FoodBud

Before the Castle, Part 1 — Origins: Before the First Cone (1931–1996) ### 起点：第一支冰淇淋之前的故事 **A FoodBud translated & annotated edition of Mixue co-founder Zhang Hongfu's first-person memoir**

*Series: "Before the Castle — How Mixue Was Really Built, 1997–2017" · Article 1 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

1. FoodBud Editor's Note

Mixue is best described in the company's own prospectus language as the world's largest freshly-made-drinks company by number of stores. As of December 31, 2025, MIXUE Group (HKEX: 2097) operated 59,823 stores — 55,356 in Chinese mainland and 4,467 outside Chinese mainland — of which 59,785 were franchised and just 38 were self-operated. Its H shares listed on HKEX on March 3, 2025. Market capitalization is intentionally omitted here because it fluctuates and was not refreshed for this publication.

A note on how to read that scale, because it is routinely mangled. The figure that captures "how big Mixue is to consumers" is systemwide sales / GMV — the total spent by customers across the whole network — not company revenue. Revenue, profit, and GMV are not interchangeable, and throughout this series we keep them apart; no FY2025 GMV/systemwide-sales amount is stated here.

Mixue's 2025 company revenue was RMB 33,559.9 million, up 35.2%, and is primarily a business-to-business figure: selling store supplies and equipment to franchisees, plus franchise-related services. Its profit attributable to ordinary equity holders of the parent was RMB 5,886.7 million in 2025.

A word on names, because leadership changed recently. Effective March 24, 2026, Zhang Hongfu (张红甫) — the author of the memoir translated below — stepped down as CEO and was appointed Co-Chairman, remaining an executive director focused on strategy, culture, public welfare, and innovation. The 1997 founder is his older brother, Zhang Hongchao (张红超); the CEO since March 24, 2026 is Zhang Yuan (张渊). Zhang Hongfu calls himself Mixue's *"generation 1.5"* (创1.5代). So where the memoir's cover says "CEO," read it as a snapshot of when it was written; in this series he is the co-founder and former CEO, now Co-Chairman.

Now rewind almost three decades. Before the 60,000 stores, before Hong Kong, before the Snow King mascot, there is a beating on a village bridge in Henan, a father salting a popsicle so his son would stop wanting one, and a grandmother's life savings sewn into a pair of underwear. This series goes back to the primary text — the long, unguarded account one of the two brothers who built Mixue wrote of how it actually happened — and translates and annotates it in order. This is FoodBud reading a founder's own words as a source document for understanding China's value-priced chains: their low-price strategy, their franchise networks, their supply-chain efficiency, and the founder culture underneath all three.

2. Why This Series Matters

The document at the center of this series is Zhang Hongfu's roughly 95,000-character memoir, an internal "required-reading" history tracing Mixue from its 1997 beginning to its 20th year (2017). It is discursive, self-deprecating, and raw — and that is exactly its value. Most writing about Mixue starts at the end: the IPO, the store count, the "China's cheapest bubble tea" headlines. This memoir starts at the beginning, and it lets you watch the company's defining instincts form before they had names like "supply-chain integration" or "franchise unit economics." The obsession with low prices for ordinary people is here as lived poverty, not a slide. The frugality that later squeezes cost out of a national logistics network is here as a father unable to spare a few cents for a popsicle. The first-principles temperament that eventually produces an in-house product-and-supply machine is here as a teenager fixing radios and reverse-engineering how to pass five exams in a month.

This first article covers the origins — everything before the first business. Below, the source is presented as a FoodBud translated and annotated edition: a close English translation of the opening, in the author's own order, with direct quotations marked. FoodBud's framing, analysis, timeline, and notes are kept in their own sections, outside the translation.

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 1 Begins —— *(Close translation of Zhang Hongfu's memoir, in source order, from the preface through his brother's college years. Lines in quotation marks are translated directly from the source; the surrounding prose is a close translation of the connecting text.)*

Preface — Dreams and Starting Points (前言·梦想与起点)

"A starting point is never too small; a dream is never too big."

