Martin Dabilly at his Meiming farm in Yunnan province. [Photos By Chen Liang/China Daily]

Seven years ago, Martin Dabilly saw an opportunity and took it, growing raspberries in Kunming with the help and expertise of his family, Chen Liang and Li Yingqing report

The French have a long and varied association with agriculture in Yunnan province.

In 1860, a French missionary built a church in Deqin county and planted grape seeds brought from France. Today, the province is considered the sole repository for the rare rose honey grape, extinct in France for more than 100 years.

Another French missionary, who left Vietnam to settle in Bingchuan county in 1892, planted coffee seeds near his church, and now the province is China's largest coffee-growing region.

More recently, Martin Dabilly has been making Yunnan famous for its raspberries.

In November 2008, he planted seedlings of a French variety of the fruit on 4 hectares of land in Longyuan village, about 50 kilometers northeast of the provincial capital, Kunming. Today, raspberries grown on his farm, which has been expanded to 15 hectares, are sold in many major Chinese cities.

Dabilly, who is from a winemaking family and studied agriculture at a university in Toulouse, came to China in 2005 to work on a French-run kiwi farm in Dujiangyan, Sichuan province.

During his first two years, he says he discovered that fruit grown in China had high yields, but were of poor quality.

"I wondered why China had to import expensive foreign fruit, and why I couldn't find raspberries on the market," he says in his office at Meiming Raspberry Farm.

He says Russians introduced raspberries to Northeast China in the 1930s, and the region now cultivates the fruit on a large scale, especially in Heilongjiang province. Yet most are frozen and exported to the United States.

"There were no raspberries on the Chinese market, but I knew I could grow high quality raspberries. I saw an opportunity," the 38-year-old says.