Before the Castle, Part 3 — 1998–2003: Walls Down, Doors Open ### 1998–2003：从合肥糖葫芦到业态园总店 **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 3 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

1. FoodBud Editor's Note

Article 2 ended with the first year of Cold-Snap Shaved Ice: three stores, three collapses, three recoveries. Article 3 follows the years when the business became, for the first time, recognizably Mixue Bingcheng — but only after another failed detour, another demolition, a misspelled signboard, a romance that ended at the edge of marriage, SARS, and one more near-fatal forced closure.

For readers looking at MIXUE Group today — HKEX: 2097, 59,823 stores at year-end 2025, and a system whose scale should be read through systemwide sales / GMV and store count, not confused with company revenue — this installment is important because it shows how many of Mixue's later systems were still just habits in the body: cheap fit-outs, secondhand materials, hand-drawn posters, dormitory flyer runs, low gross margins, ruthless throughput, supplier credit, and the refusal to walk away from a site before the last possible day.

This is also where the name appears. The first store to carry the brand was, in Zhang Hongfu's telling, not quite "蜜雪冰城" but "密雪冰城" — a signmaker's mistake accepted because correcting it cost money. That small embarrassment is very Mixue: the brand emerges not as polish, but as persistence under constraint.

2. Why This Installment Matters

From 1998 to 2003, Zhang Hongchao did not yet build the beverage-chain model. He built operating reflexes: stay close to the customer base you understand, use cheap space creatively, make the store warm even when the room is poor, price for students, calculate against yourself rather than the customer, pay suppliers even when demolished, borrow reputation when cash is gone, and keep looking for the next site.

Below, the source is presented as a FoodBud translated and annotated edition, not an original interview. The translated source is kept separate from FoodBud's commentary.

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 3 Begins ——

1998–1999: Candied Hawthorns, Hefei, and the Name "Mixue Bingcheng"

In the spring of 1998, after the weather warmed up, they withdrew from the orange business and went back to cold drinks. That year was relatively smooth: no demolition, no roadworks. By the autumn, the brother temporarily rented the shop out to a Fujianese jeweler who made gold ornaments, and chose to sell candied hawthorns himself.

Of all the places to sell candied hawthorns, he insisted on going to Hefei. As for why, even he could not really explain it. He simply felt Hefei was a good market: its economy seemed better than Zhengzhou's, and people there liked to eat. Before going, he even designed packaging for the candied hawthorns. Zhang Hongfu remembers a white bag under the brand "Zhang Laotai Candied Hawthorns". It was positioned as a high-end product: three layers of packaging, with the skewer first wrapped in glutinous rice paper, then placed in a plastic box, then put inside the plastic bag.

Reality slapped him hard. After he arrived in Hefei, he knew no one and knew nothing of the place. With difficulty he rented a site and started work, only to discover that Hefei's winter was too damp. After the hawthorns were dipped in sugar, they quickly absorbed moisture again; once the sugar coating melted, the product looked bad. In the end, he spent a winter struggling in Hefei without making a single yuan, and returned to Zhengzhou in the spring of 1999 looking utterly defeated.

This story, Zhang Hongfu writes, teaches a lesson: one should still fight on familiar ground. When you run too far, anything can happen. The contradiction is that human beings are restless animals. When the current conditions are poor, we wonder whether conditions outside might be better. When the current conditions are good, we grow full of spirit and imagine that distant battlefields will be easier to conquer.

Demolition as the Main Theme

"Demolition" became the main melody. Or perhaps, Zhang Hongfu writes, his brother may not have been calm at all; perhaps he simply did not want the family to worry about him.

In the spring of 1999, Zhang Hongchao returned to Zhengzhou intending to keep fighting at the Baimiao store on Dongfeng Road. Then demolition arrived.

Because the technology market across the street was booming, the existing market could no longer carry the public's beautiful demand for buying computers and improving life, so Baimiao Farmers' Market was demolished. That land later became a new area of the technology market; a few years after that, it became today's Cyber Digital Plaza.

There was no choice. Move again. This time he moved to a row of storefronts near the current company, on the southeast side of the Wenhua Road and Bosong Road crossing, to the left of the Coal Hospital entrance. It was not the current building. By then he had accumulated some experience and become bolder, so he took over a larger storefront, about sixty square meters, with six or seven folding tables inside.

The consumption environment had changed, so the products upgraded too. Shaved ice in cups was upgraded to snowflake ice served on plates. He added more elaborate lines: banana boats, milkshakes, and some more Western-sounding series such as *boda* drinks with sparkling water and *binzhi* drinks containing ice-cream balls. As both the product and the environment upgraded, the shop name also changed. It became Mixue Bingcheng.

Why "Mixue"? Because shaved ice like snowflakes was covered with sweet jam; eating it was like eating sweet snow.

Why "Bingcheng," or Ice City? Because the product line was very rich — probably more than a hundred ice products. Zhang Hongfu estimates it may have been the most professional ice-products shop in all of Henan, so it was called an "ice city."

The person who helped name Mixue Bingcheng was the eldest brother in the family. He was a widely read man of letters, and men of letters like to chew over words.

There are photos of that Mixue Bingcheng store, Zhang Hongfu notes, and he planned to gather and add them later. But in the photos, the sign actually reads "Mixue Bingcheng" with the wrong Chinese character: 密 instead of 蜜. The reason was simple: "蜜雪冰城" was a coined phrase, and the sign shop made the character wrong. Correcting it would have cost quite a bit. The sign shop said it would discount the sign by 200 yuan if they just made do with it, and Zhang Hongchao agreed, because it saved money.

So strictly speaking, the first Mixue Bingcheng store was called "Mi Xue Bing Cheng" with the wrong "mi."