Entrepreneurship, Zhang Hongfu begins, is a word people invoke constantly. What is it — bitter struggle, gritted-teeth persistence, indomitable will, hardship survived? Society, he thinks, sacralizes it too much. Chinese culture has a soft spot for "the plum blossom whose fragrance comes from bitter cold," or for "falling into the abyss and meeting a master there" — and in loving those stories it overlooks the quiet good fortune of ordinary people, with ordinary minds, accumulating ordinary things. At bottom, he writes, building a company is just *"a tiring and happy process of living."*

In recent years, he says, he has met many founders his own age who ask, full of curiosity, how Mixue opened several thousand stores. He asks how long they have been at it. A year, they say — and wonder why, in that first year, they have only managed a dozen or so stores. His answer:

"You're so lucky. It took us ten years to open a single store — and we've been at this for twenty-two years now."

He notes the two reactions he has met for most of his career. When people learn Mixue's prices, countless of them urge the brothers to "go premium." When they learn Mixue franchises, some immediately picture franchise scams and lump the company in with them. And in the recent craze for internet-famous brands, well-meaning friends kept forwarding him trendy products — an influence, he admits, that led them down some wrong turns. All of it pushes him toward three questions: *Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?*

He calls himself Mixue's "generation 1.5." His older brother, Zhang Hongchao, started the business in 1997; he joined ten years later. He had the luck, he says, to be born into this era, to work alongside their little band of partners, and — carried by a kind of foolish drive — to get through the life-or-death survival period and grope out a path of their own. *The one who connects the founding generation to what came after,* he writes, *that should be me — generation 1.5.* His family was utterly ordinary, his brother fierce and hardworking, the team grassroots; and it is precisely those ordinary people and ordinary things, he says, that have moved him over the years. As a bystander to the first stretch and a participant in the middle, he feels both the chance and the responsibility to set the details down.

"I don't expect this book to have many readers or to travel far. I only hope it gives the people who care about us — our partners, our customers, or just my family — a little more understanding and recognition, and one more record in the archive. If ten people, or a hundred, find something in it, that is its value."

A small ice cream and a single cup of tea, he writes, should also be allowed a big dream; an ordinary person doing one insignificant thing should also be allowed a faith. He reads little and writes clumsily, he says, but he is willing to try — and perhaps that effort is a value of its own.

Before the Founding — The Returns of Education (草创之前·教育的回报)

"Accepting one's fate is not the same as submitting to it. People who have read books know what reading is worth."

If there is one thread running through the family, it is education, kept alive like an ember.

"I often tell my partners: without education, we'd never have made it out of that village — there would be no me and no brother Hongchao as we are now, and probably no team like the one we have. But education may not pay off immediately. One generation plants the trees, the next enjoys the shade."

He goes back generations. His grandfather was born in 1931 (year 20 of the Republic). In 1938, fleeing the Japanese invasion and the deliberate breaching of the Yellow River dikes, he was an eight-year-old just beginning a traditional tutor-school education; later he tested into a Kaifeng prefectural middle school, and by the founding of New China in 1949 he was exactly eighteen. As one of the new country's first literate workers, he rolled up his bedding and went to a power plant in Shangqiu, leaving wife and children in the home village, and worked there the rest of his life. A great-granduncle — a late-Qing scholar — had insisted on funding the grandfather's schooling through repeated wartime interruptions, and on his death left him a thread-bound set of the *Zizhi Tongjian*. Out of gratitude and example, the grandfather in turn paid for the schooling of the narrator's father, an uncle, and several relatives — some of whom rose to lead the county's education bureaus.

The father was an outstanding student — first in his cohort across the five villages that shared a single primary school. But fate intervened: the year he finished junior high, 1966, the great wave came. Through 1967 and 1968 he sat in a high-school classroom without ever studying an academic subject — memorizing Chairman Mao's quotations, doing political study, and joining the great link-ups, trekking on foot to Zhengzhou or taking the train to Wuhan and Shanghai to see the motherland's rivers and mountains. He married in 1971, and by the time the national college examination was restored in 1977 he already had three children. He did once go to the county to register for university, the narrator recounts; the examiner asked whether he had any special talent, and he said no, only that he studied well and was good with the abacus, since he kept the village accounts — and was told that did not count, and was passed over.

