Southwest China's Pu'er City, globally famous for its Chinese tea, is trying to conquer the coffee market by rapidly expanding the plantations.
Outside the courtyard of Wang Zhongxue's home in the Pu'er city's Dakaihe Village of Yunnan province, coffee plants cover some seven hectares of land.
This year, Wang harvested about 100 tonnes of coffee fruit. "I didn't know that our land could grow coffee until 1992, when I met Old Wang," he said.
"We used to grow corn and mangoes, and our family could hardly make ends meet. Thanks to Old Wang, who taught us how to grow coffee, we can lead a prosperous life," he added.
"Old Wang" is actually Dutch agronomist Maarten Warndorff, the first foreign expert sent by food and beverage giant Nestle to Pu'er.
The company, which started growing coffee in Yunnan in 1988, has sent groups of experts, including six foreigners, to Pu'er to offer technology and training to 16,000 farmers.
Warndorff said that in the 1990's, it was hard to persuade local farmers to grow coffee, since they didn't know the crop was profitable.
Wang Zhongxue became one of the first local farmers to grow coffee with the help of Warndoff. At first, Wang removed three mu (0.2 hectare) of mango trees and planted coffee instead.
"Every mu can harvest about 1,000 kg of fresh coffee fruit, which can be processed into 180 kg in coffee beans," he said.
Wang gradually expanded his coffee coverage. At the end of 2008, he restored his courtyard and expanded the coffee plants to seven hectares with the money he made from selling coffee beans.
Many of his fellow villagers who had been growing mangoes and corn for generations also turned to coffee for higher profits, state-run Xinhua news agency said in its report.
Located at an average altitude of more than 1,300 metres and just south of the Tropic of Cancer, Pu'er has a humid subtropical climate suitable for growing arabica coffee.
Yunnan accounts for over 98 per cent of China's national coffee production, and about 40 per cent of Yunnan coffee is from Pu'er. The city exports coffee to over 30 countries and regions.
In addition to supplying coffee beans to big foreign companies, the city is trying to build its own brands.
According to Shi Lijuan, manager of Kunming JieSi Trade Co Ltd, the company's ManLao River coffee brand has won global recognition for its quality.
The brand started as part of a government poverty-alleviation project in 1997, when some 3,000 poor farmers were moved from their depleted land to a 10,000-hectare rainforest to grow coffee.
