海外开设青田咖啡书房 打造龙泉青瓷海外工作室 丽水蹚出文化出海新路

Brief (coffeeyo.com): From a “Qingtian Coffee Reading Room” in Madrid to a Longquan celadon studio in Germany, Lishui in Zhejiang is finding new routes for culture to travel abroad — with coffee, books and porcelain doing the connecting.

By Wu Min, Chao News; correspondents Chen Lingli and Chen Yanyan

Recently, a reading salon at the Yika café’s “Qingtian Coffee Reading Room” in Madrid, Spain, drew Chinese families living abroad as well as local residents. In the café’s reading corner, several hundred Chinese-language books are neatly shelved, and Chinese community volunteers guide foreign visitors as they take up a brush, dip it in ink and try traditional calligraphy.

As one of China’s key hometowns of overseas Chinese, Qingtian has built the “Bookish Coffee, City of Reading” brand and is exploring a “books plus coffee” model. It has brought county-level coffee bars into the map of public cultural facilities and, through small, precise upgrades, converted more than 300 star-rated bookish coffee bars across the county into “micro-libraries”, rolling out a range of reading events and building a reading culture with the distinctive character of a qiaoxiang — a hometown of overseas Chinese. Qingtian has also used overseas cafés, Chinese-language schools and other networks to set up coffee reading rooms abroad: six overseas Qingtian Coffee Reading Rooms have been established in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and elsewhere, with more than 15,000 volumes on traditional Chinese culture shelved and 34 events held. The scent of books has drifted from the hometown out into the world.

If the Qingtian Coffee Reading Rooms take everyday reading scenes abroad, the Longquan celadon overseas studios take intangible-heritage craftsmanship abroad. Recently, in Rathenow, Brandenburg, Germany, the wheel turned gently and clay spun at the Longquan Celadon Overseas Studio as a China–Europe ceramic residency and co-creation programme got under way. Mao Weijie, a Zhejiang Province Master of Arts and Crafts who heads the studio, worked alongside German artists kneading clay, throwing forms, glazing and firing, jointly creating celadon cups, bowls and ornamental pieces.

“Since June this year the studio has been running regular residencies for Chinese and European ceramic artists, teaching sessions and cultural salons, supporting joint research into Chinese and European ceramic techniques and mutual learning in craftsmanship,” Mao Weijie explains.

Drawing on a global network of overseas Chinese associations, Longquan has also set up celadon display corners in Italy, Serbia, Romania and other countries, appointing overseas Chinese as ambassadors for the region’s “sword-and-celadon” culture and placing celadon exhibits and everyday porcelain in Chinese restaurants and community spaces abroad. At the same time, 588 sword-and-celadon products have been listed on cross-border e-commerce platforms, export insurance resources have been consolidated, and the Longquan–Yiwu “land port express” trade logistics route has been opened up to help celadon culture reach overseas markets.

Published on page 4 of Zhejiang Daily on September 17.

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