"Thinking about it now: a little power in someone's hands — you really must not abuse it. It can genuinely sway the fate of a young person."

So the father's road through school ended, and he settled into a lifetime of farming. But accepting fate is not submitting to it, and the refrain the narrator grew up hearing was blunt: study hard, the countryside has no future, this is not the place for you. (He adds that he himself was born in 1985, after his mother's tubal ligation — a procedure, she told him, then often performed by fresh nursing-school interns, which is why it sometimes failed; *"just like making ice cream and milk tea,"* he jokes, *"a raw hand at a new station gets nervous and clumsy."*)

He believes in cause and effect — not the karmic, next-life kind, but the visible, real-world kind, stretched across decades and even three generations. He offers an example: that same scholar great-granduncle's only son was, in the warlord years, abducted by bandit enemies just after marrying and fathering a child, and never returned — said to have been buried alive or shot. The grandfather took in the orphaned infant as a matter of course; that child became the narrator's eldest uncle, was put through school, and went to work in the public-security system, and his sons were in turn helped through school — one becoming the local head of the Agricultural Bank. *Put spiritually, it is three generations of karma; put plainly, it is one family helping another and repaying kindness.* The point, either way: through upheaval and famine, reading was a flickering ember that, in the end, was not allowed to go out, and was passed down.

"If that reading ember had gone out, my brother wouldn't have come to Zhengzhou to study; without Zhengzhou, there'd have been no work-study, no street stall, and none of the later story. And I'm the same — without my father's insistence, I had ten thousand reasons not to keep studying, and there'd be no later story either."

He is candid that this was not obviously wise at the time. In the village, most families had many sons and much labor, and the logic was to drop out early and start working; many thought his father a fool for keeping so many children in school, and the children, scattered away at school, suffered no small amount of bullying back home. His conclusion:

"Maybe education is a thing with a very long investment cycle — but you must do it without hesitation and without counting the return. If you calculate the return and the payback period, you waste it, because you can't see the return. It is only merit accrued. Don't ask about the plowing, and there will be a harvest."

The Story King on the Haystack (麦秸垛上的故事会)

Because the older siblings studied in Shangqiu, the narrator grew up in Kaifeng almost as an only child, doted on but with little to play with — and his great joy was a few boxes of books upstairs, hand-me-down textbooks and miscellany his siblings brought home. While his parents were out in the fields, he would sneak up the wooden ladder, open the boxes, and read: a magazine called *Youth Science* describing a stove with "no flame and no high heat" that cooked food by violently agitating the water molecules inside it (the microwave, he laughs, now cheap as dirt); reference papers, the *People's Daily*, a students' study paper, a *Selected Chinese Myths*, a *Story King*, joke collections, prize-essay anthologies, and middle-school texts in history, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, and politics. He read them all, over and over — everything but politics, which he could never finish even once. He learned characters early (often knowing a character's meaning without its sound), and built a broad reading habit young. He was, he says, a "rural-urban fringe" child: the fringe's advantage is the leak of the advanced and the new, a window opened in the dullness.

The payoff was social. Having learned things the other village children hadn't, he became the neighborhood "Story King," holding court on dark nights — while his mother roamed the lanes shouting his name — as he and the other kids curled into a haystack (chosen because the straw nest was safe, soft, and springy) and he told them Chang'e flying to the moon and Houyi shooting the suns; the flameless, heatless oven; and the astonishing tale of humans landing on the moon. (He had misheard "Washington" as *"peanut bin,"* since Kaifeng grew so many peanuts.) The reflection he draws is pure operating philosophy:

"Later in life I found that when you organize a group of people to do something together, you still do it the same way — you paint the far vista through a story, and you stir the feeling."
"I'm now firmly convinced: a child who loves to read won't have too bad a fate, and a child who loves to share won't either."

He is grateful, he adds, that there was no internet then, no short video — *"otherwise only a fool would read books"* — and that a one-hour story has only one climax, while a short video gives you one every fifteen seconds. And he lands on a line that recurs through the whole memoir:

"Every step you've walked counts — even the steps you took very, very early."

