is the same: a cake that’s done isn’t as good as a cake in the process of being made. The glory of a cake is in the aroma it gives off as it bakes. Those who enjoy life lessons may well find one here. (Chang, Written)
The olfactory details are telling. They used vanilla in their baked goods, an ingredient that dropped out of Chinese baking in the decades that followed and is only being reintroduced today. The venue was well lit but for the bakers’ not customers’ benefit. If the kitchen was not wholly demarcated from the seating area, few seemed to mind. But the quality of their cakes was questionable.
In Chang’s novella Lust, Caution, set in the same years, the heroine Chia-chih arranges a furtive assignation with the politically powerful lover Mr. Yee by visiting two cafés in succession as she is directed via phone calls where and when to be picked up in his limousine. The cafés are deliberately unassuming and discreet. She hasn’t much to say about the first, apart from a few telling details:
As it was only midafternoon, the café was almost deserted. Its large interior was lit by wall lamps with pleated apricot silk shades, its floor populated by small round tables covered in cloths of fine white linen jacquard—an old-fashioned, middlebrow kind of establishment.
The second, “small café” near Jing’an Temple in the International Settlement, is no less interesting for being atypical and something of a dive:
Most of the café’s business must have been in takeout; there were hardly any places to sit down inside. Toward the back of its dingy interior was a refrigerated cabinet filled with various Western-style cakes. A glaringly bright lamp in the passageway behind exposed the rough, uneven surface of the brown paint covering the lower half of the walls. A white military-style uniform hung to one side of a small fridge; above, nearer the ceiling, hung a row of long, lined gowns—like a rail in a secondhand clothing store—worn by the establishment’s Chinese servants and waiters. He had told her that the place had been opened by a Chinese who had started out working in Tientsin’s oldest, most famous Western eatery, the Kiessling….She waited, the cup of coffee in front of her steadily losing heat.
The Kiessling (凯司令) is the only coffee restaurant of old Shanghai that survives today in its original location, at 1001 Nanjing West Road. Of course, the former Cathay Hotel lobby café and bar, mecca of the 1930s Shanghai foreign elite, now the Peace Hotel, also remains in operation, but that’s not an independent coffee business.
The Kiessling was one of the few “bourgeois” establishments allowed to remain open during the Cultural Revolution. Shanghai writer Cheng Naishan (1946–2013), reminiscing on this time in an essay on coffee in her memoir Shanghai Taste, possibly refers to the second-floor restaurant when she notes a few more details such as the “distinctive German country style, with bronze chandeliers, a black oak fireplace, and lamps with georgette lampshades.” The first-floor bakery described by Eileen Chang survives, absent of seating. In Ang Lee’s 2007 film version of Lust, Caution, actress Tang Wei, playing the heroine Chia-chih, sits in a Shanghai Film Studio reimagining of the Kiessling, with appropriate noir atmosphere (“Production notes”).
The original Kiessling indeed opened in 1901 in Tientsin (Tianjin) by a German chef. The Tianjin shop continues to operate also as a bakery and restaurant. I first visited this Kiessling in the early 2000s, when the city had few other Western cuisine offerings. The interior was unchanged since its beginnings or at least looked authentic enough. Returning to the restaurant a decade later, I found the food unpalatable, but the dalieba in their first-floor bakery—huge round loaves of Russian-style sourdough bread with nuts and dried fruit—was hearty and scrumptious.
One of the many cafés opened by Russian immigrants was Kavkaz (卡夫卡斯) on Huaihai Middle Road in the French Concession. Two surviving photos show the exterior and what purports to be the interior, though the windows don’t match up (“Cafe situation”). It’s still a good example of the common “train car” design of many former Shanghai cafés, with a row of window-lined high-backed booths a la the American diner. This proved attractive to young couples who could interact with a veneer of privacy, especially so for Chinese women who for the first time were venturing out of the house. A still from the film Cityscape (Dushi Fengguang, dir. yuan Muzhi, 1935) shows a typical café booth; the camera zooms in through the streetside window and opens into a busy interior (Jia). High-backed booths in cafés and bars became the norm in China up until the present and had a similar purpose, which I shall return to.
