Coffee-themed tour attracts tourists with fresh experience

Coffee-themed tour in Pu'er City, southwest China's Yunnan Province, awes their visitors with local coffee culture and fresh coffee-making experience as the country enjoys a tourism boom during the summer holiday season.

Long known for its namesake tea, Pu'er is now making a mark among visitors with aromatic beans from its mountains. It sits in the so-called coffee belt, a zone from around 25 degrees north of the equator to around 25 degrees south where much of the world's coffee is grown.

As one of China's major coffee production areas, Pu'er had a total coffee cultivation area of about 670,000 mu (about 44,667 hectares) in 2023, accounting for almost half of that of the entire country.

With this geographical advantage, many coffee estates in Pu'er are beckoning visitors across China to have a taste of their coffee culture.

A coffee estate in the city receives an average of over 300 tourists each day since the start of the summer vacation, with its moon-shaped coffee house made of coffee grounds and other coffee-related materials to attract visitors' eyes.

"Beyond the Pu'er tea, the public are also attracted by Pu'er coffee, yet obviously drinking coffee alone cannot satisfy the visitors. We then launched more activities to let them experience the coffee making process, for example, grinding coffee beans, brewing coffee and making drip bag coffee. We get positive responses from tourists. What we do could in general enrich visitors' experience here," said Wang Xianglian from the coffee house.

"I'm a coffee lover. I drink locally distinctive coffee here. I also see coffee trees for the first time in my life, which is a wonderful experience for me. Workers in the café introduce local coffee culture and coffee-making process to us. I think all these experiences make our trip more meaningful," said Su Junqiang, a visitor.

As the coffee industry goes more popular in the city, diverse coffee-related tourist programs are unveiled, boosting the tourism sector and giving new experiences to visitors.

Coffee-themed tour attracts tourists with fresh experience

The China-Africa Industrial Cooperation Conference was held in Beijing on Saturday, drawing over 500 attendees, including Chinese and African business leaders and diplomats.

Themed "Sharing Development Opportunities of Modernization", the event sought to foster collaboration between China and Africa across various sectors following the 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the largest diplomatic event hosted by China in recent years, which concluded on Friday.

"Certainly, we expect a lot more cooperation, particularly in the areas of energy. We have a serious challenge in terms of energy in my country Zambia following the effects of climate change and the droughts. The electricity generation capacity has been wiped out, so we need to diversify our energy sources with the expansion in solar and wind," said Ivan Zyuulu, Zambian Ambassador to China.

Abubakar Hassan Abubakar, assistant minister at Kenya’s Ministry of Trade, Investments and Industry, emphasized the importance of China's vast market to Kenyan producers who would benefit from strengthening trade ties between China and Kenya.

"Of course, we are expecting more cooperation because, as I had said, China is the largest trading partner in Kenya and now, we want to position ourselves for Kenya to be the largest investment partner. We want them to invest in and produce either agricultural or industrial products and serve the rest of the world, but also serve China itself because you can see that President Xi Jinping is opening up this market, and we want to take advantage of that market," he said.

The Alliance of Chinese Business in Africa for Social Responsibilities (ACBASR) published a new Blue Book at the conference about the "One Hundred Enterprises and One Thousand Villages" initiative, estimated to have benefited 10,000 people in Africa by supporting work to protect the rights and interests of women and children and promote environmental sustainability and community development.

China-Africa Industrial Cooperation Conference held in Beijing