The Brother — The Riverbank and the Mulberry Field (小河边，桑树地)

In 1992, when the narrator was seven, his brother Zhang Hongchao — then fourteen and in his last year of junior high — transferred back to the home village over a rural-household-registration issue, and for the first time the narrator had a brother at his side. The brother was the family's marvel: diligent, dutiful, and funny, able to fix any broken radio or television; he scavenged electronic components, built small radios, made the narrator an electronic watch, and repaired a cast-off windup alarm clock as a gift (though it never kept time again once the brother left). He was brilliant at physics and hopeless at English — not quite a standard science nerd, the narrator notes, because he also loved to talk. That, too, had a history: family lore held that the brother barely spoke until nearly four, so that their father feared he might be mute, before rebounding into a relentless talker. A face-reader said his slightly protruding "cucumber mouth" marked him as a talker; the grandfather nicknamed him *"always-right,"* an uncle called him *"splits-hairs,"* and the narrator and his sister thought him a *"know-it-all."* That habit of talking everything through never left him — decades of chronic pharyngitis from a founder who would always rather over-explain than leave a thing half-understood.

"Oh my brother, you really are long-winded. Now I understand: all these years he wasn't being long-winded — he was just being thorough."

The narrator taught the brother to swim in the village river (the brother, too theoretical, kept over-thinking the strokes and stayed uncoordinated, and only really learned in 2017 from a coach at a pool). Money, meanwhile, was at its tightest, with all four children in school. Alongside the staple wheat and peanuts, the father kept trying to farm his way up — isatis root, stevia, pigeons, rabbits, pigs, all failing (*"otherwise I might've been a rich second-generation,"* the narrator jokes) — and finally planted seventeen *mu* of mulberry to raise silkworms, because the radio had urged silkworm farming. Picking mulberry leaves — dozens of fertilizer-sized sacks of them — became the brothers' after-school and weekend life. To pass the dull hours, the brother "popularized science" for his little brother: physics, chemistry, geography, history, and eventually the biology of where babies come from, a subject conspicuously missing from the boxes upstairs. (That lecture, the narrator admits, became the most popular item at the haystack story sessions, and by the time a female biology teacher assigned the two-sexes chapter as "self-study" in the second year of junior high, the boys in his class didn't self-study — *he* taught it.)

He draws the line forward explicitly:

"His hands-on ability may well have been the courage base for striking out, alone among ten thousand students, with a street stall; and his love of physics, biology, chemistry, and good food is what gave birth, twelve years ago, to the first ice cream he developed himself."

"Nongfu Spring Has a Little Field" — The Fake Idyll (农夫山泉有点田·都是假美好)

Here the memoir turns hard-edged, under a title borrowed from an ad jingle about bucolic farm life. City people romanticize the countryside and visit for an afternoon, he writes — *but dare to try a month.* He wants to record what the real village was, in two words: poor, and bad.

On poor, he does the arithmetic. Around 1996, the family's ten-odd *mu* yielded roughly 10,000 *jin* of wheat and 8,000 *jin* of peanuts; at then-prices (about 0.5 yuan a *jin* for wheat, 0.8 for unshelled peanuts) that came to 11,400 yuan, and after fertilizer, pesticide, and irrigation diesel — some 4,000-plus yuan — perhaps 7,000 yuan for the year. *Divide by twelve: about 583 yuan a month, to feed six people, four of them students, worked by two parents alone.* (He recalculates at current prices to show that pure farming income is still the lowest there is.) He remembers riding the tractor with his parents to sell grain, driving from buyer to buyer just to get a fraction more per *jin*, with no telephone to check prices first — so they would rumble all the way over only to find the price wasn't as high as rumored, and turn back disappointed or sell at a loss. And he remembers, around seven or eight, the popsicle vendor calling out across the wheat fields in the heat while his father wouldn't buy him one — there were school fees to save for. Once, when he cried for a popsicle at four or five, his father bought one, dipped it in the salt jar, and handed it back, hoping the bad taste would cure the wanting for good.

"Dad, you really weren't a good dad."
"Happiness is often not a fact, but a thing arrived at by comparison."

