Dark, thick, strong, bitter. That’s coffee in Xinglong, a small town 30 minutes inland from the surf resorts of Wanning in Hainan province, China’s southernmost island.

First the beans roast over charcoal with butter and sugar until they shine. Then they’re brewed in a metal kettle and strained through gauze into condensed milk. For locals, the caramel-colored pour-overs sweeping China’s megacities are nothing more than “sugar water.”

On Xinglong’s Sun River Bridge, a stone still carries former Premier of China Zhou Enlai’s quote: “Xinglong coffee is simply great.” The town has held onto that praise for decades, long before China developed a taste for lattes and single-origin beans.

But that coffee was never native to Hainan.

It was an exile created by Hainanese migrants across Southeast Asia, who roasted it to approximate a remembered taste — a brew that only reached the island when their families returned in the 1950s and ’60s.

Xinglong itself was built for these returnees. Meaning “prosperity” in Chinese, the town was founded in 1956 as one of 41 overseas Chinese farms across the country — state-run settlements created to receive ethnic Chinese who had lived abroad and hoped to reestablish themselves in the young People’s Republic.

In “Citizens in Motion,” Singaporean sociologist Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho calls them “re-migrants,” people returning to a homeland they often knew only through stories.

They arrived from across the region, carrying different ruptures: survivors of Indonesia’s anti-Chinese violence, left-wing sympathizers expelled from British Malaya, families fleeing the war in Vietnam, and others drawn back by the promise of socialism.

Today, coffee shapes Xinglong’s migrant history and daily life.

The town’s central road is lined with cafés and shops that trace the journeys of the families who returned here from more than 20 countries. Hainan coffee stalls sit beside Indonesian snacks, Vietnamese dishes next to local roasters, all framed as part of the town’s identity.

And for those born in Xinglong — the children and grandchildren of re-migrants — coffee carries both distance and belonging. It recalls a home they never lived in, yet it also marks the future of the town their families rebuilt. Here, coffee is how people make sense of where they came from and where they are going.

Home brew

Across urban China, coffee shops glow with soft lighting, curated interiors, and crowds of young professionals. In Xinglong, the ritual unfolds in laobacha, literally “daddy’s tea,” plain neighborhood cafés where men in their 50s and 60s play chess, trade gossip, and drink the dark roast their families once carried back from Southeast Asia.

One of the best-known stops is Popular Tea House, where an iced coffee costs 7 yuan (under $1). The hometown favorite, Xinglong Bridge Coffee, is equally affordable: a 250-gram bag of its pot-roasted beans sells for about 30 yuan.

Coffee always begins at home. Many re-migrants taste their first at age 5 or 6, sipping from a parent or grandparent’s cup. The habit carried across generations, served at breakfast tables, family visits, and quiet afternoons, and younger Hainanese still learn to drink, and sometimes roast, coffee exactly as their grandparents did.

Chen Siying grew up in that milieu. Born in 1994, she is now the chief roaster at Xinglong Bridge Coffee and the first woman in her family to inherit its demanding stove-top technique. In 2022, the Hainan provincial government named her an “intangible cultural heritage inheritor.” Her grandfather, Chen Zhuoming, founded Xinglong Bridge and was among the farm’s earliest roasters.

Chen says her family traces back to Jieyang, in the southern Guangdong province, but her grandfather grew up in Cambodia, where he learned the trade, including roasting, at an early age. His parents wanted him to have an education they couldn’t secure there, so he was sent back to China.

When he arrived, the farm’s appetite for coffee was enormous. It was fuel for long days clearing hillsides, digging reservoirs, carving irrigation canals, and building new homes. In those first years, everything had to be built from scratch.

Coffee breaks quickly became the farm’s social glue. Writing in “Wanning Literature and History Vol. 9: Xinglong Farm Series,” — a collection of early re-migrant testimonies — Indonesian returnee Zhang Liukun said that if the supply ever ran out, people would bike or walk up to eight kilometers to the next town for a cup.