Several other Shanghai coffee establishments with some connection to the glory days survive, if in name only. Deda Western Restaurant (德大) goes back to 1897, when it began as a butchery on 177 Tanggu Road in the Hongkou area, where the Japanese and Russian Jewish communities—both serious café cultures at the time—intermingled. It moved to nearby Sichuan North Road after the war in 1946 and was nationalized in 1949. It remained open, now with a separate café section, but moved again in 1986 to 473 Nanjing West Road, where it continues to operate as a restaurant and café. A second branch opened in 2009 on 2 Yunnan South Road, also near People’s Square (the old Race Course in the British Concession). Gongfei Café (公啡咖啡) opened in 1929 also on Sichuan North Road and became a favorite haunt of intellectuals and revolutionaries such as Mao Dun and Lu Xun. The café closed during the war and the building was razed in 1995. It reopened in 2020 under the same name at nearby 251 Duolun Road. Its new incarnation is a sleek modern café with old-Shanghai accents and an attached bookstore. Mars Coffee Shop opened in 1941 at 147–149 Nanjing East Road. It was renamed Donghai Restaurant (东海) in 1954 and Donghai Coffee Shop in 1988, finally closing its doors in 2007. It reopened in 2019 at a new location (110 Dianchi Road), beautifully furnished in the old style down to its giant decorative gramophone horn.
By the time the Communists triumphed, café culture had spread to all the coastal cities, even during the terrible years of the Japanese invasion and occupation (1937–45) and the subsequent civil war (1946–49). Shanghai was attacked in August and Nanjing devastated in November of 1937; Shanghai’s International Settlement fell to Japan in 1941, the French Concession in 1943. During the war years, café life never ceased. We must not be under the illusion that coffee culture was confined to Shanghai. The writer Lao She (best known for the novel Rickshaw Boy), while temporarily living in wartime Wuhan in the spring of 1938 just before the Japanese assault on that city, made this nostalgic yet ambivalent observation about the younger generation’s carefree ways in Qingdao, where he had been teaching and which had succumbed to Japanese occupation the previous January. Despite that, café life there too carried on, as it must:
Is it really appropriate for Shandong University to be located in Qingdao? Dance halls, cafés, cinemas, bathhouses….Can one concentrate on studying amidst such a vibrant world?… Someone who hasn’t been to Shandong University might easily imagine that Qingdao, being a place with a cosmopolitan atmosphere, must also have Shandong University students dressed in Western clothes, like children of overseas Chinese. That is simply not the case.
Lao provides more scornfully colorful details about café-goers in Hankou, the site of Wuhan’s former foreign concessions:
If—oh, I dare not even think of it!—she’s that hypocritical, pretentious woman who learned her ways from movies, and she insists on coming with me, even while fleeing, wearing high heels. What will I do? I’ve seen with my own eyes, in the most luxurious restaurants and cafés of Hankou, women putting on a show for their husbands. They’re supposedly very fond of the arts. Whether their husbands are artists, I don’t know; I just worry that if their husbands are indeed writers, will they have time to write besides serving their wives? If he has to write after returning home from the café late at night, can she bear to see his miserable face at dawn—a demeanor and posture completely opposite to that of a male star? (Delightful)
And then, as evanescent as arabesques of vapor from a hot cup of coffee, it all vanished after 1949, as if never having existed. Yet it never had existed for the vast majority of Chinese, who had scarcely heard of coffee much less had access to it. A few state-run cafés held on tenaciously in Shanghai for a shrinking elite of coffee addicts (Cheng). During the Cultural Revolution, only those with foreign exchange certificates could buy coffee beans from the Friendship Stores that had been set up for the benefit of the foreigners remaining in the country. Tins of Shanghai Brand ground coffee premixed with sugar became gift items (“Shanghai’s original”). Coffee drinking was now disapproved of, forcing it underground. Those with cash to spare put “ground coffee in a bag, added it to a pot of milk and boiled—just as fragrant and rich. Since coffee cups had been confiscated, we poured it into our rice bowls to drink” (Cheng). Those without cash to spare—just about everyone else—found sad substitutes such as roasted barley. (Personally, if coffee ever disappears, the best substitute would be quality Pu’er tea from Yunnan Province, China’s coffee-growing region, which mimics coffee’s body, richness, and color, with a taste all its own.)