The brother, born in 1977, had it worse: in those hungry years their underfed mother had too little milk, and the infant, nursing constantly out of hunger and sleeping on his side, developed a slightly pigeon-breasted chest — which, the narrator jokes, must be the anatomical basis for a broad and generous heart. Having lived at the very bottom, he says, no work and no life since has ever felt hard to him.

On bad, he is almost reluctant — writing about the countryside's cruelty after escaping it feels like ingratitude — but he insists it matters, because scarcity of both goods and spirit lets the worst of human nature show *"directly and nakedly."* In a small place, he writes, *"a tiny matter is a matter of heaven and earth."* He'd heard of suicides over petty quarrels; feuds over a boundary, a tree's shadow on a neighbor's crops, a pig in the cabbage; village-against-village brawls. *Where there are people, there is a jianghu* — and in a small, far-from-the-emperor jianghu, strength was the law, so families with many, fierce men had the advantage. His own family was weak in this arena: the men were away in Shangqiu, and his gentle, scholarly, thin-and-pale, Confucian father — forever yielding and contending with no one — *"had practically every trait that gets a man bullied by the village bullies."* It was a "weak nation has no diplomacy" situation, the details of which he'll spare, *"since this is supposed to be a book about starting a business"* — and it only hardened the father's resolve to send the children out.

Then comes the hinge of the origin story. Having finished junior high, the brother had tested into a then-fashionable vocational secondary school but, dutiful and pained by the cost, refused to go, set on becoming a "peasant entrepreneur" at home — collecting farming-and-raising books, subscribing to a business magazine (*Business* something, the narrator thinks), and, stirred by Deng Xiaoping's 1992 southern-tour speech and that era's call to mass entrepreneurship, dreaming of becoming the next Liu Yonghao of New Hope (already famous by around 1995). The grandfather called him "always-right," the mother called him a "stubborn donkey"; he was set. And then, one autumn after the harvest, a "bad" thing redirected his life. Walking home from the peanut-drying ground, across the small bridge behind the village, the brothers met a big drunk man who blocked them and, for no reason at all, wanted to fight; the brother — frail, late to develop, perhaps 1.6 meters then — pulled the narrator behind him and was beaten where he stood, in silence, never saying a word. The narrator, small and never a fighter, watched, with no chance or courage to help.

"That little bridge was less than 200 meters from our house, in a straight line. On the way back my brother held my hand, and neither of us spoke — it must have been an impossibly long 200 meters."

That beating, the narrator believes, broke the brother's idyll of the beautiful countryside and shattered his peasant-entrepreneur fantasy; he went straight to bed without a word to their parents. Combined with a girl already studying at the Zhengzhou finance college who kept writing and inviting him, and a sister who had graduated and found work there and, hearing of the beating, urged him on, it tipped him. One day he suddenly told their father: *"Dad, I've made up my mind. I want to go to Zhengzhou to study."*

"The hardest life is the farmer's: the poverty is real poverty, and the badness is real badness. The countryside's badness is crude and overbearing — and yet somehow lovable."

In 1996, the mother packed his bags, and he boarded the train to Zhengzhou alone. *Good and bad beget each other,* the narrator writes; *and so a new journey began.*

Schooling (求学·上/下)

In Zhengzhou the brother enrolled in the adult-education public-relations-and-secretarial program at the Henan College of Finance and Economics (later merged into Henan University of Economics and Law). The narrator, thrilled to have relatives in the provincial capital, finally got to visit over a winter break — ostensibly to treat a strange ailment that had been deforming and shedding his fingernails since age eight, which the county hospital couldn't cure. What he found upended his expectations. The siblings shared a tiny room in a *tongzilou* tenement — a ring corridor hung with every tenant's laundry, rows of coal stoves outside each door, countless families packed in — that he compares to a slum. He had pictured a beautiful campus and textbook study; instead, the morning after the clinic visit, the brother announced he was off to *work* — by bicycle.