Even during the years of strict rationing, Xinglong managed to set up a small coffee factory, and Zhuoming — one of the few who had learned roasting simply by watching others work — was pulled in as a part-time technician.

Decades later, after leaving Hainan to study law in Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong, Chen returned to find the local coffee world had shifted.

While big cities raced ahead with branding and third-wave trends, Xinglong’s marketing habits barely shifted. “Promotional techniques that were already outdated in Guangzhou were still common here,” she says.

In 2020, Chen quit her marketing job and returned to Xinglong to focus on coffee full time. For young professionals like her, the pull home is complicated: they want to push Xinglong coffee beyond the island, yet they know China’s mainstream coffee culture now revolves around Starbucks and China’s domestic giant Luckin Coffee, specialty brews, and global trends.

“Hainan coffee,” as it’s known in Southeast Asia, may thrive there, but within China — and globally — it still sits on the margins.

Chen’s typical roasting day starts at dawn, roasting the traditional way over a stove-top pot until the heat drives her outside. But she also evaluates coffees from around the world, holds a Q Robusta Grader certification — a global credential for professional coffee tasters — and runs her own brand of Hainan coffee beans using modern roasting equipment.

For decades, the elders roasted by feel alone, their tongues and hands the only measures of good coffee. Chen’s generation believes otherwise. “Now that we need to link up with international standards and markets, we can’t just rely on experience alone,” she says. “My Q Grader certificate might not matter to the older generation, but it matters to everyone else.”

She often teams up with her friend Zeng Weiru, co-head of Longyuan Coffee Farm, entering roasting competitions and gastronomic fairs across the region. They see promoting Xinglong coffee as a personal duty. “If coffee can’t go on in Xinglong,” Zeng says, “ask yourself if you’d be the one to blame.”

In 2024, Zeng’s coffee won first place in the Natural Process category at the Hainan Robusta Green Coffee Competition. Like Chen, he spent his university years off the island, and his degree in nutritional sciences now shapes his work as a roaster.

For him, Xinglong coffee’s future depends on quality, not nostalgia. The business won’t be lucrative soon, he says, and progress will require long-term research and a shift in how locals value coffee. In his words, the job is to “educate the market.”

That shift is already visible in the cup. The heavy, burnt profile once taken for granted is giving way to notes of barley tea, caramel, and nuts. A different Xinglong coffee is emerging, shaped by young roasters who see room for change without erasing what came before.

For Chen, Zeng, and their peers, Xinglong coffee is less a relic to protect than a craft to sharpen — something they want to push toward a future where it can be modern, cool, and still unmistakably local.

Bitter roots

Zhou Enlai’s praise still anchors Xinglong’s sense of itself. Local lore holds that during a visit to the farm, the beloved politician tasted its coffee and said: “I’ve had many foreign coffees, but our own coffee still tastes better.”

The line now appears everywhere — on café signs, farm gates, even menu covers — a reminder that the state once saw and affirmed this small, remote community.

And for the re-migrants who built Xinglong, coffee was one of the few things they could claim as their own in a country they were still learning to call home.

Indonesian returnee Zhang Liukun recalled that in the 1940s and ’50s, a strong desire to return to China was taking hold among Chinese students in Indonesia. Across colonial Southeast Asia, Chinese schools and publications were steeped in leftist ideas; Marxism offered a language to confront the injustices of colonial rule.

Ethnic tensions were already erupting into attacks on Chinese homes, shops, and neighborhoods. Chinese communities were cast as scapegoats for political unrest, a suspicion that later blended with the region’s rising anti-communism. For many families, returning to socialist China became as much a pragmatic escape as an ideological choice.

According to local archives, the first group of returnees from Malaya arrived in 1951, before the area was even formally a farm. When the state-founded Xinglong Overseas Chinese Farm was established in 1956, it sat inside Wanning’s municipal borders but functioned like a state-owned enterprise.

Amid the Cultural Revolution in 1969, the military took over its administration; in 1978, control shifted to the provincial government; and in 2007, after decades of reform, the farm was finally folded into the Wanning Municipality and rebranded as the Xinglong Overseas Chinese Tourism Economic Zone.