In the summer of 1999, Zhang Hongfu had just finished his second year of junior high. Bored at home and eager to get to Zhengzhou, he asked his parents for 14 yuan, took a bus to Kaifeng, then transferred to Zhengzhou. His brother had no mobile phone then, only a pager. Zhang Hongfu did not call him; he only knew his brother had moved about one kilometer north of the Dongfeng Road and Wenhua Road intersection. He got off at the long-distance bus station, took Bus No. 6, got off at Wenhua and Dongfeng, and walked north. By sheer luck, he arrived right at the shop entrance. His brother was unloading folding tables and chairs from a vehicle. The two saw each other and were equally surprised. Only later did Zhang Hongfu learn that the tables and chairs had been placed outside, confiscated by the city management officers, and had just been begged back by his brother with shameless persistence.

Demolition and urban management, he sighs, both have a long history.

He also admires the courage he had at that time: somehow he traveled alone and did not get lost.

To him, that store was practically a luxury flagship. At the door were already two big speakers; inside, the homemade amplifier was much larger than before, and its aluminum heat sink felt hot to the touch. By then Zhang Hongfu was old enough to listen to pop music, and helping in the store with his brother was far more interesting than staying in the village.

Across from the store were the Broadcasting and Film School and the Metallurgical Industry School, and it was not far from the brother's alma mater, the Henan College of Finance and Economics, so business was quite strong. His sister would come help after work. The eldest brother helped in the store too, along with Zhang Hongchao's girlfriend and a cousin from an uncle's family. They bustled around to music by day and closed up to count cash at night. That store was a beautiful memory for the whole family.

But good times did not last. Halfway through the summer holiday, the municipal notice came. The key word: demolish.

It was not the first demolition. So they moved. Coincidentally, across from the store, at the gate of the Broadcasting School, there was another row of storefronts. Zhang Hongchao moved the shop there.

The opposite storefront was about the same size, so with a simple clean-up and a new sign, Mixue Bingcheng was reborn in about a week. This time, the character "蜜" on the sign was correct.

Traffic grew, business improved, and by then he had hired several employees, all rural children who could endure hard work. Because the ice-drink product line was relatively seasonal, he added new items that year: hamburgers, fries, and the like.

Zhang Hongfu remembers one time when he and an employee named Yatao were frying fries in the back kitchen. Under the gas stove were several sheets of newspaper, splashed with oil. After being roasted by the stove flame for a long time, the newspaper suddenly caught fire, which then ignited the plastic hose connected to the gas cylinder. Flames shot out more than two meters. Yatao's face turned green with fright, and Zhang Hongfu panicked too, rushing out to find his brother. Fortunately Zhang Hongchao was in the store; he went in and shut off the stove valve by hand, calmly preventing a serious accident.

After seeing the prosperity of the big city, Zhang Hongfu no longer wanted to stay in the village. That winter holiday he came to Zhengzhou again. By then his brother had made the store especially warm. At the entrance hung dark cotton curtains for insulation; inside, customers were noisy and lively. On the walls hung cheap oil paintings collected from here and there — his brother had a habit of scavenging things from secondhand markets — while green vines and streamers wrapped around the lamps. Some Tibetan students from the Broadcasting and Film School even gave Zhang Hongchao several pure white *khata* scarves. Looking back, Zhang Hongfu says, this was what Xiaomi would later call "making friends with customers."

That year, because business was good, one die-hard customer insisted on franchising. He opened a Mixue Bingcheng franchise in Jiaozuo called Tianwaitian Mixue Bingcheng.

Everything was steadily improving, but Zhang Hongchao, restless as always, could not sit still. A neighboring storefront happened to be transferring, so he took it over as well.

Then he and the employee Yatao went two consecutive nights without sleep. Holding hammers and straddling the wall, they smashed the partition wall down strike by strike. It really was forty-eight hours without closing their eyes. After knocking it down, they bought cement and lime, smoothed over the traces of the demolition, added more tables and chairs, extended the existing counter by another meter, and turned it into a rather imposing long counter. On the counter they pasted the four-character logo: 蜜雪冰城.

Zhang Hongfu helped paste onto the walls the green vines and streamers his brother had bought from Huanghe Food City. Watching a store become warmer and more loved by customers made him feel delighted too.

His brother calculated that once the winter holiday passed, spring would arrive. If things went well, by 2000 he could save a good amount of money, step gradually toward the peak of life, and marrying a fair-skinned, rich, beautiful woman would not seem such a difficult matter after all.

But the reader can already guess what happened. In the spring of 2000, the municipal government vigorously called on universities and public institutions in the city to "remove walls and reveal greenery" — tear down perimeter walls, tear down storefronts, and reveal the landscaped beauty of campuses and institutions. This big store, just finished after all that effort, had to close again.

After being tormented many times, one grows armor. Zhang Hongfu says his brother was someone with armor. When this store was being demolished, he seemed calm — or perhaps he was not calm, and simply did not want the family to worry.

A Winding Path, and Moonlight Among Flowers

Zhang Hongfu inserts several corrections and omissions. First, from his sister: the employee who smashed the wall with his brother at the Broadcasting and Film School store was not Yatao, but Guo Yuzeng, from Linzhou, Anyang — the hometown of the Red Flag Canal. He was a young man with the spirit of the Red Flag Canal. Unfortunately, Zhang Hongfu either never met him, or was too young at the time and met him without remembering.

Second, from Shi Chunwei, an early participant and witness at the Cuihua Road store, Zhang Hongchao's classmate and still a Mixue franchisee, came details about the origin of the venture and the Cuihua Road store. At that time, Zhang Hongchao was already the Zhengzhou-area business supervisor for Fengle Small Foods World, which represented Guai Guai filled rice crackers. In 1997 his monthly income was already more than 800 yuan.

But he was not someone easily satisfied. He had ambition and ideas. He wanted to distinguish himself, make his parents proud, and perhaps bring the family out of hardship. That was why he kept tossing himself into entrepreneurship.

At the Cuihua Road store on Nanyang Road, he had rented the window of a restaurant. Soon after paying three months' rent, the restaurant could no longer continue; the sub-landlord — the restaurant owner — ran off with the equipment and money. The head landlord came to collect rent again or take back the property.

Zhang Hongchao had just started, operating on a tiny budget, and could not afford to pay rent twice. He negotiated repeatedly, but the head landlord would not relent.

