Coffee and the Returning Taste: How Jiangmen Became China’s Coffee Capital

Jiangmen — the prefecture in the western Pearl River delta that brands itself 中国侨都 (Zhōngguó Qiáodū, China’s “overseas-Chinese capital”) — did not grow a single coffee bean when its coffee industry began. What it had instead was a diaspora. For more than a century the people of the five Wuyi counties — Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping and Heshan — left through the ports of Hong Kong and Macau, and on the way they learned to drink coffee. The taste came back the way the people did: in luggage, in letters, in the tin canisters of a returning household. Then, in the early 2000s, it came back a third time — as an industry.

Today the city reports an annual coffee-industry output value of more than 3 billion yuan, roasted-bean output of more than 10,000 tonnes — roughly one-tenth of China’s total — and a manufacturing base that, by the city’s own count, makes one in every five coffee machines exported from China. More than 350 firms make coffee equipment and parts. The fourth China Qiaodu Coffee Festival, held in March 2026, drew more than 510,000 visits. And the region still does not grow much coffee — the “coffee capital” is a returnee’s capital, built from a taste that crossed the Pacific and came home.

Two things need saying plainly before the story. The first is that almost every figure in this article is a 2023-to-2026 government or press figure, not a book citation — the books that document Wuyi’s emigration stop in 2000, a generation before the industry they describe. The second is that the coffee habit itself is oral history and museum evidence, not a census: nobody counted how many Taishan households kept a coffee tin. The article says which is which.

The taste left

Coffee was not a drink the Wuyi emigrant brought from home. It was a workplace commodity he acquired abroad. The 1992 Taishan County Overseas-Chinese Gazetteer (台山县华侨志) records Taishan emigrants concentrated in laundries, restaurants, groceries and cafés — the service sector where hand-brewed and later roasted coffee was a daily fact of work. The same gazetteer maps Taishan communities across the United States, Canada, Cuba, Peru, Australia and Southeast Asia, the geography of where the taste was absorbed. And the indentured-labour traffic of 1847–1874 — the coolie trade that shipped Wuyi men under contract to Cuba’s sugar fields and Peru’s guano beds — put thousands of them inside Latin America’s plantation economies, alongside the region’s coffee estates.

So the habit’s first home was not the qiaoxiang but the café, the plantation and the restaurant counter. The coolie-era departure story is told elsewhere on this site; the point here is narrower: the taste left with the emigrant, and it stayed abroad for a generation.

It also came back through more than one route. The same gazetteer that lists café work records the “foreign-country habit” returning with 归侨, and it notes that returned migrants came home not only with money — carried home through the qiaopi remittance-letter networks — but with imported goods and customs, coffee among them. The round-trip was not a single wave; it was a steady counter-current to the emigration, a taste moving back along the same shipping lanes the emigrants had taken out, one suitcase and one tin at a time.

The taste came home

When the taste returned, it returned with a name for itself. The gazetteer records coffee-drinking as a 番邦习气 (fānbāng xíqì, a “foreign-country habit”) that returned overseas Chinese — 归侨 (guīqiáo) — carried home, and the cultural survey Outline of the History and Culture of the Wuyi Qiaoxiang treats imported coffee as one of the everyday foreign customs reimported by returnees. In a region that drank tea, coffee marked the returned.

It also left objects. The Taishan Museum holds a 1906 HILLS BROS coffee tin, donated in 1987 by a villager whose forebear had brought it back from the United States, alongside an 1880s Peugeot hand grinder and a 1930s French silver-plated coffee pot. The museum’s assistant curator, Feng Haoran (冯浩然), has described why so many old tins survived: the families kept them “out of a 睹物思人 feeling — seeing the object and thinking of the person.” An empty coffee canister, set on a shelf, became a keepsake with “a genuine qiaoxiang flavour.” The collecting continues: in 2023 the museum retrieved a rusted HILLS BROS tin from an old 侨房 in Baisha Town — the same brand as the tins already in its collection. The county’s own account dates the first coffee ware to the 1860s — “overseas Chinese put coffee beans, a pot, cups and a grinder into their luggage and carried coffee culture home to Taishan” — though no primary document has been located for that date, and it should be read as the city’s own story rather than an archival fact.

The taste also had a character. Huang Chunyan (黄春燕), a Taishan literary-federation official who has written on the county’s coffee history, describes what she calls 老华侨味 (lǎohuáqiáo wèi, the “old overseas-Chinese flavour”): a bitter, astringent, dark-roasted coffee, always with sugar and milk — a family-inherited taste that predates every modern coffee wave. A Taishan café owner who has run her shop for a decade told a local outlet that old overseas Chinese walk in and order coffee the moment they return to the county, and that they once brought coffee powder and beans home as gifts. That is the taste the article is named for — a returning taste, held in a tin and passed down in a habit.