The Nescafé coffee desert (not dessert)
“Thirty years later,” as Chen Danyan writes from her own experience, “the new generation of modern people didn’t really know how to drink coffee. They didn’t know to take the small spoon out of the cup and put it on the saucer before drinking. The new coffee shop owners didn’t really know how to brew coffee either, always using Nestlé instant coffee to appease customers” (Shanghai Salad).
This was reminiscent of my hunt for something as odd as a coffeehouse on a trip to Urumqi in Xinjiang Province in 1995. The Uyghurs were after all ethnically Turkic and I had naively thought coffee might be ingrained in their DNA. They drank tea exclusively. I did stumble upon something resembling a café, with coffee on the menu. After some digging around, the waitress presented me with a stainless-steel mixing bowl half filled with lukewarm water, a ladle, and an unopened jar of Nescafé, hoping I could figure it out.
It was now the bleak Nescafé era. In Beijing at the time, a state-run store across from the Friendship Hotel where I lived sold gift boxes with a transparent front revealing a Nescafé jar, a jar of powdered creamer, a pair of gold-rimmed Vienna-style coffee cups, and imitation gold-plated spoons. Canned Maxwell House ground coffee was available at the Friendship Store. I scrounged up a plastic coffee dripper and paper filters somewhere for daily use.
Rewind a few years back to my first trip to China in 1990. I was living in Japan at the time and traveling with a Japanese male friend. Coffee is just as important to the Japanese as it is to us, indeed more so. Our town in rural Wakayama Prefecture was jeweled with elegant coffeehouses known as kissaten serving hand-brewed siphon coffee. The local liquor shop roasted their own coffee beans and hand-poured their coffee for patrons. My friend brought along for emergency purposes a device of the sort only the Japanese can cook up—a pressurized can that squirted concentrated liquid coffee into a cup and you added hot water.
Shanghai was our first stop, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to snap a photo of the one coffee establishment we visited. Our guide said it was famous for its steamed coffee. We found seating in the second-floor gallery area which looked down upon the first floor. It was crowded and brightly lit. A waitress brought our coffee in a metal pot, generously mixed and steamed with milk and sugar; no option for black coffee. Chen Danyan claims that in Shanghai cafés at this time already offered Blue Mountain coffee, Mocha, Irish coffee, Japanese iced coffee, Italian cappuccino, and American regular coffee, along with homemade cheesecakes and muffins (Shanghai Salad). This café may have been the same venue, the Times Café (时代咖啡馆), which she photographed in 1992 for her compilation of Shanghai history, Shanghai Trilogy. The venue has long since closed.
Upon my first arrival in Beijing in 1994, there were no cafés, properly speaking. The closest thing to a beverage salon was the Sanwei Shuwu teahouse (三味书屋). Even that was an anomaly; the city only had a handful of teahouses, in contrast to southern China where they had always been more plentiful. It was opened in the 1980s by a Mrs. Liu, who along with her husband had been imprisoned for two decades for the crime of being university professors during Mao’s Anti-Rightest Campaign (1957–59). The teahouse contained, on the first floor, a bookstore of select literature, and on the upper floor in the teahouse itself, jazz musicians and cultural talks on occasional weekends. Until Beijing’s coffeehouse scene burgeoned in the 2000s, it was the only place where expats could mingle with Chinese of a more intellectual cast.