Fortunately, heaven leaves no one without a road. It happened that the building's electrical wiring had a problem. Zhang Hongchao used his physics foundation to fix it. The landlord was moved, truly won over by this striving young man, and did not collect rent again, allowing him to continue operating. That was how the Nanyang Road Cuihua Road store survived.

Zhang Hongfu adds in parentheses that he forgot to write earlier that after graduating junior high and before returning to the village to prepare for his "peasant entrepreneur" dream, Zhang Hongchao had studied motorcycle repair for a few months in Shangqiu at Lanxiang Technical School. In just a few months, his motorcycle electrical-repair ability reached a master-level standard.

Back to the main story. After the Broadcasting and Film School store was forced down by the wall-removal-and-greening campaign, poor Zhang Hongchao had to keep looking for another store. Finally, between the south wall of the Broadcasting and Film School and the north wall of his alma mater, the Finance College — at today's intersection of Wenhua Road and Wenlao Road — he found a row of very run-down storefronts.

In front of the storefronts was Wenlao Road; behind them, between the stores and the Finance College's north wall, was a foul drainage ditch. Today that ditch has already been buried underground by the municipal government, with a row of park space above it. Because the buildings were shabby, the rent was cheap, and the location was only 200 meters from the demolished old store. The disadvantage was that renovation would cost more.

Renovation was not a problem, because they were good with their hands.

He and the employees again worked overtime: painting walls, hanging ceilings, hardening the ground at the entrance, planting a row of small trees and evergreen shrubs, painting the exterior wall light blue, and even setting up open-air seats on the roof. In about a week, the ruined storefronts had been transformed into a row of pale-blue romantic castles. By then Zhang Hongfu was in high school. When he visited, he could not feel the decay of the broken buildings at all; instead, it felt like a secluded Eden reached by a winding path.

These rooms together were larger. There were already five or six employees, and the seating could receive seventy or eighty customers at the same time. Beyond drinks, hamburgers, and fries, the product line added Chinese-style simple meals such as Yangzhou fried rice.

To add fun for customers, Zhang Hongchao placed a small television in each compartment. The televisions were black-and-white sets bought from the secondhand market — not color TVs, again to save money. But to make them amusing, he sprayed the shells with colored paint and called them "luxury private-room black-and-white color TVs." Zhang Hongfu personally sprayed two of them.

He remembers watching his brother handwrite a big poster promoting the store's new hamburger. The slogan was violent and funny: "Damn! What's so great about a hamburger? Isn't it just two slices of bread with a piece of meat? Mixue Bingcheng Big Burger: three yuan each. Big enough, filling enough, satisfying enough!" The hamburger was genuinely delicious. The chicken in the middle used a coating that his brother had developed by combining Chinese cooking methods, seasoned with Sichuan pepper and five-spice. It tasted properly satisfying.

When Zhang Hongfu returned half a year later, the store had a new sign: Mixue Bingcheng Chinese and Western Restaurant. His brother had once again tossed in a new product line: Chinese food.

Why add Chinese food? Because next door there was a Chinese restaurant with very good business. A few dishes and a bottle of beer would make a table spend several dozen yuan, and the tables would turn many times a day. Zhang Hongchao's previous Western-food-and-cold-drink format had customers order a table and sit for an afternoon without turning, creating too little output value. The Chinese menu retained Mixue Bingcheng's character: cheap and substantial. Shredded potato with vinegar and chili was 1.5 yuan per plate; fish-fragrant shredded pork was five yuan per plate.

The main customer-acquisition method then was to go to the surrounding college dormitories and hand out flyers. Zhang Hongchao took Zhang Hongfu and the employees and swept through buildings one by one. Dorm management was lax then; they even went into women's dorms to distribute flyers, which made the adolescent Zhang Hongfu very excited.

The conversion rate on the flyers was extremely high. The design referenced Dicos flyers, with the same die-cut creases and coupon redemptions.

During those years, the songs most frequently blasted from the big speakers at the entrance were Dick Cowboy's "How Much Love Can Come Again" and Jay Chou's "Simple Love." Zhang Hongfu became a Jay Chou fan from that time.

Business was booming and rising. His sister, who often came to help, grew so envious that she simply quit her job and rented a room beside him. She happened to have a friend in the clothing wholesale market, so she opened a clothing shop next door. The name was also given by Zhang Hongchao: "My Clothes — Individuality Unleashed."

The once desolate drainage ditch, dead-end road, and broken buildings thus became a must-visit destination for nearby college students. Who knows how many couples had their first date, first hand-holding, first... at that place?

And Zhang Hongchao himself gained his second love there. This one entered marriage, and they now have two sons.

The first love, because of many reasons, had ended during the hardest period. Zhang Hongfu says he would write a separate chapter about that later.

Love: A Knife in the Wound, or an Assist

At the time, one could not see clearly. In that age of material scarcity and spiritual homelessness, success studies and motivational studies were like lighthouses, guiding many struggling young people in China.

This is a book recording an entrepreneurial story, Zhang Hongfu says. Originally he did not want to write about love, but his brother's first love had a major influence on his life, so he had no choice but to spend some space reviewing its beginning and end.

He and his first love could be considered childhood sweethearts. When Zhang Hongchao was in junior high in Shangqiu, because he developed relatively late, he sat in the front row with a girl as his desk mate. She was a very kind girl. In an era when even having a rural household registration at school could be grounds for discrimination, she did not look at him through colored glasses. They spent more and more time together. The seed of love had already sprouted in both hearts, but their skin was thin and Zhang Hongchao lacked confidence, so that layer of window paper was never pierced.

When Zhang Hongchao returned home for the last two years of junior high, their sudden day-and-night companionship became separation between two places. The longing of youth burned like fire and turned into letters back and forth, pouring out their hearts. They fell in love.

In the letters, her name for him was "Cobra", because he was highly myopic and wore glasses, and was born in the Year of the Snake. When he had graduated and was idle at home farming, she once came back to the village to find him. She was very nice, and taught Zhang Hongfu the first English word of his life: "thank you." His small pleasure was to follow the couple around as a third wheel. Filled with curiosity about romance, he wanted to see with his own eyes how people dated.

