A cafe opened inside an abandoned Chinese mine pit and took 800,000 yuan (about $120,000) its opening month. The following month it took 20,000 yuan ($3,000). The pit is a dead limestone quarry in Anji County, Zhejiang, abandoned for over 10 years and used as an illegal construction-waste dump. Once the digging stopped, rain flooded it naturally, and rainwater sitting 108 meters deep between sheer rock walls comes out a deep, cold blue. Cheng Shuoqin, a primary school teacher who quit in 2021, saw that water and thought of Iceland. It opened into the first Labour Day holiday of 2022, and the crowds came. By the second month they were gone, and the quarry went quiet again. Cheng doesn't dress up what happened: "we did genuinely find the value of the pit," he said, "and then we didn't do a single further thing right." So he rebuilt the place around the one thing people actually wanted: the photograph. The team built more than 50 designed shot positions across the site and adjusted the angle of every one. For a patch of wild roses growing inside a ruin, the designer compared more than 80 varieties of artificial flower online before choosing one. On 5 April 2024 the rebuilt site sold 8,818 cups in a single day, running 8 windows and 37 espresso machines with more than 50 baristas at close to 14 cups a minute. That broke the national record the same shop had set 6 months earlier. It now generates over 20 million yuan (over $3 million) a year off 600,000 visitors. Over 80% of customers drink half their cup and abandon it. 70% of visitors come because they saw the place on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social app, and most stay less than 3 hours: drive in, get the photo, drive home. Copycats have since opened more than 300 cafes across Anji County running the same trick, in a population under 600,000, at a higher density than Shanghai's. He stopped selling a place people wanted to visit and started selling a photo people wanted to be in. Entry costs 68 yuan (about $10), and that fee is really a ticket to the photo spots. The coffee just comes with the ticket, which is why most of it never gets finished. - @samuelszuchan