The teahouse was otherwise strangely empty. My Chinese was very sketchy at the time, but Mrs. Liu managed to get across that her daughter was seeking a foreigner to practice her English with—who turned out to be living in the apartment directly above mine in the Friendship Hotel with her American boyfriend. Shasha filled me in on why the teahouse had so few customers. It had been an intellectual gathering place in the years of relative political freedom in the late 1980s. Shasha herself had opened her own bookstore devoted to democracy literature. Tiananmen Square brought an end to it all. The intellectuals were dispersed or arrested, as was Shasha. The Sanwei Shuwu was allowed to stay open but had to keep a low profile. It was still standing when I last checked during the Covid years but evidently shuttered, sandwiched between new office buildings. Mrs. Liu had surely passed away by then. Shasha herself had years earlier emigrated to the U.S. (see Parts Three and Four in this series for more on Shasha).
Beijing coffeehouses at the time consisted of prostitute pickup joints with names in English like “Jane’s Café” or “Melody’s Café” or darkly lit “coffee bars” with high-backed booths (recall the train-car cafés in 1930s Shanghai), where the heating was seemingly turned down to give couples an excuse to drape themselves in their long green army-style coats for a little privacy. One movie theater in Beijing’s Xidan District, long since demolished, had deep love seats for couples to cocoon themselves in. For even more privacy, an attendant guided you by flashlight to a smaller unlit theater in the basement. No one was there to watch the generic Hong Kong action flicks, nor was anyone very particular about draping themselves.
The Ueshima Coffee Group of Japan, aka. UCC (founded in 1933) was the first to take on the Nescafé regime when it got a leg in China and opened hundreds of cafés throughout the country. Known as Shangdao (上岛) in Chinese, it adapted to prevailing tastes and spawned many imitators. Smoky dens smacking of vice, the high-backed booths were now crowded with businessmen shouting into their cellphones or plying their secretaries with drink. Many of these establishments occupied the second floor of buildings for added privacy from the street. But an important development was that in addition to various grades of whisky and “XO,” the Chinese term for cognac, acceptable siphon-brewed coffee was on the menu for the first time, with varieties of bean (not always fresh) including Hawaiian Kona and Jamaican Blue Mountain. As Chen Danyan writes of this breed of café in Shanghai, “If a single woman placed a pack of cigarettes on the table, it was often an indication that she was a prostitute. If middle-aged men and women came together, their behavior was always chaotic, often suggesting adultery” (“Romance”). These old-school booze cafés have gone by the wayside, though you can still find them in backwater cities.
In a parallel development also at the end of the decade, Beijing experienced a teahouse boom, which provided another answer to the lack of privacy. A popular chain whose name escapes me popped up around the city, open 24 hours with private tatami-lined rooms, ostensibly for “business” dealings that took until morning. The chain folded only a few years later, perhaps because real teahouses, for tea connoisseurs, were beginning to catch on.
Coffee returns with a vengeance
I was a frequent visitor to the Sanwei Shuwu in the mid-1990s, as it was the only teahouse or coffeehouse in the western half of the city—the university district. This lack was somewhat understandable as most students would have regarded shelling out for the Western beverage to be an unaffordable luxury, at a time when many were still rationing shower tickets. By contrast, across the city to the east in Chaoyang District—the embassy district—international business was budding and nightlife cropping up for the first time. The first convincing coffeehouse (name escapes me), replete with checkerboard flooring and fresh-brewed, arabica-grade coffee, opened on the Third Ring Road at Sanyuanqiao in 1996. It folded after a year or two, but the owner might have been the same American entrepreneur who launched a whole-bean brand called Arabica around the same time, which did last but you had to know which stores sold it.