Beginning in the 1970s, it received support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as waves of ethnic Chinese fled the Vietnam War and anti-Chinese campaigns. When the UNHCR formally opened operations in China in 1979, many of these refugees were directed to state farms like Xinglong, where assistance funds were distributed until the program ended in 1997.

The farms took in the hungry and displaced and offered them a new beginning, but it also meant an abrupt rupture in how people lived — from urban, market-driven environments to a tightly controlled rural enterprise.

In that upheaval, drinking coffee, an ordinary habit in many countries, became one of the few stable links to who they had been.

Caught between adapting to the present and absorbing the promise of a new nation, Xinglong’s coffee culture became a way to hold on to a past that was slipping out of reach.

This is why Zhou Enlai’s praise mattered so deeply. For a community often treated as marginal, his words signaled that their coffee — and by extension their presence — finally had a place in the national story.

But that history gives Xinglong coffee a weight that’s hard to translate. Its meanings are densely coded: exile, return, political rupture, cultural endurance.

For today’s growers and roasters, the challenge is simple to pose and difficult to solve: how do you explain a coffee shaped by a past most drinkers never lived?

Brand China

Unlike the market-led coffee booms in China’s southwestern Yunnan province, the state has always loomed large in Xinglong’s story.

From the beginning, the crop fell under the Institute of Flavors and Beverages — a branch of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, founded in 1957, just a year after the farm itself.

Coffee was only one of its tropical crops, but the institute’s backing gave Xinglong beans an official pedigree. By 2025, after five hybrids developed in house, local media declared that “China has its own coffee varieties.”

Wu Chunguang, secretary of the Xinglong Coffee Association, is among its strongest advocates. His family repatriated from Indonesia, and he argues that Xinglong coffee’s quality comes not from state planning but from the re-migrants themselves.

“Many of us who came from Southeast Asia needed coffee,” he says. “We planted it because we wanted to drink it, which made the quality exceptional,” Wu said.

But the reality on the ground is harsher.

A 2021 report in Nanguo Metropolitan News called Xinglong coffee a “one-hit wonder”: after its brief peak in the 1960s and ’70s, it has been reduced to a mere tourist trinket, because of shrinking cultivation area, stagnating product variety, and uneven quality.

Coffee began losing ground to more profitable crops like betel nut and coconut, which yield higher margins and demand far less labor than coffee. As more farmers made the switch, local coffee became rarer — and consequently more expensive. And without a stable business model to support growers, Xinglong coffee has remained a largely local phenomenon.

Sloppy market management added another blow. Some local merchants began importing cheaper, lower-quality beans from Southeast Asia and selling them under the Xinglong name, making it harder for buyers — even locals — to distinguish genuine Xinglong coffee from counterfeits.

Counterfeits also point to a deeper problem. Outside Hainan, few people know what Xinglong coffee is; inside, the shift toward specialty coffee has been slow.

Praise from past state leaders once carried its reputation, but that halo has faded. In China’s current coffee boom, Yunnan has taken the spotlight — and the state’s favor. During a visit to Lijiang, a UNESCO Heritage Site, in March 2024, President Xi Jinping remarked, “Yunnan coffee represents China.”

Wu, from the Xinglong Coffee Association, believes Hainan could become an “important node for global coffee,” connecting talent, research, investment, and culture. In his view, Xinglong’s future won’t come from planting more coffee but from building a real industry around it.

With the Hainan Free Trade Port — designed to open Hainan to global capital, logistics, and innovation — expected to be fully operational by the end of 2025, that vision feels more plausible than before.

But the town’s future has rarely been its own to decide. Since the 1950s, Xinglong’s status has shifted repeatedly, each transition redrawing its purpose from refugee shelter to plantation to scenic area.

Through all of this, coffee remained — private and public, personal and political. It built Xinglong once. It may have to do so again.

Editor: Apurva; visuals: Ding Yining.

(Header image: Visuals from the interviewees and VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)