World Coffee Culture Coffee is the devil's trick?

Europeans first came into contact with coffee around 1515-1519, but were not interested in it for a long time. In 1585, 30 years after the emergence of the cafe in Istanbul, the Vatican envoy Morosini reported: "these people are all humble, tacky and unenterprising, just wasting their time in a daze all day." So, they just sit there all the time, want to have some fun, in public places, in shops, in the streets, drinking a black liquid so hot that they can stand it. It's extracted from a seed they call coffee. " At that time, most Europeans' first impressions of coffee were both disgusted and disdainful. In 1610, the Englishman George Sandys wrote about coffee-drinking Turks in his travels to Turkey: "they sat there chatting and sipping a drink called coffee." It is as hot as it can stand; it is as black as coal ash, it tastes like it, and it tastes like it. "

Yang Xiaokai recalled in the Book of cattle, ghosts and Snakes: the first time he drank coffee during the Cultural Revolution, he found that the taste was not as good as he had imagined. He frowned and said with a smile, it is no wonder that people in capitalist countries live a hard life. I used to drink such bitter things all day. This reaction is only natural, and it was almost a similar feeling when Europeans first came into contact with coffee 400 years ago.

Drinking coffee is a serious crime although drinking coffee is now often regarded as a more "classy" behavior by Chinese people, but the origin of coffee is very humble. One theory is that coffee originated from the ancient kingdom of Kaffa in southern Ethiopia (called by some people as the "hometown of coffee"); another is that in 850 Kaldi, an Arab shepherd in the mountains of Yemen, discovered that sheep were behaving abnormally after nibbling on a kind of dried nuts, and then boiled the nuts to produce a drink called qahwah (which means "wine"), which was the predecessor of coffee.

On the surface, the two statements are different from each other, and there are different explanations for the origin of the word "coffee", but both admit that coffee originated in the Horn of Africa, which is now extremely poor and backward, but there have been closely related ancient civilizations in ancient times, so it is likely that coffee was introduced across the sea from Ethiopia to Yemen. One of the strong reasons is that in the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, coffee is called buno, and the word later evolved into Arabic bunn (meaning "raw coffee"), which shows that its origin should be in Africa.

In any case, it is the Arabs who really spread the drink. There is still a famous coffee called mocha Coffee, which takes its name from Yemen's Red Sea port of Mocha, which was famous for exporting coffee for a long time in the Middle Ages. According to Islam, Muslims are not allowed to drink alcohol, but coffee can be used to refresh themselves in prayer ceremonies. At first it was only drunk in Yemen, but it began to spread in the early 14th century, and coffee began to appear in Cairo, the center of Islamic countries in the Middle East, in 1400, which gradually spread to almost the entire Middle East. But at that time, many people were worried about whether coffee was dogmatic or not. some people thought that it could be regarded as an alcoholic beverage and should be banned and replaced by tea without any alcohol. This idea was gradually accepted, and as a result, people in the Middle East now have a deep-rooted tea-drinking habit (especially as a national drink for low-income groups), and in many cases, coffee can only play a complementary role.

At that time, although the Turks also converted to Islam, they gladly accepted coffee. In 1554, two Arabs from the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo opened their first coffee shop in Istanbul, the capital of the Turkish empire. The Turks called the new drink kahve, and later the word "coffee" in the European language (such as French caf é, Italian caff è, English coffee may have been translated from Italian). At that time, as a refreshing stimulant, coffee was very popular in the mystical Sufi circle and affected the living habits of many Turks.

Even so, the Turkish habit of drinking coffee is under pressure from religious circles. In the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's historical novel "my name is Red", the imam declared that "drinking coffee is a serious crime!" Our glorious prophet doesn't touch a drop of coffee... He knows that coffee is the devil's trick. Although this is only a fiction, it does partly reflect the reality of that era; by the 1630s, the Imperial Sultan banned the use of coffee and tobacco-two narcotics that were also taboo in the West before the Industrial Revolution. it was later accepted by society because its pick-me-up role supported "the reorientation of mental work by human organisms" in the process of industrialization.

In this way, when coffee gradually became a worldwide drink, the Arabs and Turks who first discovered and promoted the drink almost stopped drinking coffee.

Wasting time: drinking a black liquid

Europeans first came into contact with coffee around 1515-1519, but were not interested in it for a long time. So, they just sit there all the time, want to have some fun, in public places, in shops, in the streets, drinking a black liquid so hot that they can stand it. It's extracted from a seed they call coffee. " At that time, most Europeans' first impressions of coffee were both disgusted and disdainful. In 1610, the Englishman George Sandys wrote about coffee-drinking Turks in his travels to Turkey: "they sat there chatting and sipping a drink called coffee." It is as hot as it can stand; it is as black as coal ash, it tastes like it, and it tastes like it. "

The first cafe in Paris opened about 100 years later than Istanbul, as did London. When London's first coffee shop opened in 1652, it was met with a storm of protest from supporters of the British beer industry. they declared the "pagan drink" as "shoddy, dark, thick, dirty, bitter and disgusting mud water". Even in 1925, someone invented the word "mud" as a slang term for coffee. In spite of this, cafes soon sprang up everywhere: by 1675, Britain had more than 3000 cafes, opening an average of 130 a year; France was slightly slower, with only about 2800 by the 1780s, but the impact was just as far-reaching, because France was a bellwether of European fashion at that time.

