High-Speed Rail Brings a Cool Influx of Visitors, and the Aroma of Coffee

Brief (coffeeyo.com): Guiyang—a city that grows no coffee—now boasts more than 3,000 cafés and nearly 50% annual growth in coffee consumption, as an expanding high-speed rail network reshapes Guizhou’s tourism and fuels a booming “cool economy.”

A city that grows no coffee has nevertheless given rise to a thriving coffee-consumption scene? Recently, CCTV’s “Xinwen Lianbo” (News Broadcast) turned its lens on Guiyang—a city that produces no coffee yet is home to more than 3,000 cafés, with coffee consumption growing at an average annual rate of nearly 50% and providing over 15,000 jobs. Visitors sip coffee and enjoy the coolness beside the Huaxi Waterfall or inside luminous karst caves; the “cool economy” is bringing a scorching wave of visitors to Guizhou.

A set of eye-catching economic figures more directly attests to the rise of urban vitality. Data shows that in the first half of this year, investment in Guiyang’s accommodation and catering sector grew 31.0% year on year, while investment in culture, sports, and entertainment surged 146.4%, and the sales area of new commercial housing also achieved positive 3.5% growth. These seemingly independent industry figures share a common underlying logic: an increasingly dense high-speed rail network is reshaping Guizhou’s passenger-flow, consumption, and development patterns.

High-speed rail is reshaping consumption scenarios. In the past, mentioning tourism in Guizhou conjured images of Huangguoshu Waterfall, Miao villages, and sour soup fish. Today, as lines such as the Shanghai-Kunming, Guiyang-Nanning, and Chengdu-Guiyang high-speed railways weave into a network, Guizhou has achieved efficient connectivity with surrounding provinces and municipalities, and intra-provincial intercity EMUs now run on a bus-like schedule, fully realizing a shift toward “fast travel, slow tourism.” Visitors no longer rush about; they stay longer and demand finer experiences, moving from single-purpose sightseeing to immersive, quality leisure. It is precisely this unhurried travel rhythm that has made sipping coffee amid mountains and rivers and taking slow getaways in the countryside a brand-new summer-travel trend.

Transport is incubating business innovation. Since the summer travel season began, Guizhou’s railways have carried over 9 million passenger trips in total. This vast and sustained flow of visitors has laid a solid market foundation for new formats in dining, accommodation, and leisure. That passenger flow follows the high-speed rail and investment follows the passenger flow is the simplest law of regional economic development. It is precisely the convenient travel and high-frequency mobility brought by high-speed rail that makes visitors willing to come, able to stay, and inclined to slow down—and that has allowed more than 3,000 cafés to take root and thrive. The continuous improvement of transport accessibility has broken the constraints of geography and time, providing space for the city’s niche formats and trend-driven economy to survive and grow.

Producing no coffee, yet igniting coffee consumption; nestled among mountains and waters, yet revitalizing the urban economy. The boom in Guiyang’s coffee consumption is a vivid microcosm of urban transformation and development in the high-speed-rail era. It also fully demonstrates that urban development in the new era is no longer confined to local produce and native resources. Relying on its premium cool ecosystem and compounded by the distribution advantages of high-speed-rail hubs, a city can proactively connect with the national consumer market, create entirely new consumption scenarios, and cultivate emerging industries—truly converting resource strengths into development advantages.

The cool mountains and waters are Guizhou’s natural backdrop, and the far-reaching high-speed rail is the city’s hard-edged confidence for development. This midsummer, Guizhou extends a summer invitation amid its green hills and clear waters, while the high-speed rail delivers beautiful scenery across the country with its speed and connectivity. The gentle mountain breeze blends with the aroma of coffee on street corners, and natural scenery coexists with the trend economy; what the high-speed rail carries is not only travelers from all directions, but also a city’s endless vitality, energy, and future. (By Hu Hui and Lin Zhaomu)

Source: China Daily website (By Hu Hui, Lin Zhaomu).

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