Later the girl went to Zhengzhou Finance College, and the two kept up frequent letters. After Zhang Hongchao's dream of becoming a peasant entrepreneur collapsed, it was because of missing her and because of her invitation that he came to Zhengzhou.

After he arrived in Zhengzhou, she was practically a capable helper in his studies and early entrepreneurship: doing part-time work together, living together in cheap rented rooms, helping in the store and closing up. In the blink of an eye, they both graduated and reached the age to discuss marriage.

The girl's family was in the suburban area of Shangqiu City. At that time it had just been planned into the urban district; in today's terms, they were about to become urban-village demolition households. Their conditions were quite good.

A father-in-law looks at a son-in-law as though he were an enemy. More importantly, that era carried a great prejudice against rural household registration, and Zhang Hongfu's family conditions were genuinely poor. Zhang Hongchao had grown up looking thin, poor, and shabby. Every time he visited her parents, even if he bought many gifts, he was never treated well. In sharp contrast, the girl's younger sister had also just started dating. Her boyfriend's conditions were better, and when they visited the girl's home together, the younger sister's boyfriend would shout and drink with the father-in-law at the table, while Zhang Hongchao, disliked and unable to drink, could only sit lonely to one side.

Lonely or not, life still had to go on. In 1999 Zhang Hongchao was twenty-two; if Zhang Hongfu remembers correctly, the girl was twenty-three. At that age then, it was time to marry. The condition of marriage was that Zhang Hongchao would marry into her family. The pull between two people in love was enormous, and after all kinds of twists, he agreed.

But whether there is fate or not can sometimes be decided in an instant. In 1999, after the Coal Hospital store had opened and business felt gradually stable, the two returned together to her father's home in Shangqiu to prepare the wedding. The house prepared for Zhang Hongchao was being built and was about to have its main beam raised.

Raising the beam of a house is a major event. It requires firecrackers and red couplets pasted on the house frame. Firecrackers cracked and boomed; strong laborers shouted in rhythm and began lifting the beam.

At that moment, Zhang Hongchao broke down in tears.

Although his future father-in-law had always looked down on him, what had sustained him through all the twists to that final point was that the girl's mother had always been good to him, matching the saying that a mother-in-law looks at her son-in-law and finds him pleasing from every angle. Yet the trigger that made him decide to break up that day came precisely when her mother was present.

After returning to Shangqiu City, his girlfriend had just brought him onto the construction site and in front of her mother. The future mother-in-law happily pointed at the house and said, "Hongchao, the first floor of this house will be for you two first. After your uncle and I pass away, the upstairs will all be yours too..."

The workers happened to be lifting the beam, and the firecrackers started booming. In an instant, scene after scene of humiliation and bitterness surged up: being bullied back home, the inferiority of a rural Shangqiu household registration, being looked down on by the future father-in-law. A wrenching pain immediately rose in his heart, and tears began flowing uncontrollably. Was he really going to live under someone else's roof from then on? His parents and younger brother were still being bullied at home. The whole village was still waiting to laugh at the family. There was also an eldest brother who had not been very promising. His grandparents had spent a lifetime of savings and energy educating them, yet he had not even had time to repay their devotion. He wanted to make big money and make everyone who had once looked down on him regret it, but he had not yet sorted out any path. He absolutely could not let things end like this. He was supposed to be the hope of the whole family.

That night, they peacefully broke up. Today, Zhang Hongfu writes, every person may come from another place to a new city and form a new family; there may be no heavy sense of grievance or "marrying into" another household. But in that era, under those circumstances, all the bitterness suddenly converged, and they really did break up because of these things.

Afterward, the girl chose another husband in Shangqiu and formed a family. Zhang Hongchao returned to Zhengzhou and continued his entrepreneurship.

Perhaps love is like this: there is no right or wrong. Campus love can be all moonlight and flowers, whispering sweetly to one another. But once it comes to marriage, it falls to rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea. Parents who love their daughter are not wrong either. Who does not hope their daughter marries into a good family? Human nature seeks good fortune and avoids harm. If she followed a poor, uncertain young man, and even supporting a family and raising children might be materially difficult, would she be happy? Or put differently: if Zhang Hongfu had a daughter, what choice would he make?

Judged by today's eyes, some might stand from a feminist perspective and ask why a woman marrying into a man's family is acceptable while a man marrying into a woman's family creates a shadow. But there is no "if." It happened that way. Only the people involved know the psychological struggle of that difficult decision. Even his parents learned of all this only later.

Fate gathers and begins; fate scatters and ends.

The blow to him was enormous. After returning to Zhengzhou, he wrote in his diary: "I must succeed! I must succeed! I must succeed!" He pasted those words at the head of his bed and above his punching bag. Then he worked as though his life depended on it. This is what people mean by: to succeed, first go mad.

From passionate love suddenly back to being single, the emptiness in his heart could only be filled by books. During those years, when Zhang Hongfu came to Zhengzhou, his brother was living in the Songzhai sanitation transfer station. The municipal government had built the transfer station but was not using it, so Zhang Hongchao rented it at a very low price and used it as both home and warehouse. In his small room were stack after stack of books. He also recommended that Zhang Hongfu read Lu Yao's Ordinary World and Life. Ordinary world, ordinary life, ordinary encounters always resemble one another. Zhang Hongfu still remembers the two protagonists: Sun Shao'an and Sun Shaoping.

At the head of Zhang Hongchao's bed, the most battered book was a pirated copy of The Greatest Salesman in the World. Zhang Hongfu checked later and found that the book should have been published in 2002, but he clearly saw it in his brother's room in 2000, so perhaps the pirated edition circulated before the official one.

His brother can still recite every chapter, because at that time he read and memorized it aloud every morning. Today some people laugh at success studies. But in an age of material scarcity and spiritual homelessness, success studies and motivational studies were like lighthouses guiding many struggling young people in China.

