Infusing Hometown Pride into a Cup of Coffee Warm with Intangible Heritage

At a Glance (China Coffee Network): In a corner of Songxi County, Nanping, Fujian, a café carrying both hometown sentiment and intangible-cultural-heritage depth has quietly blossomed. “Songzhan” blends Songxi woodblock prints and Jianzhan tea ware into its space and drinks, turning a returning youth’s dream into a warm community hub where intangible heritage meets a daily cup of coffee.

Where everyday life hides poetry and intangible heritage enriches the daily routine—when the rich aroma of coffee meets a millennium of cultural lineage, and a young person’s original aspiration returns to the homeland—a café imbued with local sentiment and heritage quietly blooms in a corner of Songxi, Nanping.

Step into the Songzhan Café in the Linjuli Shared Community, and an atmosphere blending literary flair with heritage appeal rushes to meet you. In the spatial design, intangible-cultural-heritage elements appear everywhere: Songxi woodblock prints are displayed on walls and in corners, and from the tableware to the layout the concept of “heritage integrated into the scene” is realized. Many customers sit, chat and take photos here.

“Opening this café fulfills a personal dream of mine, but I also hope to add a bit of everyday warmth to the community of my hometown and let more people understand Songxi’s intangible heritage,” says Lin Lantian, the owner of Songzhan, with a smile, speaking of her original inspiration. As a returning youth, she not only has a strong passion for coffee but has always cared about the cultural inheritance of her hometown. By chance, she learned that the hometown “Linjuli” community lacked a business that combined leisure with cultural attributes, and together with her partner Wu Jiaying conceived the idea of a café fusing Songxi’s heritage characteristics—and the name “Songzhan” was born. “‘Song’ comes from Songxi, a mark of home; ‘zhan’ blends the Jianzhan elements of the Nine-Dragon kiln and also means a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, a warm space—a vessel for hometown feeling and beauty. I hope everyone who comes here feels ‘at home,’” Lin Lantian says, her words full of affection for her hometown.

At first, the entrepreneurial road was far from smooth; Lin Lantian and her team also once faced tight funding. Fortunately, Songxi County took targeted measures to fully support returning youths’ entrepreneurship, and a series of preferential policies arrived like “timely rain.” With help from the relevant departments, she successfully applied for a “Returning-Youth Entrepreneurship Loan,” smoothly resolving the funding difficulty and reinforcing their original aspiration to start a business and inherit intangible heritage.

In product development, Lin Lantian and Wu Jiaying boldly innovated, deeply combining heritage elements with coffee and tea drinks. The signature coffee “A Cup of Song Fragrance” cleverly blends in Songxi’s Jiulong white tea, delivering a mellow taste with a light tea aroma and becoming a frequent customer favorite. On that basis, they also developed woodblock-print coasters and a series of woodblock-element specialty drinks such as “Ink Carving” and “Leaving Blank,” weaving Songxi’s heritage concepts into coffee creation—both ornamental and uniquely flavored.

As a composite cultural space, Songzhan’s appeal goes well beyond food and drink. It has built a closed-loop service of “intangible-heritage experience + afternoon-tea consumption + cultural creativity,” simultaneously running woodblock-print research study and celadon-experience courses, so that customers can personally feel heritage craftsmanship while consuming.

“During the trial operation we kept collecting everyone’s feedback and refining our products and service,” Lin Lantian says. Looking ahead, she hopes Songzhan can become a gathering place for youth socializing and a leisure harbor for community residents, letting more people walk into Songxi and understand its intangible heritage.

Young people return home to revive their hometown. A small Songzhan pavilion is both a gentle refuge in everyday life and a tiny corner where Songxi’s intangible heritage quietly grows—like a wisp of breeze by the stream, letting youth take gentle root in the homeland and letting the cultural lineage flow quietly through the marketplace, year after year, endlessly.

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1. This article is compiled and edited by China Coffee Network (coffeeyo.com) from publicly available materials (source: Songxi County Integrated Media Center; reporters Lin Yunjie and Zhen Weihao; topic: Songzhan Café’s intangible-heritage coffee). The copyright of the original text and images belongs to the original authors. This site reprints it solely for coffee-industry information sharing and does not represent our position; all data and views are subject to the original. We thank the original authors for their creation and sharing.
2. Original article: “Infusing Hometown Pride into a Cup of Coffee Warm with Intangible Heritage” (Songxi County Integrated Media Center).
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