Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Mr. Xie, owner of Xinzhai Coffee, explaining the secret to his success, by Andy

“The first step to getting our coffee farmers to produce a quality product was to get them drinking coffee,” our host explained, a freshly pressed cup of his own brew in his hand. On the couch opposite him, one of his growers — and a friend from the same village — added that over the past years just about everybody in the village has picked up the habit of drinking 8-10 cups of the black stuff a day. Andy and I sat shaking like leaves in October from our eighth cup in a few hours, amazed that we had been out-caffeine’ed by a room full of Chinese.

We were sitting in the Xinzhai Manor Coffee Company (新寨咖啡公司), guests of the founder and owner Mr. Xie Xianwen (謝顯文). Mr. Xie opened his company in his native Lujiang (潞江) in Yunnan’s Baoshan Prefecture (雲南保山市) for two reasons. First, coffee had been grown in his home village of Xinzhai — after which the company is named — for years without anybody taking the time to organize the farmers or develop the industry. Second, he realized there was good money to be made in the domestic coffee business. So he quit his job in a tobacco company — and his smoking habit — scraped up a little capital, and got roasting.

A Lujiang coffee farmer talking about his life while drinking a fresh pressed cup, by Andy

We met Mr. Xie half by accident. Our three previous attempts at finding coffee companies in Baoshan that day were abortive — one factory torn down, one moved, and one impossible to find. Then suddenly a Northeastern (東北) woman in a white Toyota heard us ask somebody else and escorted us down to the Xinzhai display cafe next to Baoshan’s city museum. Mr. Xie promised to come meet us as soon as he could, and the Northeastern woman left us with the barista. We were then served one, two, three, four, and five coffees in rapid succession, the same way you get served tea by attentive hosts. Presently Mr. Xie arrived and hoisted us off in the Xinzhai van to treat us to a Dai (傣族) lunch, but not before one last round of coffee. We got the feeling from his quick pace and twitchy face that he might actually be spry on his own supply.

Once he knew we were interested in learning about Yunnan coffee, he generously offered to drive us the hour ride out to his company and show us what he could, no compensation requested! We had planned on riding to the area ourselves but accepted his courtesy since we’re lazy. So after lunch, we whizzed down the expressway, Mr. Xie enlightening us on the area’s history along the way. “Over there along those mountains, that’s where we stopped the Japanese. Otherwise I might not be speaking to you in Chinese today.” “That village there is the home of Liang Jinshan (粱金山),” the bootstraps businessmen who made a fortune in Burma and supported the Chinese war effort. Then suddenly the expressway dipped over the side of the biggest canyon I’ve ever seen navigated by automobile, truly some sort of engineering marvel (thank God we didn’t try to ride there on the bikes). Later we found out that the area, the Salween River (怒江) is called China’s Grand Canyon, one of the deepest such landforms in Asia. “And this canyon is where Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮) burned the barbarian army of Meng Huo (孟獲) alive.” At the mere mention of Zhuge Liang, every nerdy fiber of my being quivered. Oh, yeah, and apparently they grow some of China’s best coffee in there too.

Andy took this picture from the car. It kinda gives you an impression of what an insane ride it was... see the highway winding around the side of the mountain on the left? It goes all the way down. by Andy

Coffee, like the world’s predominant religions, came from the Middle East and spread both West to our forbears and East, albeit a lot more slowly in this direction. And like religion, technology, and heaps of other trends, it is recently posing a challenge to thousands of years of Chinese tradition — in this case, the “what could possibly be more Chinese?” institution of tea. Already in places like Shanghai, Taibei, and Hong Kong, many of the youth have left the leaves of their parents and are spending more time in trendy coffeehouses. In fact, we first learned about this region’s coffee by drinking the Yunnan blend in Starbucks (New Orleanians forgive me, for I have sinned). The java giant only recently began purchasing beans out of the region, Mr. Xie explained, but the trees in his native Baoshan have been there for well over a hundred years, when European missionaries first planted them.

Andy with his fingers in some unroasted beans, by Evan

After the bible-thumpers were themselves thumped out of the country, however, the trees just kinda sat there for decades. Apparently the Dai had taken to chewing the fresh beans as a dessert and in some cases making it into alcohol (yes, coffahol, as if I needed more reasons to love the Dai). In fact, it was from a Dai village in the area that he bought his mascot — a 78 year old coffee tree, delicately uprooted and replanted in the factory’s courtyard, bought for 8000 yuan. After Reform and Opening, the farmers realized they were sitting on something of value and began harvesting and selling the unprocessed beans out of the country — but at very low profits. That’s where Mr. Xie stepped in. “Think about cocoa beans. The African countries that produce them make almost nothing from them, if not, why would they be so poor? Now think about places like Switzerland or Belgium — they make a killing off of their chocolates, even though they have to import all the cocoa. What’s the difference? They are selling a finished good, not just raw agricultural products.” That’s where his philosophy about getting the growers interested was born, and that’s how he decided to focus on the quality of his finished product. Right around this time, the modern marvel of the canyon expressway was built, removing the final hurdle: “not being able to sell a good thing out [of the area] (好東西賣不出去).”