Zhang Hongfu then quotes two passages from Og Mandino's book. For this FoodBud edition, we preserve the function of the quotation without reproducing the long excerpt: the passage insists that the speaker was not born for failure, is no lamb to be beaten, and must refuse the company of defeat; the second passage turns sadness, fear, poverty, insecurity, and self-contempt into commands to sing, laugh, work harder, move forward, dress better, raise one's voice, imagine future wealth, remember past success, and return to one's goals.

In short, as the quoted text concludes: today I must learn to control my emotions.

The Gene of Low Price

He also felt that his customers had it hard.

In the world of the *diaosi*, Zhang Hongfu writes, everywhere you look you see *diaosi*. If you drive a Mercedes, you feel the streets are full of Mercedes. If you are pregnant, you feel the streets are full of pregnant women. This principle is called the pregnancy effect.

Today online, many fans jokingly call Mixue Bingcheng the savior of "slum girls." That too is because its founder was a boy who came out of the "slums." Poverty of birth, cold eyes from others, work-study, romantic frustration, demolition after demolition — these were the labels that could be attached to Zhang Hongchao's past. Perhaps because life had been so hard, he also felt his customers' lives were hard.

So at the Wenlao Road and Wenhua Road store, prices were lower one after another: three-yuan hamburgers, 1.5-yuan fries, 2.5-yuan Yangzhou fried rice, 1.5-yuan shredded potato and cabbage dishes, and meat dishes at five or six yuan.

Did it make money? Yes, it did.

Because Zhang Hongchao was a science-and-engineering man and very good at calculating. But his calculations were never about how to take more money from customers' pockets. They were calculations against himself: how to make lower prices reach the extreme and win more customer affection.

For example, when they promoted hamburgers at three yuan, he would calculate precisely: how much did two slices of bread cost? How much for one chicken breast? How much for the self-made coating? How much for the oil? How much for the wrapping paper? Electricity and labor he did not count in. His principle was that volume had to be large, so those expenses could be spread very, very low.

Chinese stir-fry worked the same way. How many *liang* of shredded potato? How many *liang* of oil? How many *liang* of side ingredients? Food-quality standards and portion sizes were all higher than peers. He would calculate a very precise cost, add a tiny gross profit, and reverse-engineer the price.

Why insist on low gross margins?

At the time he certainly did not know any business theory, nor any "pregnancy effect." He simply felt there were too many poor students.

China's urbanization was not as widespread then as it is today. Most students still came from rural families. Once they arrived in the big city, all kinds of expenses added frost to snow for their families. In the years of youth, they still had to pursue girlfriends. Many boys, in order to win the girl they liked, looked glorious in front of others and pretended to be well-off, while behind the scenes they ate meals without ordering dishes, saving money for romance.

Customers filling the store and praising it in waves gave Zhang Hongchao the best feedback for calculating against himself.

After Chinese food had been offered for a while, the Chinese restaurant next door closed, because the table turnover at Mixue Bingcheng Home-Style Restaurant was several times higher. At that time, it was not large-scale procurement driving costs down; there was only one store.

So the ability to offer high quality at low price could only come from being willing to give up profit and earn only a thin return for hard work. It was absolutely carved out by stabbing oneself.

Maintaining low gross margins meant high efficiency.

First, he and the team worked almost twenty hours a day in continuous rotation. Zhang Hongfu remembers employees including Sister Chen Ping, Xiaohua, Yanzi, and Yatao. They operated by day and slept on the floor in the store after closing at night. They were all hard-working children from poor backgrounds, fully carrying forward the spirit of struggle, living like one family.

Second, there had to be high output and high table turnover. For the same sales, he likely had two or three times the dish volume of similar restaurants. Zhang Hongchao himself was one of the cooks, and several employees were trained by him to fry a few dishes.

Compared with today's foodservice operating environment, the kitchen then was unbelievably cramped, with no air-conditioning or similar measures. In summer, facing the oil wok, it felt like more than fifty degrees Celsius. They became completely used to it.

The equipment was poor too. Zhang Hongfu remembers a very painful incident. One of the partners, Sister Chen Ping, was making shaved ice — the Chinese-food kitchen, Western-food kitchen, and beverage kitchen were all shared — when her hair accidentally stuck to the lubricating oil on the lifting shaft of the shaved-ice machine. The machine was still running. In an instant, a patch of hair the size of an egg was ripped from her scalp. Sister Chen Ping cried from pain for a while, then tied on her apron and continued working. She refused to go to the hospital. Thinking of this leaves Zhang Hongfu with mixed feelings.

Entrepreneurship is hard. It is only struggle. No fear of hardship, no fear of exhaustion, calculating against oneself. Fortunately, the result of the partners' shared effort was that all the sacrifice won customer support.

This, Zhang Hongfu writes, is the gene of Mixue gradually laid down from that time. He cannot find the right words to describe it; he still has mixed feelings.

Many people also say society is getting richer, consumption is upgrading, and high quality at low price has become invalid.

Whether it is invalid or not, he does not know. But do customers lack money? That question is worth thinking about carefully. Do women still lack clothes in their wardrobes?

Today many people talk endlessly about business models and precise calculations: how to extract more money, from customers, from clients, from employees, from investors. The only thing they do not think about is how to give more themselves, let customers spend less, and give them more in return.

The underlying logic of the business was not wrong. Zhang Hongchao and his partners were full of drive, and Mixue Bingcheng became the brightest star by that little river.

Neighbors beside them said with envy: "Hongchao and the others are practically picking up money from the ground."

2002–2003: Midnight, the Last Darkness Before Dawn

In mid-2002, Zhang Hongchao bought a secondhand apartment and met the woman who is now Zhang Hongfu's sister-in-law. Zhang Hongchao, the sister, and the eldest brother moved into the home they had finally bought. The reason for buying the apartment was that the previous year, their rented room had been burglarized; when their sister came home from work, she found a sharp knife the thief had left on her bed.

They calculated that after Zhang Hongfu took the college entrance exam and left to attend university, their parents would be freed up, and they would soon be able to bring them from the village.

After the Chinese restaurant next door transferred out, Zhang Hongchao took over its three rooms as well. As before, he personally painted and renovated, borrowed some money to buy tables, chairs, and benches, and expanded the business scale.