For days the narrator rode on the back of that bicycle through the freezing city (nearly crushed once on the glassy, car-packed ice beside a No. 101 trolleybus), watching his brother go door to door — not about the nail, but carrying sheaves of forms, persuading doctors and nurses to fill out questionnaires, then carefully collecting the completed ones into file folders. Only the first semester's tuition had come from home; everything after, the brother earned himself, juggling jobs: direct-selling Tiens high-calcium powder, repping a Tianjin snack maker's filled rice crackers, collecting surveys for the pharmaceutical firm SmithKline, and moonlighting at an upscale restaurant near campus. He had even built a time-management system to stack the jobs: promise a head nurse a fee one day, collect the filled forms the next, and fill the gaps selling rice crackers to small shops, with the social-setting direct-selling slotted in between. By night he took short gigs — selling roses at the Huanghe Road and Jiankang Road night markets, where (he later told his brother) his close rate was unusually high because he'd worked out exactly which couples would pay a premium: the *"obviously age-mismatched"* ones, an older man with a young woman. *"Ah, this kid,"* the narrator writes.

"In short, I never saw him study — it was as if he'd come to Zhengzhou to work, not to go to school."

And then, just after the Spring Festival, the sister phoned home: the brother had won a scholarship. *How is that possible?!* He'd skipped high school entirely, his English never passed, he worked several jobs, and his girlfriend was at the same school — winning a scholarship seemed absurd; the narrator assumed he'd buttered up a teacher. The truth: he had placed first in his entire department.

"The method, besides hard work, had no shortcut."

But it was not dumb effort — it was a system, one the narrator says still serves him. The brother left all his subjects until the last month, having spent the rest of the term working, his textbooks essentially blank and the classroom barely visited. Then: gather every exam's textbook; write each book's page count in a notebook; post the goal — *"pass every subject"* — at the head of his bed. Split the 30 days into 15 / 10 / 5: fifteen days to read everything carefully and mark the key points; ten to reread, master those points, and untangle the logic of the material; five to drill only the key points, then walk straight into the exam while memory was freshest. Divide total pages by days — five 400-page texts is 2,000 pages ÷ 15 ≈ 133 pages a day. Sleep four hours, leave two for work and meals, and read the remaining eighteen — about 7.39 pages an hour. Read 50 minutes of each hour, rest the eyes five or six minutes, then punch a sandbag hung at the bed-head to wake up before the next hour (the first sandbag, stuffed until hard as a cement bag, left his finger joints permanently enlarged). And then, step six: *act.*

The sister, who saw him that month with his eyes bulging from exhaustion, feared he'd collapse; he didn't. *He was a man who runs on his own adrenaline,* the narrator writes, *and people who run on adrenaline don't end up in too bad a state.* A month later he sat the exams, passed every subject, and placed first — the only junior-high graduate in that adult-education cohort to do so and win the 200-yuan scholarship, an enormous sum then, about a month of the sister's starting salary. Roughly two-thirds of his class failed courses. He used the method on every exam after, and in three years of college never failed a single one, graduating smoothly.

The Close of Part One (第一部分的小结)

Zhang Hongfu ends the first part with a set of reflections, of which the core are these. First, each person's experience is unique and lived only once — being born into hunger, mocked for a rural household registration, is a product of its time and not repeatable; but anyone can, like his brother, face the future actively and with heart, and *"if you were idle before and work hard now, it's not too late."* Second, education is a kind of R&D investment in the mind: R&D doesn't guarantee a result, but not investing guarantees none — and so, toward ourselves, our partners, and the next generation, we should invest continuously and overwhelmingly, without counting the return, which is precisely when fruit is most likely. Third, Confucian culture is useful — it shaped the family's character (the thing, he feels, that mattered most in the years of building the business) and, quietly, much of Chinese daily life. Fourth, always help others, especially to grow and learn; help is an investment, and the one who gives is the investor, even if the horizon is very long. Fifth, stay curious and eager to learn, keep exploring, and be glad to share — the more you share, the more you gain. And, he adds, good and bad are one and the same; he is grateful now for the hardship, because without it his brother would not have been so driven, so frugal, so hard-working.

