Deep in the mountains of Alishan, Taiwan, there is a coffee farm called Zou Zhu Yuan (鄒築園).

The farm is led by Fang Cheng-lun, a member of Taiwan’s Indigenous Zou people. Today, Taiwanese media call him the “Coffee Prince of Alishan,” or “咖啡王子.” He is a perennial winner of coffee competitions and one of the people who have helped bring Alishan coffee to the world.

But his story did not begin in the glamorous world of specialty coffee.

It began with a young man who had failed as an engineer and returned to his hometown, and with a single coffee tree left behind in the mountains after the Japanese Empire departed.

During the Japanese colonial period, commercial coffee cultivation was once attempted in Taiwan.The Japanese Empire ruled over the forests, land, and labor of the people of Alishan, mobilizing vast resources for the imperial project. Then, in 1945, Japan was defeated, and the Japanese imperial forces withdrew from Taiwan.But the coffee trees remained.

The Zou people who were left behind, however, had no idea how to process the red cherries, roast the beans, or turn them into a drink. There was no tradition of drinking coffee, nor was there a market in which coffee could be sold as a commercial product.And so, for many years after the war, the trees once brought in by the Japanese survived as ornamental plants in the yard of a relative of Fang Cheng-lun’s family.

No one knew their value.
Even when the trees bore fruit, no one harvested it.

The trees that carried the memory of an empire continued to bloom and produce red cherries season after season in the mists of Alishan. Then one day, Fang Cheng-lun’s father received some seedlings from a relative and planted just over one hundred coffee trees on a small piece of land.No one could have imagined that this would eventually transform not only the life of one young man, but also the coffee industry of Alishan—and perhaps even the future of the Zou people, an Indigenous community numbering only around 6,000 people.

At one point, Fang Cheng-lun noticed a coffee tree in his small farm that looked different from all the others.Its leaves were different. The way its branches grew was different. Its fruit ripened differently. Even the shape of its beans was distinctive.It was clearly different from the trees around it.He refused to dismiss it as nothing more than individual variation.He had its DNA analyzed, and the results suggested that it was an indigenous lineage originating in Ethiopia, potentially distinct from already registered coffee varieties.It was a coffee that had not yet been discovered—and had no name.

Fang Cheng-lun named the tree “So’ngna” (索恩娜).
In the Zou language, it means “the best” or “the one I like most.”
If his goal had simply been to market it as a coffee variety, he could have chosen an English name that was easy for Westerners to pronounce, or a name designed to evoke an exotic sense of place.

But he chose a Zou word.

Every time someone somewhere in the world says the name “So’ngna,” that person encounters not only a coffee, but also the existence of the Zou people.
This is more than a product name.
It is a way of sending a language into the marketplace, and of leaving the memory of a people within the world’s palate.

Culture does not survive simply by being preserved in museums.
Nor does it survive merely by putting on traditional clothing and performing dances for tourists.
It comes alive when it creates value that can be exchanged with the wider world.

What is being cultivated here is not simply coffee.
It is the economic independence of a people.
Fang Cheng-lun says:
“We have always been a weak people. But if we can produce extraordinary coffee, perhaps we can become strong.”

So’ngna is a coffee named in the Zou language, but it is also a small cultural device that carries the name of the Zou people into the global marketplace.

Just as K-pop has done, perhaps one day there will come a time when people call it “T-Coffee.”