Pu’er Coffee

  In the past, I envied the interesting life inside coffee shops, and the elderly gentleman just now also loved this kind of life. He said that in this rich and fragrant air, there is an endless experience of life to savor. — Tian Han, One Night in a Coffee Shop Compared with China’s long history of tea drinking, coffee, as an imported commodity, has only a very brief two-hundred-year history of consumption. This simple brewed beverage stirs cultural trends and emotional turbulence no less than tea. According to Yangzhou Huafang Lu by Qing opera writer Li Dou, in the sixteenth year of the Daoguang reign, the Danes opened China’s first coffee shop near the Thirteen Factories in Guangzhou, which people referred to as the “black shop,” and called coffee “black wine.” It is not hard to see the tentative and resistant emotions people had toward coffee. They reluctantly sipped a mouthful of the bitter or sour brown liquid, just as the rulers had no choice but to open the crumbling ...