On a remote mountain slope in south-west China, bamboo trays of freshly picked red coffee cherries are drying in courtyards and on the rooftops of farmers’ homes in the tiny village of Zhukula.
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trays → pick → Zhukula
Much of the fruit has been harvested from trees planted next to an old church more than a century ago by French missionaries who brought Arabica saplings, along with Catholicism, across the border from Vietnam.
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who → harvest → Vietnam
The village’s nascent Christian conversion didn’t survive the religious purges of the Cultural Revolution, but the coffee trees are now recognised as the oldest in the country, making Zhukula the birthplace of China’s coffee cultivation.
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Zhukula → survive → cultivation
In this corner of China, long days ploughing and harvesting the mountainside are book-ended by coffee, not tea.
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days → plough → coffee
“Ever since I was little, as far back as I can remember, there have been coffee trees growing all around here,” says Li Jinrong, 57, a third-generation coffee farmer.
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Jinrong → remember → ?
“We make coffee as soon as we get up in the morning, drink it, go out to work and then have another cup before dinner.”
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we → make → dinner
The village of Zhukula has just one road in and out for its 83 households, reachable only by driving for hours along slender hairpin bends that snake around a mountain range.
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that → have → range
Li invites us into his farmhouse after we poke our heads through an open doorway leading to his courtyard, drawn in by a striking mound of yellow corn cobs baking in the sun and a noisy cat.
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we → invite → sun
His home is a modest three-storey brick structure, centred around an open-air communal room with a concrete-slab floor.
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home → centre → floor
One corner functions as a kitchen, with a rice cooker and a camping stove rigged up to a single power board looped around a nail in the wall, while a collection of mismatched plastic stools surrounds a basic dining table.
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collection → function → table
In the courtyard, he empties a rice sack filled with green coffee beans – shelled from their cherry skins – into a wood-fired roasting pit, fashioned out of an oil drum and large cast-iron work.
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he → empty → drum
With a cooking shovel, he continuously turns the beans, a process that takes more than an hour to achieve a deep roast.
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that → turn → roast
It might seem nostalgically authentic, but it’s a laborious task that modern coffee manufacturers long ago outsourced to roasting machines.
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manufacturers → seem → machines
While China’s surging taste for coffee helped drive global prices to record highs in 2025, few, if any, farmers in Zhukula have grown rich from coffee.
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farmers → surge → coffee
“We grow coffee beans to make a living, but coffee alone isn’t enough.
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coffee → grow → living
The problem is that we don’t have much farmland here,” Li says.
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Li → have → farmland
“Coffee consumption [in China] has increased, but our area is small, so sales are unstable.”
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sales → increase → China
Today, the sprawling mountainous region produces almost all of China’s coffee beans, an industry that has boomed as cafe culture has exploded across the country.
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culture → sprawl → country
China still trails miles behind Europe and the United States in terms of global coffee consumption, accounting for just 3 per cent, but it’s the fast-growing market, rising 150 per cent over the past decade.
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it → trail → decade
It’s big business, with large commercial farms harvesting thousands of tonnes of coffee beans each year.
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farms → ’ → beans
You can find Yunnan beans in speciality coffee shops around the world, Australia included.
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Australia → find → world
But today, most of the region’s produce is consumed domestically, fuelled by the rapid expansion of coffee chains such as Chinese giant Luckin Coffee, which has opened 30,000 stores across the mainland since its first in Beijing in 2017.
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which → consume → 2017
Boutique cafes serving oat milk lattes, iced Americanos and various berry infused, caramel-lashed, pistachio-rimmed concoctions are now abundant across Shanghai, Beijing and other major cities.
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cafes → serve → Shanghai
This growing demand has helped pull farmers out of poverty in rural Yunnan, which remains one of China’s poorest provinces.
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which → grow → provinces
The industry’s rise is also a case study in China’s 1980s pivot from a wholly planned economy to state-supported private enterprise and land cultivation, while also highlighting how rural land reform continues to constrain small-scale farmers.
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reform → plan → farmers
Which boats have been lifted highest by this rising tide has depended heavily on geographical luck and the Communist Party’s “visible hand” in picking industrial and agricultural winners.
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lifted → lift → winners
About half a day’s drive from Zhukula, towards China’s border with Myanmar, the sweeping valleys of Baoshan are blanketed in coffee trees, popping with red fruit.
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valleys → sweep → fruit
Many of them are owned by private commercial farms such as Gaosheng Coffee Manor, a family operated estate that runs a cafe, cupping room and tasting courses, while its German-imported industrial roasters churn through thousands of kilograms of beans each week.
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roasters → own → beans
Once an export-oriented business that used to count Nestlé and Starbucks as its largest clients, Gaosheng is now almost entirely focused on China’s domestic market.
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Gaosheng → orient → market
They’re our gods,” Gaosheng Coffee chairman Gao Jianyun says.
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Jianyun → ’re → ?
The company is one of several large coffee enterprises that have sprung up in Baoshan over the past two decades.
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that → spring → decades
Its roots trace back to a 1950s state policy designating the region as one of China’s agricultural engine rooms, where farmers were instructed to grow coffee.
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farmers → trace → coffee
“At that time, planting coffee wasn’t something they wanted to do themselves.
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they → plant → coffee
It was mandated by the state’s planned economy,” says Gao, whose parents were among the first coffee farmers in the area.
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parents → mandate → area
Similar to the Li family in Zhukula, the Gao family also has three generations rooted in coffee farming, but their trajectories couldn’t be starker.
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trajectories → have → farming
As China’s economy opened up, and the government poured resources into making Baoshan a coffee cultivation powerhouse, the Gaos scaled up and invested in modern equipment, whereas the Zhukula farmers today remain limited by isolation, difficult terrain and low-earning capacity.
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farmers → open → isolation
When Gao joined his parents working on their farm in the early 1980s, all fresh coffee cherries were still purchased centrally by the collective, and his role was to calculate and distribute wages based on farmers’ planting area.
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role → join → area
By 2005, the family had set up its own company, which today owns 34 hectares of coffee plants in Boashan and 80 hectares in the nearby Pu’er region and employs 100 people.
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which → set → people
Under China’s rural land system, farmers cannot buy or sell farmland, but they can lease their land-use rights to others, enabling wealthier operators and co-operatives to turn fragmented plots into larger estates.
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they → buy → estates
Gao says these farmers’ incomes have increased several times over.
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incomes → say → ?
…and 23 more, not listed.
The Aporia