Just as today's Chinese cafes are often designed in European style, at that time, until the end of the 17th century, the interior and overall atmosphere of London cafes were designed and built in the style of traditional Arab cafes. At first, the price of coffee was "horribly expensive" (but not because of precious or inconvenient transportation, but because of sky-high tariffs), but it was still cheaper than tea and declined rapidly; although tea was introduced to Europe a few years earlier than coffee, throughout the 17th century, tea had a far less profound impact on European lives than coffee, one of the reasons was that tea drinks were too expensive. It was not until the end of the 17th century that the price of tea fell under the impact of cheap coffee, but the price of a cup of tea was still five times that of a cup of coffee.

The emergence of cafes has brought about profound changes in the living space of Western Europeans. In countries such as Britain and France in the 18th century, coffee houses were respectable places with a significantly higher social status than those mini-bars. And like tradition in places such as the Middle East, cafes are reserved for male clients, who come here for business or rest, so that these places naturally show some kind of club character.

In terms of social function, the cafe is somewhat similar to the Chinese teahouse: its emergence has created a public space and flattened the class distinction, and as prices fall, people from all walks of life can go for a drink and participate in gossip. Sociologist Lewis Coser believes that this "fosters a new kind of respect and tolerance for the ideas of others", promotes the social atmosphere and conversational communication, and actually becomes a club. However, cafes have different styles in different countries. In the eyes of some Britons, in France, "cafes are crowded with intellectuals, smoking, drinking coffee and coming up with impractical ways to transform the universe"; by contrast, the British are much more pragmatic: the famous Lloyd's Classification Society, originally the ship insurance agency of a London cafe, was named after Edward Lloyd (1648-1713), the founder of the cafe.

After two hundred years of development, by the end of the 18th century, coffee was no longer generally regarded as a Muslim drink or "muddy water". It has become one of the symbols of social identity. a necessity in Western European life-it has become a drink symbolizing "civilization".

Brothels are often disguised as cafes

By the late 19th century, coffee, once regarded as an imported luxury, had become very common in many parts of Western Europe. Behind this, of course, is the great development of related industries (for which large-scale coffee plantations and trading systems need to be maintained), and secondly, it has been widely recognized as part of social etiquette. It actually became an integral part of Western life (so during the Napoleonic Wars, the French middle class longed for peace at sea in the hope that the price of coffee would be lower) and became a symbol of the Western way of life.

After coffee was introduced into Europe, it itself has changed a lot, adding a lot of new elements: for example, Europeans like to add sugar to coffee (Arabs have never been like this) The Italians invented cappuccino by mixing milk and cream with espresso-the original etymological meaning of cappuccino refers to a long, pointed cloak worn by the Capuchan monks, a branch of the Franciscans, whose color is similar to this coffee; French Parisians mix coffee, milk and sugar. Although by the end of the 19th century, everyone in Britain consumed ten times more tea than coffee, mainly driven by the French, coffee is still increasingly regarded as a Western fashion.

Ironically, it is the popularity of this drink that has changed the lives of many people in other parts of the world. In Africa, Latin America and tropical Asia, large tracts of land were forcibly converted into coffee plantations, and the economies of many colonies depended mainly on coffee exports. In Indonesia, coffee was the main local export for most of the 19th century; in Brazil, coffee exports accounted for 61% of the total value of exports in the 1880s. This huge coffee production system completely shifted the active center of the country to the south-central part, eventually making the decline of northeastern Brazil inevitable.

In other areas, with the infiltration of Western culture, the scene of upper-class people resting, discussing and reading in cafes has gradually become a symbol of a desirable way of life. No one outside Western Europe was first affected than the Germans in central Europe, who hated the French but accepted their cafe culture. Coffee was a luxury for Germans at first, but soon the handicraftsmen in W ü rttemberg could not afford anything but potatoes. "but if they were forced to give up morning coffee, they would think they were living an inhuman life." This even formed a kind of unrequited love for French culture, so much so that after the beginning of World War I, Wyndham Lewis ridiculed the war as a "strange courtship": "authentic Germans must go to Paris, to the cafes in Paris, at all costs, even if they lead thousands of troops and slaughter millions of people."

In Russia and Japan, cafes continue to appear in cities with the wave of westernization, and they become new places of public entertainment, opening up a space for people to accept new values. They are not necessarily "civilized", and sometimes even seem to be criticized. For example, before 1937, brothels in the Shanghai concession were often disguised as cafes, bars, song and dance restaurants, photo studios, dance schools and other different places, which are regarded by some conservatives as indecent places. But even so, it is certain that they represent a new way of life, a "modern" thing that may be different from the local conservative cultural tradition. Therefore, for a long time, cafes have been regarded as places for fashionable young people in China-the plot of Qiong Yao's later novels often takes place in three fairly fixed places, namely, the living room, the dance hall and the coffee shop. so it was ridiculed as a "three-hall movie".

There is no doubt that for many people, drinking coffee is not only drinking coffee as a drink itself, but also consuming all the cultural symbols associated with the drink. If coffee has always been a kind of "mud water" drunk by Arabs and Turks, even if it still tastes the same, many Chinese will probably not choose it. This is the great power of cultural construction-it can make what is consumed seem completely unimportant, what matters is the symbol itself: does drinking coffee seem like a symbol of social taste? Although if we lift the veil, we sometimes seem to be not much different from the Turks who were "tacky and unenterprising" 400 years ago.