A useful discipline for reading this history: the city’s accounts describe two stages that are often blurred into one. The first tins and grinders arrived, in the city’s own telling, “by the 1860s”; but the same sources say coffee was already “commonplace in Jiangmen by the 1960s.” Arrival in the 1860s, everyday by the 1960s — the books fix no single date, so neither does this article.

The farm that kept it alive

The habit’s deepest roots are in a single place: the Haiyan Overseas-Chinese Farm (海宴华侨农场), created in September 1963 on Taishan’s southwest coast to resettle returnees from thirteen countries and regions of Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei. Locals still call it the “Little United Nations.” Government sources confirm the thirteen-country character and the founding year; the specific claim that a dark, robust Indonesian-and-Vietnamese coffee habit persisted on the farm comes from a 2025 volume of returnee oral histories, Overseas Chinese Revive Haiyan (侨兴海宴), and from the anthropologist Nekura Kyoko’s study of a Guangdong overseas-Chinese farm — that is, book evidence, not government records.

The farm matters to the story for a second reason. Nekura’s fieldwork treats food as the sharpest boundary between 归侨 and their locally born neighbours, and coffee as one of the identity markers a returnee served to guests to signal overseas origin. The oral histories record returnees teaching their Taishan neighbours to drink coffee and cook Southeast Asian dishes, and the farm’s periodic market as the contact zone where the two foodways traded. In other words, coffee did not just return to Wuyi — it was introduced to locals by the people who returned, one cup at a time. The resettlement story of the Haiyan farm itself belongs to a sibling article; here it is enough to say the farm was the habit’s incubator.

The corridor reversed

The corridor that carried emigrants out was the same one the industry later came back through. Hong Kong and Macau were the hinges of Wuyi mobility — the transit points for emigrants, remittances and letters — and by the reform era Hong Kong and Macau capital was the county’s most active investment channel. Then the corridor was run in reverse.

Three firms carry the story, each with a name and a date. 香记 (Heung Kee), a Hong Kong coffee group whose brand began in Singapore in 1936, opened 香记（江门）咖啡有限公司 in 2002 — the first professional coffee-roasting production base in Jiangmen, and the fact behind the region’s later claim to be “one of the earliest” roasting bases in mainland China. 华盛 (Kong Wah), another Hong Kong house, moved its headquarters to Jiangmen in 2003 under general manager Zhong Darong (钟达荣). And 诚品 (Chengpin) was founded in Jiangmen in 2006 by returnee Tang Jinhui (汤锦辉), a Xinhui-born man raised in Macau, with production from 2007; his family’s 诚品咖啡 brand — led by Tang Jinqing (汤锦卿), also Xinhui-born and Macau-raised, and a co-founder of the original World Coffee Bean-Blending Championship — now exports to Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The two Tangs are both named in sources; nothing in the record states how they are related, so this article will not.

Why did the firms come? Their own answer is geography and kinship — “close in place, close in people” — plus, in Tang Jinhui’s telling, “Jiangmen’s distinctive coffee culture.” The deeper answer is that the returnee capital had a ready-made channel to follow: the 侨务 (overseas-Chinese affairs) machinery that had spent a century treating diaspora capital as, in the gazetteer’s phrase, “foreign but native,” and steering it home through investment incentives, credit lines like the 侨资贷, incubation platforms like the 侨梦苑 (“Overseas-Chinese Dream Garden”), and a registered database of diaspora-funded enterprises — the modern successor to that machinery is the subject of a companion article on the overseas-Chinese platform. The book-level claim that Taishan shifted “from a county that sent people out to a county that drew capital back” is confirmed here at the level of institutions.

The money behind the move has its own history. The remittances that once flowed home as consumption — 侨汇, earn-abroad-spend-home money that built houses and paid for festivals — gradually became 侨资, equity-style investment steered into factories and firms. The gazetteers tabulate the shift, showing remittance income declining relative to manufacturing exports across the reform decades; the coffee roasters of 2002, 2003 and 2006 are the endpoint of a 150-year arc from letter-borne spending money to factory capital.

The industrial base

The equipment cluster did not appear from nothing. It grew out of the region’s older light-metal craft — the 五金 and 机电 (hardware and mechanical-electrical) sectors, the stainless-steel and metalware base that includes Xinhui’s century-old Sānhéngwǎ kitchen-knife lineage — and out of a food-and-beverage processing sector that already existed. The industry itself says the connection plainly: “Jiangmen’s metalware craft is exquisite, which is what made it one of the world’s important hand-pour-kettle production bases.” That is a reported craft connection, not a deterministic one — the equipment industry is an extension of a skills base, not its inevitable outcome. But it explains why Jiangmen, of all places, ended up making the tools of a drink it barely grows: it already knew how to work metal to kitchen standard, and it already had the food industry’s regulatory habits. The region’s aged-tangerine-peel (陈皮) heritage even survives in the coffee itself — 陈皮拿铁, the local latte cut with chenpi, is a festival staple.

