Many Irish people associate the aroma of fresh coffee with Bewley's Oriental Cafes in Dublin, but coffee is not in fact a particularly oriental drink, not in China anyway.
It was virtually unknown in the world's most populous country until about six years ago. Very few Chinese people can say, as did T.S. Eliot, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons". Here they mark the passing of time with endless sips of tea.
Instant coffee arrived in China in the early 1990s, but the first consignments appear to have been welcomed for the containers rather than the contents. Taxi drivers and office workers in Beijing have taken to pouring their tea into old coffee jars, then during the day unscrewing the lid to have an occasional drink.
Because it proved too bitter for their tea-conditioned taste buds, very few Chinese initially took to the instant coffee, or "Nestles" as many call it, confusing the product with the brand name of the first supplier.
Not having a coffee culture, they also had no way of knowing that this was low-quality coffee which people in more developed coffee-drinking countries would find a poor substitute for Jamaican Mountain Blue or Colombian Supreme.
But the concept of coffeedrinking in China is now changing fast, says William Wu, the young market development manager of Arabic Coffee Roasters, supplier of Beijing's big hotels and of the many espresso and cappucino bars which have sprung up in the embassy district in the last year.
With a couple of American partners he has just opened The Daily Grind, a tiny coffee store in the foreign trade centre shopping mall, where customers can themselves dispense roasted coffee beans from an aperture in huge glass jars and have them freshly ground on the spot.
This self-service method is common in western supermarkets but it's a first for Beijing and Mr Wu is confident it marks the beginning of a great leap forward in Chinese coffee-drinking habits and that 1998 will become the year of the filter.
The one noticeable difference is that the beans are lighter in colour. Arabica has found that the more the green beans are roasted the more bitter and unattractive to the Chinese palate they become.
"There are three types of people who want real coffee," he said over a cup of Colombian on his premises. "These are young people with good incomes, especially those who work with foreign companies, people who have lived abroad and come back, and resident foreigners. And their numbers are growing all the time."
"You first teach people to know what a real coffee is, then they will demand it. It's the same with McDonalds. You bring the children and they get a taste for hamburgers and become customers for life. I see a great future for coffee."
The statistics bear out the prediction of Mr Wu, whose dream is to open a chain of coffee stores in China and further afield for Arabica.
In 1996, China's coffee consumption soared to 15,444 tonnes from 4,526 tonnes the year before. The London-based International Coffee Organisation forecasts that it could increase five-fold to up to one million 60kg bags by the end of the century.
This is still small compared to the size of the population and there is a huge potential for expansion.
China's 1.2 billion people drink on average just over one cup of coffee a year each, according to a 1997 survey, whereas the 3.6 million people of Singapore, Asia's top coffee-drinking state, sip 500 cups of coffee a year, with the Japanese not far behind at 357 cups.
The new Chinese coffeedrinkers are to be found mainly in Beijing and Shanghai and along the more developed southeast coast.
"It will take a long time, but the coffee-drinking culture will eventually spread to China's west from the east," Dong Zhihua, general manager of Yunnan Coffee Industrial Corporation in southern China, told Reuters at the annual Asia International Coffee Conference, held in Singapore last week.
"It's impossible that coffee can replace tea, but in five to 10 years time, China will definitely become a huge market for all coffee producers," he said. "Just imagine if 5 per cent of China's population drink coffee how much the consumption will be."
The key to increased coffee use in China is image. In India, another tea-drinking nation, the number of coffee drinkers is falling by 4 per cent a year, not just because of severe competition from tea and colas, but because in India coffee is perceived as the drink of old people, a coffee industry official told the Singapore conference.
In China coffee-drinking, by contrast, is seen as sophisticated and smart. The new executive in Beijing drinking a tiny espresso or a mug of Kenyan AA is seen as distinctly trendy. He or she wouldn't be seen dead in public drinking lukewarm tea out of a coffee jar - not for all the tea in China.