![]() He did not drink coffee because it was “foreigners’ food”, and he was too busy writing for the kind of leisure enjoyed in cafés. However, this was negatively judged as “Western” and “bourgeois.” For example, in 1932, Lu Xun, one of the most important twentieth century Chinese writers, commented on the café fashion during 1920s (133-36), and listed the reasons why he would not visit one. It was almost a fashion among the literary elite to spend time in cafés. Another group of coffee consumers were from the cultural elites-the young revolutionary intellectuals and writers with overseas experience. (For more history of Kiessling, including pictures and videos, see Kiessling). At that time, coffee was reserved mostly for foreign politicians and military officials as well as wealthy businessmen-very few ordinary Chinese drank it. This restaurant, named Kiessling, was run by a German chef, a former solider who came to China with the eight-nation alliance. In 1901, coffee was served in a restaurant in the city of Tianjin. With instant coffee dominating as a drink, the Chinese have developed a cultural and social demand for cafés, but have not yet developed coffee palates. Cafés, rather than coffee, are at the centre of this current trend in contemporary Chinese cities. The second is to focus on coffee and cafés in the socio-cultural milieu of contemporary China in order to understand the symbolic value of the emerging coffee/café-scape. ![]() ![]() The first is to map coffee and cafés in Mainland China in different historical periods. In this article, I set out to accomplish two tasks.
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