Xinglong — the returnees' coffee

The village of returnees

In October 1951, 756 people arrived in three groups at an overgrown spot on the Taiyang River, in the hinterland of the east coast. They were Chinese from Malaya, today's Malaysia. The British colonial administration had expelled them in the fight against the communist guerrillas; many were accused of supporting the insurgents.

The young People's Republic took them in and settled them here, on a state farm for overseas Chinese. What they found was wilderness: hills, scrub forest, mosquitoes, no roads. The first years were hard, and many of the returnees had never seen China before.

Three waves from 21 countries

It didn't stop with this one group. Whenever the mood in Southeast Asia turned against the Chinese, new people came to Xinglong: around 1960 from Indonesia, when laws there drove Chinese traders out of the countryside, and in 1978 from Vietnam, when hundreds of thousands had to leave the country.

In the end more than 13,000 returnees from 21 countries lived here. Xinglong became the largest of these farms in all of China. Since 2007 the old farm has officially been a tourism area, but many families still live here, now in the second and third generation.

A little world from Southeast Asia

The newcomers cleared land and planted rice, rubber, pepper and lemongrass — things they knew from the tropics. But they also brought their houses, festivals and habits: Malay stilt houses, Indonesian swing doors, figures from Thai temples.

Because everyone spoke differently, a “Xinglong Mandarin” full of Malay and Indonesian words emerged. The restaurants still serve dishes from the old homeland, and some families cook exactly as their grandparents did in Malaysia or Indonesia. Look closely and you'll notice that Xinglong feels more like a small town in Malaysia than Hainan.

Coffee with butter and sugar

Above all they brought the coffee. The returnees were used to drinking it, and the hot, humid climate on the Taiyang River resembled that of their old home. In 1952 the People's Republic's first coffee roastery was set up here.

What's special is the Southeast Asian-style roast: the beans are caramelised dark in the pan with butter, sugar and a little salt. Robusta is grown, not the milder Arabica from Yunnan. The result is strong, almost chocolatey, and tastes more of Kuala Lumpur than Italy. It's classically served with sweetened condensed milk.

Praise from Beijing

In 1960 Premier Zhou Enlai visited the farm and praised the coffee as first-class, better than many foreign ones. He even had experts come from Shanghai to write down the roasting process precisely. A memorial stone still commemorates the visit.

In the 1990s the coffee lost ground to the big brands and many plantations were abandoned. For some years now it has been making a comeback: today Xinglong again has more than 200 cafés, and in the morning the old folks sit over coffee there as in a kopitiam in Penang.

A garden of spices

In 1957 the state Academy of Tropical Agriculture founded an experimental station for spices and beverages here. It became the Xinglong Tropical Botanical Garden, now about 40 hectares with more than 3,000 varieties of tropical crops. The researchers taught farmers how to harvest many times more from a coffee plant.

In the garden you see where things in our kitchens come from: coffee, pepper, vanilla, grown here since 1986, and cocoa — one of China's first cocoa plantations. There's also a tree whose milky sap was once used as arrow poison. The garden is a good complement to the café, especially for anyone who wants to know what a coffee cherry looks like.

How to approach the visit

Xinglong lies on the east coast between Lingshui and Qionghai, a natural stop on the way north. It's best to come in the morning: first a coffee in one of the old cafés, then the botanical garden or the Coffee Valley with its small exhibition about the returnees.

Drink the coffee in a café, don't just buy it as powder in the souvenir shop. If you want to take some home, ask for freshly roasted beans rather than instant sachets. Afterwards it's not far to Riyue Bay, one of China's best-known surf beaches.