A cup of coffee, and visitors make a special trip: how village cafés are redrawing Anhui's countryside

Source: Anhui Daily

A cup of coffee lets you taste the charm of Anhui; a “village café” draws a wave of check-ins.

Along its tourist scenic corridors, Xuancheng City actively guides the convergence of coffee with high-end guesthouses, dining, bookstores and other formats, pushing “village cafés” into the spotlight and meticulously building a southern-Anhui rural vacation-leisure tourism destination.

Today in Xuancheng, nearly 800 young people have thrown themselves into the “village café” industry, realizing their entrepreneurial dreams in the countryside. The “village café” no longer relies solely on outside traffic to break out; it has begun to generate its own pull — it can be part of a theme park, an extension of intangible-heritage experience, a guesthouse amenity, or an independent destination. “Before, visitors would drop by for a cup on the way; now some make a special trip just for that café,” said the founder of a local “village café.”

A new way to open up the southern-Anhui countryside

Around 8 p.m. on October 2, light rain drifted over Gaofeng Village, Dongting Town, Guangde City — known as the “hometown of Chinese bamboo.” “Jianshan Coffee,” extending into the famous “Bamboo-Hometown Gallery” tourist corridor deep in the bamboo sea, gradually quieted; as the last guests left, founder Gu Qian, busy all day, finally got a breather. “It kept raining, but that didn’t stop visitors from Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang — we received nearly 3,000 people these two days and sold six or seven hundred cups of coffee alone.”

Gu Qian is a local who spent years in Hangzhou in garden planting and design, yet always carried her hometown’s hills and waters in her heart. At the end of 2024 she returned to Guangde. Deep in Dongting Town’s mountains sits the Daxiwu post station, built years ago with a viewing platform, leisure corridor and vintage pavilion across 1,500 square meters, its terrace overlooking the whole of Guangde. “The city and town don’t lack coffee; what’s missing is a shop hidden in the landscape where you can stop and watch the mountains.” Without major demolition or construction, Gu made micro-renovations and light upgrades to the existing building; less than half a year later, on the 2025 May Day holiday, Jianshan Coffee officially opened.

Sitting on wooden benches, rattan chairs or swing seats, ordering a “mountain-wild signature” or a bowl of hearty local stir-fried noodles, watching the mountain scenery and listening to the mountain breeze, time slows and stops here. “Open the door and it’s the bamboo sea; wake to birdsong in the morning, watch the stars at night” — the experience of many visitors.

Ximuli Courtyard in Qiancheng Village, Boidian Town, hidden among forest and streams, combines stream-tracing, barbecue and check-ins into a new culture-tourism nameplate for the “Little Third Front” Yuekechong. Founder Zhang Ping, also a returnee entrepreneur, turned her grandmother’s idle storage room into a café. Zhang said the store’s peak-day revenue tops 5,000 yuan.

A cup of coffee in hand, lost in the countryside breeze, is becoming a new way to open up the southern-Anhui countryside. Coffee, once a city symbol, has soaked into fields and hills, becoming standard along tourist scenic corridors. A relevant official from Xuancheng’s Culture and Tourism Bureau said that to date the city has built 207 “village cafés,” receiving over 6.6 million visits a year, with revenue above 75 million yuan, driving about 300 million yuan in culture-tourism consumption.

A map of taste scenery

In Jing County’s Caicun Town, Moon Bay scenic area, a distinctive three-story café sits on a cliff by the stream; visitors from all over hold coffee cups, checking in before the cascading waterfall or reading the newspaper in seats overlooking green hills and white clouds.

This “Fanxing · Waterfall Coffee,” built by young founder Shi Zhaohao, has become a landmark on the “southern-Anhui Tianzang line.” “It’s been popular the whole time; even on ordinary days customers stream in nonstop, with single-day peak sales reaching 1,200 cups,” Shi told reporters.

As the “hometown of Chinese rice paper” and “hometown of Chinese rice-paper brushes,” Jing County was also where Xuancheng’s “village cafés” first broke out. Using “one cup of village coffee” to lever rural resources, the county took the lead in building the “Jing County Village Coffee” county-level public brand and launched the province’s first county-level rural-coffee hand-drawn map — the “Jing County Village Coffee Map.”

Open the map and dozens of cafés in six fun, photogenic, time-traveling styles dot the landscape, stringing together all the county’s highlights — Moon Bay, Peach Blossom Pond, Pingyuan Secret Realm and more. “Visitors follow the hand-drawn map to ‘hunt’ each village café, and in the process tour all the rivers and hills along the way,” said Wang Min, deputy director of Jing County’s Culture and Tourism Bureau. The countryside’s hills and waters, its flowers and trees, form highly regional and imaginative “scenes”; “scenification” gives the “village café” its uniqueness. Since its September 2024 release, the cafés on the hand-drawn map have grown from 60-odd to nearly 100.