Only a few days after the three rooms were fixed up, one afternoon several urban-management officers came with a bucket of paint and wrote several "demolish" characters on the walls at his storefront.

The employees panicked. Zhang Hongchao was not especially surprised. He was used to being demolished; it was not the first time. That night, he told the employees: during this period we will operate with everything we've got. Tomorrow we will print more flyers and try to earn back the renovation cost of these three rooms before the demolition.

The next morning, Zhang Hongchao went to Huanghe Food City to purchase supplies. Just as he arrived, an employee sleeping in the store called him: "Brother, hurry back. The demolition crew is here!"

Fortunately, his old suppliers, knowing Hongchao was starting again, each pulled goods over and stocked the back kitchen for free.

By the time Zhang Hongchao returned from Huanghe Food City, the building was about to be pushed down. The professional demolition machinery was all present and had already reached the wall, waiting only for the leader's command. The employees could only temporarily move out some tables, chairs, benches, pots, and bowls. Some larger stoves and equipment had not been brought out in time. Most pitiful of all, the three newly renovated rooms had not yet had any chance to create value before dying young.

There are only two things worth writing about this demolition. First, it came extremely suddenly; they rescued only some tables, chairs, benches, pots, bowls, and utensils. Second, that very afternoon, Zhang Hongchao sat at the entrance of the ruins beside his pile of pots, bowls, tables, chairs, and benches, and called each supplier one by one to tell them to come settle accounts. Not a single cent was owed. At the time he had already bought an analog-signal mobile phone, commonly called an "er ge da."

Because this demolition came with no mental preparation, nothing was ready. Should the next store open or not? Where should it open? Where would the starting capital come from? Even the rescued equipment had no suitable place to go and could only be covered temporarily with a tent somewhere.

At this point, being used to demolition, and having made some money from the demolished store, he did not retreat at all. He was firmly determined to keep opening stores. Damn it, he refused to believe in fate.

So he kept looking for a store. Zhang Hongfu says his brother was rather stubborn: the stores repeatedly demolished were basically all around the northern section of Wenhua Road, within a radius of no more than one kilometer around his alma mater.

That winter holiday, Zhang Hongfu had just arrived in Zhengzhou when his brother excitedly told him he had found a location and wanted him to go see it together.

The demolished store had been by the north wall of the Finance College. This time the store he found was at the college's west gate. The west gate stood on a north-south road called Information College Road. The store was at the intersection of Information College Road and Wenlao Road, while the previously demolished dessert shop had been at Wenlao and Wenhua. On the same Wenlao Road, they were about 400 meters apart east to west.

The storefront was on the west side of Information College Road, with the Finance College west gate across to the east. But that west gate was usually locked and not open. Walking one hundred meters north from the storefront would bring one to the Information College Road and Wenlao Road intersection. Unfortunately, in the past this road did not connect directly with Wenlao Road; it was separated by the foul drainage ditch that ran in the same direction as Wenlao Road — the same ditch behind the previous store. There was no bridge across, and Information College Road was still a dead end.

Zhang Hongfu was then an underage, half-ripe kid who knew nothing. His brother brought him to look at the site, probably because he was lonely inside and needed someone to talk to. Zhang Hongfu's feedback was: this street looks utterly lifeless; how could you possibly do business here?

Zhang Hongchao then fully deployed his usual ability to make himself sound right. He said: first, the last store had been demolished precisely because the ditch was going to be renovated. He had already asked around: the ditch would be buried underground. If it was buried underground, Wenlao Road and Information College Road would certainly be opened through. Once the road opened, the Finance College west gate would certainly open regularly, because it would become extremely convenient for both students and teachers going out to Jiangzhai Market, or to their adult-education college. At that time, the small building he had chosen would become the best gathering place for students. And not only for the Finance College: once the intersection opened, to the west and north was the Public Security College; to the east and north was the Judicial Police School; south along the road to Dongfeng Road was Agricultural University's Taoliyuan student dormitory; west from Dongfeng Road was Henan Light Industry College; and further south was the PLA Information Engineering University. The shop he had chosen was practically a golden site at the crossroads of nine provinces.

He said it did not matter that the place was remote. As long as the food was good and the portions large, customers would come through the winding path once flyers and promotions went out.

In truth, he did not need to consult Zhang Hongfu. Zhang Hongfu knew nothing then and simply liked following the excitement. Nor was Zhang Hongchao really consulting him; he was explaining his ambition and vision. What he needed then was a sense of recognition. So the store was naturally taken. The place was still desolate, so the rent was cheap.

Because the previous store had been demolished without any advance preparation, he had no cash at all. He mortgaged the secondhand apartment he had just bought and borrowed 50,000 yuan. Zhengzhou housing prices were not high then, and the apartment was a small-property-rights unit, so that was all he could borrow. This store was a two-story building, and he took both floors. During that winter holiday, he renovated only the first floor, cutting the coat to fit the cloth. After all, he had only 50,000 yuan.

But as the renovation neared completion and opening approached, they were again at the end of their ammunition and grain. The first floor had eight rooms opened up into one large space — probably about 300 square meters — and the 50,000 yuan had already been split in two to spend. Fortunately, his old suppliers, knowing Hongchao was starting again, each pulled goods over and stocked the back kitchen for free. So without taking on new supplier debt, the store opened smoothly.

He was already somewhat famous in the surrounding student circles. When he opened, a campus magazine even came to interview him and wrote an article. Zhang Hongfu planned to add photos of that article later.

Sure enough, as Zhang Hongchao predicted, after the New Year the dead-end road was opened and the Finance College west gate began to operate. The small building directly became a holy site. Zhang Hongchao already had a customer base from his nearby operations. Before opening, he printed 100,000 flyers and swept through college dormitories to build momentum. As expected, business was once again explosively hot. There was nothing to say: his brother was simply that strong.

But this store operated only about one month before SARS, which shocked the world, arrived. Anyone who lived through SARS knows how serious the epidemic was. In front of food and entertainment, life mattered more. At first, some fearless people still came out wearing masks; later, as the epidemic grew tighter, no one came out.