In 1998 Starbucks launched its very first shop in China across from the east gate of People’s University, with Ming Dynasty-style hardwood furniture. Other Starbucks soon popped up like mushrooms over the next few years, all crowded with young people. Some shops, like the one at the Lido Hotel, were notorious for sex workers. Yet the chain performed a needed service in forcing local café owners to get up to speed on coffee quality.
It was indeed a milestone year for coffee in Beijing. The idyllic string of interconnected little lakes in the Shichahai neighborhood in central Beijing at long last had its eureka moment—I had been wondering when it would come—and exploded with bars and cafés. The first one to open, in a former vine-covered house overlooking Qianhai (the “Front Lake”), was too understated to bother with a sign. Persuaded to adopt a name, they styled themselves the “No Name Café” (无名咖啡). It became a hit not only for being one of the first of its kind, but the foreign customers could get away with a bit of naughtiness: the super-laid-back staff either didn’t recognize the strange-smelling smoke from their hand-rolled cigarettes or pretended not to. It’s long since been razed.
Also in that year, the first local coffeehouse chain proper, with acceptably brewed Illy coffee and just the right cerebral ambience, opened in a strip of old lanes squeezed between Beijing and Qinghua Universities, snobbishly entitled “Sculpting in Time” (雕刻时光), after a book by renowned Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It moved to the Beijing Institute of Technology when the lanes were demolished in 2001; it remains open today. Over the next decade, the chain opened shops throughout Beijing and other cities. It got certain things right from the start, enabling it to thrive for over two decades: comfortable wooden furniture and warm, earth-toned color schemes.
Not until 2008 did I make it back to Shanghai. Good coffee was easy to find by then. I started taking frequent trips to the city, where a revolving cast of Chinese and foreign friends were also passing through. Someone introduced me to Niny Lam, owner of the lovely Santa Cecilia Music Café (茜茜莉亞) in the former French Concession. I first visited Santa Cecilia in 2012. Niny had played the violin professionally in Europe for years before returning to China, and her valuable collection of violins was displayed on the second floor of the café. Her husband was a cellist and professor of music at the nearby Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The café in this cultured neighborhood conjured up French Concession-era Shanghai and the coffee was satisfying. I gave them CDs of Gabriel Fauré piano music to put on the stereo. The location could not have been more ideal—across the street from the planned Shanghai Symphony Hall. But customer traffic wasn’t growing enough to assuage Niny’s worries about staying afloat, and she wasn’t sure she could hold out until 2014 when the concert hall was slated to open. Santa Cecelia soon closed its doors. It was ahead of its time and a bit too sophisticated for prevailing tastes.
This would soon change. In 2008 a café opened in the Changde Apartment Building just off Nanjing West Road near Jing’an Temple, the former International Settlement that had been previously populated by cafés in the 1930s and 40s. What made this café special was its location in the very building where Eileen Chang, the Lust, Caution author discussed above, lived from 1939–47. She was a frequent visitor of a café occupying the same ground-floor space as the new venue, the Qiancai or “Thousand Color” Bookstore café (千彩书坊), which is devoted to the author. To keep the crowds out, you have to first purchase a beverage before being allowed to choose a seat, and Americano is priced twice the normal going rate at 50 yuan ($7). To give you an idea how revered Chang is China, a random bookstore café I stepped into in Dali in Yunnan Province mounted photos of their pick of the 100 most famous international authors on a wall. In the Qiancai Café, literary books, including everything by and about Chang line the walls. The proprietress (behind the counter) uncannily resembles the author. She nodded when I told her that; it certainly wasn’t the first time she heard the compliment.
The chandelier invasion
The early 2010s saw the next revolution. Whereas Shanghai has long catered to the intimate and European, Beijing’s gastronomy industry is partial to the grandiose. Sparked by South Korea’s Caffe Bene chain (咖啡陪你), the city in the teens witnessed an eruption of massive cafés of stylishly roughhewn rustic woodwork, intentionally mismatched tables and chairs, and chandeliers galore, resembling furniture or lighting emporiums more than coffeehouses. In my Beijing neighborhood of Shuangjing alone sprouted five such coffee palaces. Their elaborate waffle creations enticed locals more than boring Frappuccinos, quickly rendering Starbucks and Costa Coffee passé, though the Western chains managed to hang on and weather the storm.
