Chinese Characters

The symbolic meaning of coffee varies within China, he notes. In Shanghai, which had extensive contact with the West in the 1920s and 1930s, coffee shops display black and white or sepia pictures of that era, marketing the nostalgia of a bygone period. Beijing did not have as large a foreign presence, and so coffee connotes something slightly different there. ‘It represents a new stage of globalization,’ Wasserstrom suggests.