No one knew how long SARS would last. At the time there were already more than ten employees in the front and back of house. Zhang Hongchao did not dare let them go home, because if they returned to the village they would be stopped directly at the village entrance and sent to an isolation place; then their parents would still have to deliver meals to them there. So they depended on one another in the store every day. Even under those circumstances, he still paid a basic wage. Zhang Hongfu could not come to Zhengzhou then, so he cannot imagine exactly how they passed those months. A dozen people together every day would even grow bored of playing cards — and because everyone was penniless, there was no money to lose anyway.

They endured and endured until early June, when the epidemic was effectively controlled and the public mood began to loosen. Gradually, students who had been confined in school for months began a revenge rebound of eating and drinking. They came alive.

But the good times did not last. They were alive for only about twenty days.

Anyone doing business near a school knows what came next: summer vacation arrived.

That summer Zhang Hongfu came to Zhengzhou relatively early. It was the year of his college entrance exam. A few days after the exam ended and the situation loosened, he bought a ticket and went to Zhengzhou.

When he arrived, he found his brother more full of ambition than ever before. Zhang Hongchao said SARS was finally over. After it ended, business had been unbelievably good. The intersection was now open, the Finance College west gate was open, and this store was more famous in the student circle. He was preparing to open up all eight rooms on the second floor too, and the money had already been borrowed.

Although his continuous entrepreneurship had been full of twists, he had already become a hero in their home village. People said Hongchao had opened a cafeteria in Zhengzhou and was picking up money from the ground. Many relatives whose children reached the third year of junior high and no longer wanted to study sent them to Zhang Hongchao, saying that following Hongchao would teach their children well.

Zhang Hongchao accepted them all. At the time two fourteen-year-old young workers, Xiaokai and Dapeng, came carrying their bedrolls. These two young men would have stories later.

July 2003: The Last Darkness Before Dawn

Zhang Hongchao planned with bright eyes, as though he had forgotten that just days before he had still been struggling in the shadow of demolition.

In July 2003, during summer vacation, SARS had passed, the intersection had opened, the money had been raised, and a group of new employees had been accepted. They were ready to roll up their sleeves and start: renovate the second floor.

Just as Zhang Hongchao was leading the partners and preparing to begin, the owner of the neighboring internet cafe said, "Hongchao, don't rush to renovate. This store may be demolished."

It was like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. Zhang Hongchao quickly asked around from many sides. The answer he got was that after the northern section of Information College Road was opened, it had become an important small road, and the two-story building was a private illegal structure. It was indeed about to be demolished.

After Zhang Hongchao told the family the news, his sister cried. His parents said, Hongchao, stop tossing yourself around like this; come home. At the same time, his father began looking for connections for him back home. After all, several cousins worked in the county education system, so it should have been possible to arrange some kind of position.

His wife said: if you go back home, I will go back with you; if you keep doing this here, we will borrow money together and find another store. The store's partners could not speak in grand principles. They simply said: Brother, if you keep opening stores, we will work for you without wages.

Zhang Hongchao later told Zhang Hongfu that he had thought about it. If he stopped doing business, with his ability he could find a job then that paid several thousand yuan a month. If he stopped here, he would never do business again in this life; he would simply work hard and carefully run a modestly well-off family. But in the end he was still unwilling. After being demolished so many times and persisting so many years, persuading himself to give up was probably harder than continuing. After having galloped across the grassland of entrepreneurship, it was difficult to return to the stable. Besides, a group of loyal partners had not left him. He did not know how to explain himself to them, and felt he had no face to return and meet the elders of his hometown.

According to the original plan, that year, after Zhang Hongfu entered university, Zhang Hongchao should have brought their parents from the village.

After all kinds of inner struggle, Zhang Hongchao still decided: not to go back; keep looking for a store.

Those who work hard are ultimately not too unlucky. Even if luck is bad, there will be a turn from darkness to light, and someone will help. While operating there, he had met a village cadre from Dapu Village. That elder brother had once been director of the Zhengzhou Aluminum Products Factory behind the store. He told Zhang Hongchao that after lying idle for many years, the old factory buildings behind were now going to be rented out, and asked whether he was interested.

In August 2003, mid-summer vacation, Zhang Hongfu and his brother went together to see the aluminum-factory compound. The compound sat right behind the store. During the 1990s wave of state-owned-enterprise restructuring, layoffs, and closures, the factory had stopped operating. Its gate faced the Finance College west gate, so the location was quite good.

Inside were two rows of large factory buildings from the planned-economy era of the 1980s and 1990s. The quality was good, with excellent lighting and high ceilings. Rent was more expensive near the gate and cheaper farther inside. Zhang Hongchao chose the innermost unit on the left. The reasons: first, he had been frightened by demolition, so this time he chose a place farther from the road; second, it was cheap.

Entering the gate, there was a factory road running straight to the end. On both sides, the wintergreen and other landscaping plants planted back then had grown wild. At the end was the factory's public restroom. To the left of the restroom was the factory building. Half the glass windows were already broken; the iron window frames were rusted; the big iron workshop door was half open and rusted so badly it looked as if it might collapse at any time. They did not dare move the door, and squeezed through the gap. When they entered, the scene before them shocked Zhang Hongfu: the floor was covered with old, dried waste, thick in places, with an obvious sense of age, already turned pale. Before they came, it had clearly been an abandoned refuge.

In Zhang Hongfu's eyes, how could that possibly be a place fit for humans to open a store? But on the way back, his brother had already begun planning how to renovate, how to erect the sign at the entrance, how to promote and price despite the poor location. He planned with bright eyes, as though he had forgotten the demolition shadow from just days before.

That large factory building was about 3,000 square meters. Zhang Hongchao chose half of the inside. Once the money was paid and the procedures completed, work began immediately. There was still a month before students returned in September, so the renovation period was relatively generous.

The space was 1,500 square meters, and they planned to first renovate 700. That summer, they mobilized every resource available.