Just as suddenly, the Korean wave receded and the palaces vanished: the rents were unsustainable without the clientele constantly at capacity. Like the American book superstores Borders and Barnes & Noble, they were too good to be true and collapsed under their own weight. The most successful chain, Maan Coffee (漫咖啡), which had unveiled stores throughout Beijing and other cities, still has a handful of shops. Starbucks survives as well, though only by expanding into second and third-tier cities. Its recent domestic competitor, Luckin Coffee (瑞辛咖啡), has nailed the formula and serves pretty much the same quality drinks at lower prices and more convenient pickup and delivery service using its cashless app.
For every café in China that fails or gets the boot by fickle landlords, two new ones open up. The latest trend shuns the wasteful extravagance of the 2010s to adopt a clean, minimalist look, with plain white decor. The Voyage Coffee chain exemplifies this with its spacious flagship store (since closed) in Beijing’s revitalized west Qianmen and several other shops in Shichahai and the 798 Art District and in Shanghai. Another quality chain, Soloist Coffee (独奏咖啡), adopted curious furniture items (old streetcar seats, framed antique maps) and repurposed the interiors of old buildings. What has made this phase more than a mere shift in fashion is the improved coffee experience, now that the younger generation of Chinese baristas have caught up with the rest of the world, and sourced beans and hand-dripped brew are becoming the norm.
In 2020 Covid washed away many businesses in its wake. When it receded three years later, the cafés that survived did so because they had a solid customer base rather than antiseptic decor or creatively awkward furniture. Try to find a seat on weekends in the Jamaica Blue Coffee Shop in their branch at The Place in Beijing (世贸天阶), for instance. It’s an intimate, understated café, and the coffee and edibles are reliably topnotch. It’s the customers that form the decor.
“Little sisters” clocking time
What cafés recently have collectively grasped is that distinctiveness rather than fashion and copycatting provides the winning formula. This has paradoxically sparked another fashion, which possibly started in China, of the “Internet celebrity little sisters” (wanghong xiao jiejie), “punching in” (da ka) at select cafés, where they spend hours posing in seductive clothes and snapping photos of each other with the venue’s unique setting as a backdrop. Most do this just for fun but many others, namely the unemployed, treat this as a serious job. If an attractive female gains three to four thousand followers on Rednote or Douyin (TikTok), she can create a “shopping cart” for selling products; 100,000 followers, and she becomes a de facto influencer who can earn good money. Cafés owners encourage their presence as a free form of advertising for the establishment, even if the “little sisters” order the cheapest drinks or get away with ordering nothing.
To others, the little sisters can be a nuisance. They occupy the venue’s restroom to change into several sets of clothes. To reach the right angle, they accidentally back up into you and will even ask you to shift or move seats. As one server confided to me, they “make a lot of noise, disturb other customers, misuse their flash and fill lighting, bring a lot of stuff and leave it everywhere, making a mess of the place, and engage in some indecent posing in extremely revealing clothes.” These fashionistas aren’t, of course, confined to China; it’s a global trend in the Instagram age. I witnessed it on a recent trip to Hanoi and Da Nang in Vietnam, whose equally impressive cafés draw the same little sisters dressed in the same frilly outfits.
A division is opening up between cafés that attract influencers and cafés that discourage them and highlight instead their work stations, with long tables and plug-ins for laptop users. They are quite numerous in savvy Vietnam, less so in China, where the concept is still new. Unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, China’s visa and internet restrictions don’t fly with digital nomads. But China now boasts an infinite variety of coffee establishments and enough of its own netizens who seek out the quieter variety of café. It’s comparable to the situation a century ago when Shanghai cafés had to decide whether to be cabarets or cozy incubators for intellectuals.
