The Origin and Development of Hainan Coffee_ Quality Assessment of Hainan Coffee Beans_ Are Hainan Coffee Beans Expensive

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The History of Hainan Coffee

The planting history of Hainan coffee is quite simple, summarized in four words: "saving the nation through industry." This is related to the deeds of Mr. Chen Xianzhang. Hainan coffee is not small-bean coffee—Arabica species—but rather medium-bean coffee—Canephora species, also known as Robusta. Regular coffee drinkers know that Robusta coffee is bitter and astringent, difficult to swallow, but people in Southeast Asia love to drink it. They use iron pans to roast coffee beans and add butter, white sugar, salt, condensed milk, and so on. At this point, some people might already know what I'm talking about—yes, the most typical example is Malaysian white coffee. I'm not talking about instant coffee, so please don't pretend to understand if you don't. Friends who have been to Southeast Asia have probably drunk that kind of thick, dense coffee that's sweet to the point of being cloying.

Hainan is suitable for growing medium-bean coffee, even more so than Southeast Asia, so at that time, most Hainan coffee was exported to Southeast Asia. In places like Xinglong and Fushan in Hainan, where coffee was widely planted back then, the area of coffee plantations has been decreasing year by year, but what remains follows the Southeast Asian method of roasting coffee beans.

Zhou Enlai's Praise for Xinglong Coffee

"Xinglong coffee is world-class. I have drunk many foreign coffees, but our own homegrown coffee tastes the best." On February 7, 1960, Premier Zhou Enlai visited the Xinglong Farm and was full of praise after drinking Xinglong coffee. A cup of fragrant coffee and a kind premier wrote a beautiful reputation for Xinglong coffee.

The Golden Age of Xinglong Coffee

According to reports, during its peak period, Xinglong coffee's planting area reached over 4,000 mu, and coffee gardens could be seen everywhere on the farm. Every household in the farm grew coffee, and coffee income was the economic pillar for farmers.

Xinglong coffee settled in Hainan's Xinglong in 1953, when the Xinglong Overseas Chinese Farm had just been established. To implement the practice of "using short-term to support long-term," which meant using income from short-term crops like coffee, lemongrass, and rice to supplement income from long-term crops like rubber, Xinglong began introducing coffee cultivation from Fushan, Chengmai.

Xinglong coffee was once the flagship product of Hainan coffee brands. Today, in Xinglong Farm, there is still a stone monument erected to commemorate Premier Zhou Enlai's inspection of the Xinglong coffee garden.

The Decline and Challenges

Fifty-five years have passed, the stone monument still stands, the story continues to circulate, but the coffee garden of that year has disappeared, replaced by a lush rubber forest.

At that time, the coffee planting area was very large, with over 3,000 mu in the entire Xinglong area. To ensure the quality of coffee beans, they were picked one by one as they ripened. The workers were too busy then, so farm students often came to the plantation to pick coffee for half-days at a time. After the 1990s, as coffee bean prices continued to fall, the planting area of Xinglong coffee also continuously decreased. Now, the coffee planting area in the Xinglong region is less than a thousand mu.

However, to this day, with market ups and downs, the once widely popular Xinglong coffee faces market bottlenecks including significantly reduced planting area, shrinking production capacity, inconsistent product quality, and gradually weakening brand influence.

Brand Counterfeiting Issues

In many large supermarkets, we often see various Xinglong coffee brands: Xinglong Mountain Coffee, Xinglong Authentic Coffee, Xinglong Charcoal Roasted Coffee, Xinglong Pure Coffee... But if you look carefully at the product descriptions, the production locations are actually in Haikou, Qionghai, Wenchang, and other places.

"Strictly speaking, these products are all fake Xinglong products. If the government doesn't stop this, sooner or later it will destroy the reputation of Xinglong coffee," said Qiu Xiaofeng, president of the Xinglong Coffee Industry Association. Due to limited production, many products on the market bearing the Xinglong coffee brand use foreign coffee beans from places like Yunnan and Vietnam as raw materials. Such products are inferior to authentic Xinglong coffee in terms of taste and quality, yet they tarnish the reputation of Xinglong coffee.

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