After returning from France to his native Beijing clutching the de rigeur MBA degree, Liu Yang was supposed to follow the well-worn path to the comfortable office job, with promotion prospects and a generous retirement plan. “My wife wanted me to get a job in a bank,” he recalls. “But I didn’t want that. I wanted to do something for myself, something I cared about.” So, after withdrawing all his savings from the bank, he began making artisan cheese.

Liu first learned the craft from a neighbor while studying in France, and now works out of a cramped office that doubles as a fromagerie on the dusty outskirts of northern Beijing. Here, each week, he produces a new batch of his trademark ‘Beijing Grey Camembert’ – a distinctive cheese with a soft, creamy interior and a powerful, acrid taste that can reasonably be described as ‘acquired’. With local Chinese, it doesn’t go down too well.

 “I just about break even,” he sighs. “Business has been pretty tough.” But Liu doesn’t seem too perturbed. He is 35, tall and lean, and dressed in a spotless white lab coat, which gives him an air of clinical precision – as if he doesn’t make decisions without a carefully formulated plan. Nearly two years ago, while he was working as an interpreter for French TV covering the Beijing Olympics, he looked at the rising popularity of foreign goods amongst

increasingly wealthy urban Chinese – coffee, wine, hamburgers – and guessed that cheese might be next. “I saw pizza was very popular, especially with the young,” he adds. “Chinese have very adaptable tastes.”

But at the moment, most of his customers are expats, who account for some 70 percent of his sales. The problem for local Beijingers seems to be the smell. “It’s a bit like certain kinds of Chinese tofu,” says Mr. Zhao, a customer who enters the shop out of curiosity and tries a free sample. “It smells really bad, but once you get past that the taste is very good.” Tofu is China’s cheese in more ways than one – it also has a lengthy history, is fermented from milk surplus (in this case from soya milk), and comes in an array of flavors and textures.

Actually, cheese has a history of its own in China, though almost exclusively in communities on the edges of its vast territory. The Tibetans make it from yak’s milk and use it to mould tsampa, while Mongolians make it from sheep’s milk and dissolve it in tea. The Uyghurs of the far west produce a product called ‘kurt’, a kind of hard, sour cheese which is consumed as a treat much like a bag of sweets. All of these ethnic groups share with one another a nomadic root, endlessly shifting large herds of livestock from pasture to pasture, which provided them with a ready supply of milk.

Conversely, the majority Han ethnicity (roughly 92% of the population) practiced a sedentary lifestyle – with almost every piece of available land given over to crops – and so never developed a dairy culture. Today, as a sideeffect of this, researchers have estimated that more than 90% of Han are lactose intolerant, to varying degrees. Many Beijingers choose to avoid dairy-rich products, providing an added impediment to success for Liu Yang and his cheese-making business.

“Actually, most of the lactose in my cheese is removed with the whey during the manufacturing process,” insists Liu. “But I guess that doesn’t stop people thinking it will give them a sore stomach.” He firmly believes that Chinese could develop a taste for artisan cheese if only they would try it, and plans to persevere until they do.

Even without the lactose problem, it is very difficult in any deep-rooted culture to change ingrained habits and introduce foreign aspects, especially when it comes to something as constitutional as diet. There can be a dismissive, intractable attitude of ‘this is what I eat’ and ‘this is what I don’t eat,’ particularly amongst the elderly.

De Ruiter touches upon a recurring theme with regard to foreign merchant’s attempts to change the Chinese market with foreign goods: that, in one way or another, China eventually ends up changing them instead. And, while we may not be seeing ‘Peking Duck with Cheese’ on restaurant menus anytime soon, de Ruiter reveals he has caught his own workers dropping occasional scraps into their lunchtime bowls of noodles. “Perhaps in the near future, I may have to start keeping a closer eye on them,” he laughs.

For more information on the fromagers:

Liu Yang – www.lefromagerdepekin.com

Marc de Ruiter - www.cheeseinchina.com