Another way to look at this distinction is between cafés as havens or sanctuaries and cafés as arenas or theaters: one wanders to the former and within the latter. The notion that people could step off the productivity treadmill to tramp through a city’s streets for no other purpose than making unexpected discoveries along the way was popularized by late 19th–early 20th-century Parisian poets, surrealists, and (later) the situationists, a history I trace in From Van Gogh to the Camino de Santiago. This concept of “wandering bohemians” (liulang de boximiyaren or xianguangzhe) was picked up by Chinese writers and artists in 1930s Shanghai. Many Chinese in that era had lived or studied in Paris—renowned painters Xu Beihong and Pan Yuliang and the writer Qian Zhongshu, for instance—and had their eyes opened by European Modernism. It was also at this time that China was flooded with the first wave of Western literature in translation (Li). Locals weren’t merely leaving the teahouses to venture warily into the concessions’ cafés. They “sought the thrill of wandering among no fixed routes…discovering many urban secrets that ordinary people cannot…lingering in inconspicuous corners of cafés” (Zhou). Other Shanghai cafés, by contrast, were more interactive. They drew the ordinary of both sexes for the plainer purpose of dancing and coupling—cafés as arenas for performing rather than dreaming and incubating in.
Cafés today are not for dancing; there are bars and clubs for that purpose. But the grander and more scenic of establishments are transformed into a theater of sorts, a dramatic space, when swamped upon by the Internet celebrity little sisters. Whether or not they are paying any attention to you, you are their audience regardless. Even as they pretend to be minding their own business, they are highly conscious of the impression they are making on the customers around them; despite the final product being intended only for the cellphone, they are very much performing their product on stage in the flesh. And because it’s a performance, they feel at liberty to dress provocatively. Their seeming disregard for their audience is nothing other than the classic theater’s invisible “fourth wall” behind which the players perform oblivious of the audience sitting before them.
This makes more sense if you understand public interaction rituals in China. When people get into an argument outside, say a traffic scrape, they strut and threaten each other, pretending to be oblivious of the crowd forming around them while they exaggerate their antics precisely for the benefit of the crowd. Quarreling couples similarly stand back-to-back right out on the street in proudly defiant poses, something other cultures might find embarrassing, a matter of privacy.
I’ve always been partial to the larger sort of cafés, and I have always wondered what it is about space that is so luxurious. Is it the suggestion of wealth, of living or lounging for a few hours in a grand interior as if one’s own? Restaurants and bars don’t rely as much on the same appeal, where you are more caught up in a process—the potent fragrances of the food and drink, the company and the conversation at hand, the contracting funnel of inebriation—than in a place. You’re in, and you’re out. In a café, on the other hand, there is no hurry to leave, whether due to pressure to vacate your table, or because you’ve had enough to drink, or you’ve succeeded in scoring a one-night stand. You are able, indeed encouraged, to stay as long as you want. In the café, time settles and slows down. Left to your own devices and resources, you’re invited to take in the surroundings and imaginatively merge with them.
Thanks to Katya Knyazeva for advice and corrections on the 1930s Shanghai Jewish-Russian café scene.
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Other posts in this series:
Insights into China, Part 1: A walk down the street
Insights into China, Part 2: A meal in a restaurant
Insights into China, Part 3: An invitation to a party
Insights into China, Part 4: A stay in a hotel
Insights into China, Part 5: A glimpse inside a school
Insights into China, Part 6: A visit to the library
Insights into China, Part 7: An immersion in a museum
Insights into China, Part 9: A journey to the hinterland
Insights into China, Part 10: A vision in a concert hall
Insights into China, Part 11: A timeslip to the glorious Qing
Insights into China, Part 12: An idyll in paradise
The classic coffeehouse: Ten essentials
BUY THE BOOK. FORTHCOMING THIS FALL:
At the Police Café: China in Twelve Scenes
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