I paid ¥9.9 for an Americano this morning, from a counter two metres wide, and it was drinkable. Forty years ago the same money bought a sachet of instant powder that most Chinese people would not have called coffee at all. This is the timeline of how that changed, with the years and the numbers that actually matter — and what it means for anyone ordering a cup in China today.
Late 1980s: coffee arrives as a sachet, not a drink
For most of the 1980s, coffee in China meant one thing: a flat paper sachet of Nestlé instant, sold in a glass jar in the drinks aisle, mixed with hot water and a lot of sugar. There was no espresso machine, no bean origin on the label, and no reason to think of coffee as something you go out for. When multinational drinks companies began setting up instant coffee production in Guangdong in the late 1980s, the product they were selling was closer to a sweetened energy drink than to what a café serves now. Coffee was a gift box item, something you gave at New Year, and the idea that anyone would drink it daily was, at the time, absurd.
1999: Starbucks opens in Beijing and repriced the cup
The year the modern market starts is 1999, when Starbucks opened its first mainland China store in Beijing, at the China World Trade Center (国贸). Two things happened there that had nothing to do with the coffee. First, it established that a cup could cost ¥20–30, roughly a day's food budget for many people at the time. Second, it established the café as a place — somewhere to sit for an hour, use the wifi, hold a meeting. For the next decade, "going for coffee" in Chinese cities meant going to a foreign-branded room, and the price reflected that. It was aspirational spending, and the market stayed small because of it.
2012–2016: Yunnan becomes an origin, and the shops get small
While the big chains were teaching people to sit, two quieter things happened. In 2012, Starbucks opened a Farmer Support Center in Pu'er, Yunnan — an acknowledgement that China grows coffee, and that the quality problem was agronomy, not terroir. Yunnan (Pu'er and Baoshan especially) now grows more than 98% of all coffee beans produced in China, almost all of it arabica planted by smallholders.
The other thing was the rise of the new tea shops. HEYTEA (喜茶) was founded in Jiangmen, Guangdong in 2012 and NAYUKI (奈雪的茶) in Shenzhen in 2015. Everyone predicted they would kill coffee. Instead they did the opposite: they built a habit of paying ¥20–30 for a daily hand-held drink, and they built the supply chain — cold cups, delivery packaging, app ordering — that coffee later borrowed for free.
Then came Manner Coffee, founded in Shanghai in 2015. Manner's insight was that you do not need a room: its early shops were around two square metres, a machine and a counter, and a flat white for roughly ¥15. Takeaway-only, no seats, no rent for the seats. That model is the one that eventually won.
2017: Luckin Coffee and the app-only store
Luckin Coffee (瑞幸) was founded in Beijing in October 2017 and did three things differently at once: you order in the app before you arrive, the store is a pickup point rather than a café, and the price is set by coupon rather than by menu. A 21–24 gram double shot for ¥9.9, delivered by a rider in under 20 minutes, is not a coffee-shop product — it is a logistics product that happens to be coffee. Within two years it had thousands of stores; the store-count race with Starbucks China began here.
2019–2020: the IPO, the fraud, and the reset
Luckin listed on Nasdaq in May 2019, roughly five years after the company existed, which is still one of the fastest food-and-drink runs to a US listing on record. In April 2020 it disclosed that around RMB 2.12 billion of its 2019 sales had been fabricated. The shares collapsed, the company was delisted from Nasdaq in June 2020, and in December 2020 it settled with the US SEC for US$180 million.
What is easy to miss is that the stores never closed. The scandal killed the company as a stock, not as a café chain — it kept opening outlets, kept the ¥9.9 coupon, and rebuilt. If you order coffee in China today you are very likely buying from the surviving version of that company, and the reason your cup is cheap is a coupon strategy that was designed in this period.
2023: China passes the United States on store count
According to World Coffee Portal, China overtook the United States around 2023 to become the world's largest branded coffee shop market, with roughly 49,700 outlets against about 40,000 in the US. Luckin passed 10,000 stores in China in the same year. Starbucks, which entered in 1999 and took 24 years to reach a few thousand stores, was outnumbered by a company founded in 2017.
And yet per-person consumption is still low — on the order of 20 cups per person per year, versus several hundred in the United States, Japan or South Korea. That gap is the whole story of the next decade: the store count is American, the drinking habit is not.
What 40 years left behind
Three things are now permanent. Price has decoupled from the room: you pay for the drink, not the sofa, which is why a ¥9.9 Americano and a ¥42 single-origin pour-over can exist on the same street. The app is the shop interface: ordering ahead, pickup codes and courier delivery are the default, not a premium feature. And domestic beans are normal: Yunnan arabica is on menus without apology, sold as a Chinese origin rather than as a substitute.
What I pay for coffee now
I logged every coffee I bought for four months: 63 cups, average ¥14.2. The cheapest was a ¥9.9 Luckin Americano picked up on the way to the metro; the most expensive was ¥38 for a flat white at a small roaster in Shanghai's former French Concession, where the person behind the machine could tell me which Yunnan washing station the beans came from. My actual routine is neither: it is a ¥12 Manner Americano, bought from a counter narrower than the queue in front of it, drunk while walking. That option did not exist in 1999, and it is the clearest measure of how far this market has moved.
Forty years ago coffee in China was a sachet you were given as a gift. Today it is a ¥9.9 app order picked up in ninety seconds on the way to work — and the country grows most of its own beans.
Frequently asked questions
When did coffee really start in China?
For most of the 1980s it meant a flat paper sachet of Nestle instant; the modern market begins in 1999, when Starbucks opened its first mainland store at Beijing's China World Trade Center.
When did China pass the US in coffee shops?
Around 2023, China overtook the United States to become the world's largest branded coffee market, with Luckin Coffee, founded in 2017, the app-only disruptor behind much of the growth.
What does a coffee cost now?
I logged 63 cups over four months, averaging 14.2 yuan; the cheapest was a 9.9-yuan Luckin Americano, and price has decoupled from the room you sit in.