Employees of a bakery make bread at a factory in Zixi, Jiangxi province. (WAN XIANG / XINHUA)
NANCHANG－In cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you will often see lines of people patiently lining up for a taste of special shell-shaped cakes with meat floss, but few know that these highly prized delicacies originate from a remote village in Zixi county, Jiangxi province.
Famous for its flourishing baking industry, Zixi is sometimes called China's "Land of Bakeries". Around 50,000 of its nearly 130,000 residents have opened bakeries in more than 1,000 cities around the world since the 1980s.
Once, Zixi residents regularly left the mountainous area to escape poverty, and the result was the creation of about 100 bakery brands, with a combined annual output value in excess of 20 billion yuan (US$3.1 billion) today.
Bao Caisheng, founder of Baoshifu, the popular Chinese bakery chain, is one of the most prominent Zixi natives to make their fortune from bread.
"When I was a boy, my parents opened a small bakery that was less than 40 square meters. I started to learn breadmaking after graduating from junior high school," he said.
Considering that Bao now has more than 70 shops around the country, it is hard to imagine that his road to success was ever bumpy.
But the 47-year-old's entry into the bakery business in 1995 in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, didn't go as planned.
"I thought it would be a hit, but the reality was bitter. Business was dismal, and I was left with 1 million yuan in debt," he said. "But I could not give up."
To make his next bakery more successful, Bao devoted himself to the study of breadmaking and developed new flavors.
Trying and failing made him stronger.
In 2004, Bao and his wife opened their second bakery in Beijing next to the Communication University of China.
"Constrained by our limited budget, we could not afford staff at first. To cut costs, we lived in the shop attic. That less than 40-square-meter shop was practically the only place we ever went," he said.
The couples' hard work gradually paid off. To their surprise, the shell-shaped cake with meat floss they began to make in 2006 brought them the biggest success of their lives.
"I never imagined students would be willing to line up for it," he said.
In 2017, Bao opened his first Baoshifu bakery in Shanghai. It was a hit from the first day. He still remembers the crowd of people in front of the shop, lining up for over three hours just for a bite of his famous cake. "There were even scalpers," he said, adding that the opening of his bakery in Shanghai went viral on social media platforms.
Referring to his success, the baker and business owner said that his goal is to create a century-old brand that will allow more people around the world to have a taste of his China-made cakes.