Bamboo seas and streams, fields and tea gardens — a larger “village café map” links southern-Anhui’s green hills and clear waters, and also ties together guesthouses, photo-tours, camping and study-tours into diverse formats, becoming a new landscape along Xuancheng’s tourism corridors. “We have incorporated the ‘village café’ industry into the overall layout of all-domain tourism — stringing beads into a chain, linking patches into scenery, clustering for development,” Xuancheng Culture and Tourism Bureau director Xiao Hongmei told reporters.

Last June, Xuancheng specifically issued the “Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of the ‘Southern-Anhui Jing-Jing-Ji’ All-Domain Tourism Development Pioneer Zone,” explicitly making the “village café” a core format of “traditional villages + culture and art + rural tourism.” Across the city, a “one corridor, multiple nodes” industry matrix has formed along key tourism corridors, with the “southern-Anhui Tianzang line,” the Anhui-Zhejiang sky road and the “Bamboo-Hometown Gallery” clustering 82, 4 and 10 “village cafés” respectively; the core zone of the “southern-Anhui Tianzang line” achieves a dense “one per kilometer” layout.

Maneuvers within a space

As a “traffic entry” and “consumption trigger,” the “village café” has evolved from an accidental “internet-famous phenomenon” into a new-format cluster with continuous iteration capability.

Before the China Rice Paper Museum in Jing County stands “Ranjiangshan,” a café converted from an old residence, using rice paper as an element and the scholar’s studio as its imagery; the walls hang displays of rice-paper intangible-heritage craft, and the coffee coasters and table flags are all rice-paper products. The signature “Half-Paper Splash-Ink” drink presents an ink-wash diffusion mood, as if you could taste the freshness of nature and the scent of books. “Visitors aren’t just buying a cup of coffee; they’re buying the surprise of drinking freshly ground coffee in a century-old residence,” the founder told reporters.

Baiyunwu Coffee sits in the Xuan Inkstone Culture Park in Baidi Town, Jingde County — a rare “intangible-heritage + coffee” cultural-creative space. Founder Huang Rui explained that all the store’s coffee cups, tea cups and utensils are hand-carved from Xuan inkstone; creative drinks like “Ink-Aroma Latte” and “Inkstone Cheesecake Latte” make the cultural experience more fun, and the store also has an inkstone-carving experience zone. “Let visitors immerse themselves in the charm of intangible-heritage craft while tasting coffee,” Huang said; the coffee house has driven cultural-creative consumption up over 20%.

In Shiyao International Art Village, Qinxii Town, Jing County, Shanyi Coffee is built atop the ancient Xuazhou-kiln site. “Post-80s” ceramic artist Liu Yun turned his ancient-kiln studio into a café, specializing in wood-fired-kiln bread and hand-made ceramic-cup coffee; each cup is a unique kiln-transformation work fired in the wood kiln, with natural, unreproducible glaze. Jixi County’s Renli ancient village, leveraging its Huizhou-culture depth, built a “Chengyu Luoyuan” café cluster, weaving Huizhou-ink and Huizhou-carving intangible-heritage experiences into the coffee scene to form an “intangible-heritage workshop + study-tour experience” industry chain, receiving over 400,000 visitors a year.

The rise of “village cafés” has changed the face and character of the countryside, forming a new revitalization paradigm of “using coffee to draw traffic, culture to empower, industry to enrich people.” Jing County’s Moon Bay Village adopted a “collective + company” operating model, using “village cafés” to drive nearly 4 million yuan in agricultural-specialty sales, raising villagers’ per-capita annual income by 13,000 yuan. Jixi County’s Shijia Village, through “government guidance + social-capital involvement,” turned old residences into “village café + guesthouse,” with villagers becoming stewards and baristas, adding 130,000 yuan to the collective’s income.

To support the “village café” industry, Xuancheng keeps upgrading infrastructure and “adding weight” to talent support. The “southern-Anhui Tianzang line” three-year action plan has invested over 1 billion yuan cumulatively, building or renovating 400-plus km of road and adding 371 parking lots and 27 viewing platforms; the “Bamboo-Hometown Gallery” has built 3 tourism-distribution centers, 20-plus highway post stations and 50-plus viewing platforms; the Anhui-Zhejiang sky road has invested over 200 million yuan in beautiful-road construction.

The city also founded a “Founders’ Home” and a rural-founder training base, organized founders to exchange and study in Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang, and held “Youth · Project Matchmaking Sessions,” successfully incubating a batch of quality “village café” projects, giving more new farmers who understand management, excel at creativity and love the countryside a broad stage. Jing County launched the “Wisdom Gathers Jingcheng” talent policy, attracting over 300 young people to return home; Guangde City rolled out a “culture-tourism loan” with 10 million yuan in annual capital for special risk compensation; Jixi County issued culture-tourism reward-subsidy policies supporting “village café” project construction.

From the scaled rise of guesthouse clusters, to the phenomenal breakout of the “village café” economy, to the dense landing of all-hours new formats, Xuancheng relies on its quality hills, waters and ancient-village resources to cultivate “atmosphere” culture-tourism, pushing local tourism to gradually shed its ticket dependence and shift toward an experiential, emotional, full-chain consumption model. (Reporter Zhang Jingbo)

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