A few years ago, there was a sudden craze for coffee drinking in China. Coffee bars opened left, right and centre; shops appeared selling more and more esoteric equipment for getting the perfect beverage; coffee bean shops appeared, also selling the relevant equipment.
The only problem was that no one knew what good coffee should taste like. Most of the coffee bars were awful, although you did get the entertainment of watching the staff taking about 45 minutes to produce each cup of mud. I'm sure all those coffee makers have been deposited at the back of cupboards never to be troubled again. There are only a few coffee bars remaining and few places selling beans - roasted or un-roasted.
Of course the coffee needed sugar - usually a lot to take away the taste of bitter maltreated beans. At first, the height of elegance was to use cube sugar （方糖 fāng táng)) and that is still available.
The equivalent of around ¥12/500g
Of course, that wasn't good enough for some people. The brain dead decided in their wisdom that they really needed special "coffee sugar" and so it was supplied. One local department store, notorious for its insanely high prices for stuff you can buy elsewhere at a fraction of the price, still carries stuff like this.
The white boxes on the left cost ¥170 for 900g (¥94/500g). It's the same old sugar you can buy for 1/10th of the price in any supermarket. No shortage of fools with too much money in the world.