The equipment sector has its own named players: 慕威纳’s “马赫” hand-crank espresso machine, priced at 8,200 yuan and sold in the thousands since 2025; 西啡科技, whose capsule machines leave the factory at half a million units a year for more than 90 countries; and 红博智咖’s XDosing bean-blending machine. The 2024 government post that counts the 350-plus firms also records 2023 equipment exports of about 650 million yuan, up 30 percent on the year, shipped to the United States, Europe, Brazil, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.

The name: 侨都咖啡

The industry’s branding was not invented for it. Jiangmen has long framed itself as 中国侨都 — China’s overseas-Chinese capital — and the coffee cluster’s public brand, 侨都咖啡 (Qiáodū kāfēi, “Qiaodu Coffee”), is that century-old identity re-deployed for a product. The city wires it into its “qiaodu empowerment” and “Hong Kong–Macau integration” programmes, and the city’s own leadership frames the industry as a “two-way journey” — 一杯咖啡，半部侨史, “one cup of coffee, half a history of the overseas Chinese.” State media opens its coverage of the industry with the same line, and with the city’s preferred origin story: “the people of Jiangmen prefer to believe the first coffee bean was tucked into a suitcase and carried back across the sea.” It is a framing, and this article attributes it as one — but it is also, in broad outline, true. In May 2026 the city issued a three-year action plan for the 侨都咖啡 industry (2026–2028), targeting a China (Jiangmen) coffee-industry base by 2028 — “planting at scale, manufacturing with advantage, trading through channels, consuming with character, and integrating culture and tourism” — and committing to an annual 侨都咖啡 white paper. The branding has become policy. It is the same present-tense Jiangmen this site has been documenting all season: the dual-corridor bridge economy, the neutrino observatory sunk beneath Kaiping, the rebuilt energy coast.

The scale today

The figures, each dated and sourced, are what they are. Annual output value of the coffee and related industry: more than 3 billion yuan (a 2026 news-conference figure). Roasted-bean output: more than 10,000 tonnes a year, about 10% of China’s total (2025). Exports of roasted coffee products: more than 20% of the national total in 2023, rising to about 22% of export value by 2025 — a point worth pausing on, because it is frequently misread: the “20%” belongs to roasted products, not to equipment. Equipment is a different and more striking claim: one in every five coffee machines exported from China is made in Jiangmen, and the city is credited with roughly 40% of the country’s stainless-steel coffee ware, by an unspecified measure. The 350-plus equipment-and-parts firms include makers whose hand-pour kettles ship under Western brands and to Starbucks. And the cafés: the commercial dataset 窄门餐眼 counted 2,718 cafés in October 2025, or 5.64 per 10,000 residents, ranking Jiangmen fifth nationally — up from sixth in 2022. All of these numbers drift by source and year; the honest version names the source and the date with each one. The café count itself is the clearest case — it moves from 1,251 in 2023 to 2,718 in late 2025 depending on whether the tally counts shop licences, storefronts or registered businesses. The city has also built the habit into its daily calendar: 三点三 (sāndiǎnsān, “3:15”), an official local-culture brand for the afternoon coffee break, with more than 300 cafés opened into city parks and scenic areas. And the “beanless capital” has quietly begun to grow a few beans of its own — some 90,000 coffee trees across the region by 2026, a small but pointed reversal of the premise the story is built on.

The festival — and the café that came home

The fourth China Qiaodu Coffee Festival ran 5–8 March 2026 at Wuyi Overseas-Chinese Plaza in Jiangmen — not April, a date this article’s research corrected — and drew more than 510,000 visits and 270,000 cups across more than 330 brands from 13 countries and 40-plus cities. It is the loudest single proof that the returning taste has become a mass taste.

But the sharpest single object in the whole story is a name. Xinhua reports that in the 1930s a Fang family from Zili Village in Kaiping — the 碉楼 (diāolóu) watchtower village — opened a FONG’S CAFE in Montreal, and that roughly a century later the brand returned to Zili Village itself, serving sea-salt yellow-skin iced coffee and gold-mountain garlic specials beside the watchtowers. One source, so treat it with care — but as an image it is hard to beat: a café name that literally left the village and came home. Around it, the newer returnee economy is visible in the village café wave — 森澜咖啡庄园, a coffee estate in Kaiping run by a third-generation overseas-Chinese descendant who came back to plant 20,000 coffee trees (a reminder that the “beanless” capital now grows a few), a 陈皮-coffee shop in Xinhui’s Chakeng, a coffee-and-art space in Heshan named for the painter Li Tiefu, and a café run in a Taishan 侨房 by a Hong Kong Taishan-association officer named Zhao Qiheng.