When he first got started, he was roasting beans in an old-fashioned oven in an old village warehouse. He devoted himself to learning everything he could from Lujiang’s first big coffee roaster, a friend of his family. Then he took to individual experimentation, and of course, his strategy of hooking the farmers on their own product. Once interested, they started to care about growing beans that became a savory drink, not just willy nilly picking whatever the trees felt like offering up. The strategy worked, and over time his reputation grew — with his caffeine tolerance, now up to Ultraman levels — and it was time for expansion.

Mr. Xie showing off his baby, by Andy

That meant moving into a bigger facility 8 km out of the village to the side of the highway and a serious equipment upgrade. To make the best, you must have the best, and the best roasting equipment in the world, said Mr. Xie, comes from the German company Robat. To “rise a level,” he scrounged up USD ~$70,000 for the purchase, import, and installation of a fully computerized roasting automaton. His black metallic baby now sits neatly in the middle of the pristine roasting room floor next to the laptop through which his head roaster, another Lujiang native and childhood friend, controls every step of the process. It didn’t look big enough to be the linchpin of a village’s coffee economy, but apparently in high production season it’s on almost 24 hours a day.

Since then, things have been looking mostly up. More and more orders have been coming in from all over China, specifically Shanghai. Mr. Xie had just returned from there the day before we arrived (again can’t beat our luck), having visited his distributor and some Japanese cafes in the Gubei district that brew his beans. Recently he’s also gotten involved very successfully with the Baoshan government in organizing coffee gift boxes as a regional novelty product to be sold to tourists (If you haven’t lived in China very long, this probably sounds ridiculous. If this doesn’t sound ridiculous to you, you’ve lived in China too long).

Mr. Xie showing me the 78 year old tree in his courtyard, by Andy

But of course there is always a little unexpected bitterness to eat even in the best laid of plans. This year’s drought has been especially hard on the coffee trees, which are especially water needy. He figures that half of them will produce normally or slightly below normal this year, while the other half will not produce useable beans for between one and three years to come. It’s a setback for sure, but he’s optimistic that this will only be a brief hiccup over the longterm development of his business.

So after a little while at production HQ and a swing through some coffee trees next to the river, we headed back off to town. On the return trip, Mr. Xie stopped talking about history and started talking about the future. “In this life, we only get 100 years at best. There’s no time to waste. We have to follow our dreams.” His dream is to become Yunnan’s — and China’s — premier producer of *finished* coffee and to sell his product all over the country, and maybe even the world. He’s currently in the process of applying for an export license and is constantly on the lookout for new buyers. All he needs now is to catch the karmic equalizer to this year’s drought in the form of a lucky break, and there’ll be sufficient grounds for Mr. Xie’s delicious brew — I never mentioned this before, but the stuff is great — to be served in a cafe near you.

Now it’s time for me to opine a little. We love people like Mr. Xie for the same reason we love people like Tutu: they care about the quality of their product. If you’ve spent any amount of time in China, you know how half-ass 99% of everything here is done (and if you don’t think so, you’ve definitely spent too much time in China). We don’t care that his particular craft is Western in origin. We just care that he cares. Mr. Xie is giving his all to make a better mousetrap, and we were refreshed to see it!

Andy in the Xinzhai factory courtyard, by Evan

**OK, one last thing. When we bid him adieu, I told Mr. Xie he should make a version of his company’s packaging targeted at foreigners and send some samples to Western grocery stores in Beijing and Shanghai (i.e. Jenny Lou’s and City Shop). His current packaging is way too LBX with that gothic lettering and a name that most laowai could never pronounce (an “x” and a “zh” = linguistic death). So I got to thinking (scary, I know), and what came out was a new image to be sold to us furriners: Yunnan Canyon Coffee (雲南峽谷咖啡). It would have a simple logo, for example some coffee trees next to the Salween River in between the canyon walls, maybe a Chinese house. On the back, it would have an explanation of the coffee history in Lujiang and Mr. Xie and the farmers of Xinzhai, etc. etc., the kind of human appeal that we bleeding heart Westerners love. If anybody knows anything about marketing (because I sure don’t), please let me know your suggestions, and I’ll pass them on to Mr. Xie. He was a really nice guy, and his coffee really was good, and so I’d like to give him a hand if at all possible.