Hello, thanks for listening to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with

me, Jill Curzley.

I'm taking you back to Taiwan in 1998. I'm going to tell you the tale of the first cat

cafe in the world.

So in the first three months of the business running, we didn't have so many guests at

the moment. Probably just one or two guests every day. Both things really changed after

three months because there was a local TV station came over and then we started to receive

a lot of popularity around the local residents.

Gracie Chang is the founder and owner of Cafe Cats and Dogs, which is also known as

Kitten Coffee Garden or Cat Flower Garden. The Cat Cafe concept became a worldwide phenomenon.

Cat Cafes have been springing up around the world. The first one was in Taiwan and East

Asia and opened back in 1998 since then it estimated hundreds of opened, including

in Thailand, France, Germany, Canada, New Zealand. Oh, believe me, this goes on.

That's BBC News Round in 2019.

Tracy always wanted a coffee shop of her own and when she first met her husband, they had

some street cats. So she had the perfect idea for a business.

So right before I started in my own coffee shop, I had been raising

five cats and I was thinking that maybe I should make this coffee shop very special

and I really want to make one of this kind very different from other coffee shops on

the street. So that's why I started thinking that maybe I can bring my cat into the coffee

shop. The very first cat that I raised was a black cat but that was right before I bought

it into my coffee shop. Those first five cats became known as the elders and there was

...