First was the money. The previous store had been demolished, leaving debts everywhere, and there was still remaining rent that had not been recovered. This time they were taking on such a large store, and the store was only an empty shell building with no basic infrastructure. Unlike the previous store, where laying flooring and painting walls had been relatively simple, this budget would be at least more than 100,000 yuan.

So they borrowed. Although Zhang Hongchao had good credit and friends were willing to lend, those friends were also poor friends in the rising stages of their own careers, so it was very difficult.

But they had to do it. In the end, Zhang Hongchao's friends, relatives and friends from the home village, his wife's colleagues and friends, and his sister's colleagues and friends were all asked once. Finally they scraped together the first 100,000 yuan. His wife, who kept the accounts, later said the 100,000 was all gathered in sums of a few thousand at a time; not one lender gave more than 10,000, and there were dozens of creditors.

Second was construction. How could they bear to hire a renovation company? It was all done by their own people. Among relatives called from the home village were welders; all the frames for tables, chairs, and benches were welded by themselves. First, this saved money; second, they were sturdy and durable; third, they could be flexibly customized.

As for floor tiles and other renovation materials, Zhang Hongchao specifically went to building-materials markets to buy other people's backlog inventory. The stock tiles had inconsistent patterns, so they used mixed colors. Zhang Hongfu remembers 30-by-30-centimeter tiles, purchased for one yuan each.

No need to hire masons and laborers from outside. Dapeng, Xiaokai, and the other cooks and servers took turns mixing cement and digging drainage trenches in the back kitchen. In short: girls were used like boys; boys were used like livestock. As for commute hours, none existed, because everyone slept on the floor in the store. In Dapeng's words: open your eyes and work; finish working and close your eyes to sleep; never look at a watch.

Zhang Hongfu was responsible for the ceiling. The factory building was too high; without a suspended ceiling, it would feel empty. But the white gypsum boards they bought did not feel warm enough. Finally they decided to paint them a warm color. He mixed yellow with a little red to make orange latex paint, brushed it onto the boards, and when hung up it looked beautiful — both warm and appetite-stimulating. But brushing one board at a time was slow. Eventually they invented a high-efficiency method: place four stacks of gypsum boards side by side on a long table, use an exterior-wall roller dipped in latex paint, push it from one end of the table to the other, pick up the painted top layer to dry, then continue with the next. Efficiency improved by more than ten times.

—— FoodBud English Translation of the Source · Part 3 Ends ——

3. FoodBud Notes

1. The brand name arrives through iteration, not invention. Mixue Bingcheng appears after product and environment upgrades — from cup shaved ice to plated snowflake ice, from a stall to a place where students sat, stayed, and returned. Even the first sign's typo matters: the name was not born in a brand workshop, but in a low-budget storefront where a 200-yuan discount could outweigh polish.

2. "High quality at low price" becomes operational, not rhetorical. The Wenlao Road restaurant shows the formula before it became corporate language: count every ingredient, accept tiny margins, rely on volume and turnover, and never calculate first against the customer. Later, Mixue's system would industrialize this instinct through procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and franchise density.

3. Demolition trained cash ethics and supplier trust. The most important detail in the 2002 demolition is not only the loss. It is Zhang Hongchao sitting in the ruins, calling suppliers to settle every account. That behavior explains why suppliers later extended credit when he had no cash for the next store.

4. The customer base is already student-led and value-led. Dormitory flyer runs, cheap meals, large portions, popular music, and warm low-cost spaces all point to a specific customer: students with limited budgets but intense social needs. Mixue's later mass-market pricing is visible here in restaurant form.

5. The 2003 aluminum-factory store is the first true operating platform. The compound is not yet the beverage chain, but it is large enough to become a lab: kitchen, dining hall, traffic engine, team dormitory, training ground, and later the place from which the ice-cream and beverage model re-emerges.

4. Timeline (this installment)

• Spring 1998 — Cold-drink operations resume after the orange-selling winter.
• Winter 1998–spring 1999 — Zhang Hongchao goes to Hefei to sell high-end packaged candied hawthorns; the project fails due to damp winter conditions and unfamiliar market context.
• Spring 1999 — Baimiao Farmers' Market is demolished; the business moves near the Coal Hospital.
• 1999 — The name Mixue Bingcheng appears; the first sign mistakenly uses "密" instead of "蜜."
• 1999–2000 — The Broadcasting School-area store grows, adds burgers/fries, gets its first franchise customer in Jiaozuo, and then is hit by the "remove walls and reveal greenery" campaign.
• 2000 onward — Zhang Hongchao rebuilds at Wenlao Road and Wenhua Road, expands into Chinese and Western food, and forms the early high-quality-low-price restaurant model.
• 2002 — He buys a secondhand apartment, expands into the neighboring three rooms, then faces another sudden demolition.
• Early 2003 — A two-story store near the Finance College west gate opens, then SARS shuts down traffic.
• July 2003 — Plans to renovate the second floor collapse after news the building will be demolished.
• August 2003 — Zhang Hongchao finds the abandoned aluminum-factory compound and begins building what becomes the long-running home-style restaurant base.

5. Pull Quotes (web-ready)

1. *"Strictly speaking, the first Mixue Bingcheng store was called 'Mi Xue Bing Cheng' with the wrong 'mi.'"* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 2. *"He never calculated how to take more money from customers' pockets. He calculated against himself: how to make lower prices reach the extreme."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 3. *"To offer high quality at low price, one had to be willing to give up profit and earn only a thin return for hard work."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 4. *"He sat at the entrance of the ruins... and called each supplier one by one to settle accounts. Not a single cent was owed."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text) 5. *"After having galloped across the grassland of entrepreneurship, it was difficult to return to the stable."* — Zhang Hongfu (translated from the source text)

Series navigation

*Before the Castle: How Mixue Was Really Built, 1997-2017 · Part 3 of 12 · FoodBud /insights*

• Previous: Part 2 - Before the Castle, Part 2 — 1997: The Shaved-Ice Winter ("Three Deaths, Three Rebirths")
• Series hub: Before the Castle
• Next: Part 4 - Before the Castle, Part 4 — 2003–2006: The Compound, the Competitors, and the First Cone

*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.*