"When you're in a low position, you should actually be secretly delighted — it's the perfect time to quietly gather strength and rise. Remember, you're only in your twenties; there are still forty years to sixty-five — and forty years is enough for a person to run his own reform and opening-up."
"The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; if you didn't plant it ten years ago, then the best time is now."

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 1 Ends ——

3. FoodBud Notes

Five observations FoodBud draws from this opening. (Analysis is ours; it sits outside the translation above and does not alter the source.)

1. Mixue's low-price doctrine is a scar, not a slide. The popsicle the father wouldn't buy, then salted; the tractor rides to sell grain for a fraction more per *jin*; the 583-yuan month for six people. When Mixue later builds a company around the conviction that *ordinary people should be able to afford something delicious*, it is converting lived scarcity into positioning. Treat Mixue's pricing as a value, not a tactic — values are stickier.

2. Frugality is a competence here, not a constraint. The household that counted pennies produced operators who would later wring cost out of a national supply chain and logistics network. The memoir shows the *origin* of that cost-consciousness; later articles will show it institutionalized.

3. The "engineering" temperament behind Mixue's product and supply machine is visible decades early. Zhang Hongchao fixing radios, building a watch, motorcycle-repair training, reverse-engineering how to pass five exams in a month, and — by his brother's account — developing Mixue's first ice cream himself: this is first-principles, hands-on problem-solving, culturally continuous with Mixue's later edge in self-manufacturing and in-house R&D.

4. Storytelling is treated as an operating tool, not a soft skill. The "Story King" on the haystack grows into a founder who states outright that you mobilize a team by *painting the vista through a story and stirring the feeling.* For a company that would later need to align tens of thousands of franchisees around a shared identity, founder culture is, in part, a deliberate narrative practice.

5. The founders' mental model is long-horizon and survival-first. "It took ten years to open one store." "Every step counts." "The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago." It is the opposite of the blitz-scaling story, and worth holding against the 60,000-store present.

4. Timeline (this installment)

  • 1931 — Grandfather born (Republic year 20).
  • 1938 — Family flees the Yellow River flooding; grandfather, age 8, has just begun schooling.
  • 1949 — Founding of the PRC; grandfather turns 18; becomes an educated worker at a Shangqiu power plant.
  • 1966 — Father finishes junior high; his academic schooling is derailed.
  • 1967–1968 — Father in a high-school classroom, but no academic study (political study, the great link-ups).
  • 1971 — Father marries.
  • 1977 — National college exam restored; father (already three children) is rejected at the registration interview. Older brother Zhang Hongchao born.
  • 1985 — Narrator Zhang Hongfu born.
  • 1992 — Zhang Hongchao, age 14, transfers back to the home village for junior high; the brothers grow up together.
  • ~mid-1990s — Family's failed farm ventures; 17 *mu* of mulberry for silkworms.
  • 1996 — The bridge beating; Zhang Hongchao boards the train to Zhengzhou alone; enrolls in adult-education PR/secretarial studies at the Henan College of Finance and Economics; self-funds tuition through multiple jobs; places first in his department and wins a 200-yuan scholarship.

*(The 1997 founding — the "three deaths, three rebirths" of the shaved-ice winter — opens Article 02.)*

5. Pull Quotes (web-ready)

1. *"A starting point is never too small; a dream is never too big."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 2. *"You're so lucky. It took us ten years to open a single store."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 3. *"Without education, we'd never have made it out of that village."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 4. *"Happiness is often not a fact, but a thing arrived at by comparison."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 5. *"The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; if you didn't, then it's now."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text)

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*Before the Castle: How Mixue Was Really Built, 1997-2017 · Part 1 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

*This is a translated and annotated edition, not an original FoodBud interview. Authorized translation: translated with permission from Zhang Hongfu's memoir (经授权翻译自张红甫回忆录). Original author/source: Zhang Hongfu (张红甫). The translated source is kept separate from FoodBud's Editor's Note, FoodBud Notes, timeline, and pull quotes.*

*Publication note: corporate data is primary-source-locked to HKEX filings where stated. Market capitalization and any FY2025 GMV / systemwide-sales figure are intentionally not stated. “Scale” means systemwide sales / GMV and store count, never company revenue. FoodBud is information only, not investment advice.*