The festival’s growth is itself the story in miniature: the first edition, a coffee-culture week in 2023, drew 280,000 visits; four years later the figure is 510,000. Behind it sits the 侨都咖啡全球产业联盟, a global industry alliance founded in February 2023 with representatives from 24 countries, and more than fifty trade-matching events since.

The round-trip is the story

The cultural historian Zhang Yunhua describes the Wuyi qiaoxiang as a node in a two-way flow — people out, and goods, ideas and tastes in — its physical and social transformation driven from the outside in by overseas earnings and overseas habits. Coffee is the clearest, most ordinary instance of that flow, which is why it makes such a good ending: the taste that a migration carried out of Wuyi became the industry that a return built there. The 1906 HILLS BROS tin in the Taishan Museum, the “old overseas-Chinese flavour” a returned man orders the moment he lands, the Hong Kong and Macau firms that shipped their roasters back in 2002 and 2003 and 2006, the one-in-five coffee machines now leaving the same ports the emigrants once did — they are one story, told at four scales.

The shortest version of it sits in a kitchen. Somewhere in Taishan, a family still keeps an empty coffee tin from a grandfather’s crossing, and if you ask why, the answer is the museum curator’s: seeing the object, thinking of the person. The industry that tin eventually seeded is measured in billions of yuan now. The reason it exists is measured in tins.

And the taste is being rediscovered by the grandchildren. The old overseas-Chinese flavour — bitter, dark, sugared — was once a marker of having been away; now the village cafés brew it back into fashion beside the watchtowers, and a third-generation descendant plants coffee trees on land his grandfather left and returned to. The round-trip is not finished. It has simply changed direction again: the taste that left, and came home, is now leaving a second time — this time as a product with a name.

Continue Reading

• The Haiyan Overseas-Chinese Farm — the resettlement story of the farm where the coffee habit was kept alive.
• Reading Qiaopi: Wuyi Remittance Letters — the letter-and-money networks that carried the taste home.
• The New Coast: Taishan’s Energy Economy — the present-tense Wuyi this article’s industry belongs to.
• Wuyi Roots Trip: Gifts and Reciprocity — what to bring and give when you make the trip home.

Stay Connected

Roots of China tells the stories of the Wuyi diaspora — past and present. For more on the towns, surnames and returning tastes of the five counties, explore the site, or share your own family’s story with us.

Sources

State and wire news (primary, linked)
– 新华社 news.cn — 侨都咖啡产业报道 (2026-04-08) — 侨都咖啡节, FONG’S CAFE, 一杯咖啡半部侨史
– 中新社 chinanews.com.cn — 《侨乡新貌》江门”侨咖”香飘百年 (2026-08-05) — >¥3bn, 9万株, 近2000店
– 新会区政府 xinhui.gov.cn — 诚品咖啡/汤锦辉回乡创业 (2024-12)
– 台山市政府 cnts.gov.cn — 台山华侨文化博物馆与侨乡历史
– 广东省方志办 dfz.gd.gov.cn — 侨墟：台山华侨经济与文化交流的见证

Government (additional, cited in text)
– 江门市政府 jiangmen.gov.cn — 商务局 2024-02-29 (post_3043178), 2024-05-14 (post_3091781), 2026-03-08 (post_3453332), 2026-05-19 (post_3497526)
– 蓬江区政府 pjq.gov.cn — 咖啡节收官 (post_3455464)
– 广东省政府/侨务 gd.gov.cn, qb.gd.gov.cn — 侨梦苑/侨资

Regional and commercial press (cited in text)
– 澎湃新闻 thepaper.cn — 黄春燕《在台山，有一种咖啡风味叫”老华侨味”》(2019-03-14)
– 21世纪经济报道 21jingji 2026-06; 南方财经 sfccn 2025-11-30 (窄门餐眼密度); 羊城晚报 ycwb 2025-02-18; 江门日报 jmrb 2024-12-17

Reference
– 百度百科 — 侨都咖啡; 第四届中国侨都（江门）咖啡节

Books (cited)
– 《台山县华侨志》(1992) · 《台山市志 1979—2000》(2001) · 《江门市志 1979—2000》(2011) · 《广东台山侨务志》(2012) · 《五邑侨乡历史文化概要》(张运华 2007) · 《”故乡”与”他乡”》(奈仓京子 2010) · 《侨兴海宴》(2025)