The Historical and Cultural significance of Fine Coffee

This is the earliest known painting of an English cafe. This woodcut from 1674 is from a single page advertising Paul Greenwood's "Advantages of a Sobering and Healthy Coffee Drink."

Coffee, a familiar but mysterious drink, blows into our world like a strong wind from the west and gradually changes our lives and dispositions. You may be obsessed with its bitter and mellow smell, perhaps intoxicated with its romantic and slightly melancholy meaning, perhaps immersed in its European bourgeois infinite style. But have you ever tried to appreciate and fathom the western culture contained in it from its history, from its popularity and evolution?

Coffee's hometown is in the southern part of the Ethiopian plateau in Africa. It was discovered around the 6th century AD. Because of its refreshing effect, the locals began to chew coffee beans and boil coffee with water. This atmosphere was blown up by Ethiopia and spread to Arab countries, and soon became the representative drink of Islamic countries. At the beginning of the 17th century, the British Sandis first met coffee in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey). After that, coffee as a medicine and "Oriental drink" was familiar with and obsessed by more and more Europeans.

In 1652, the first coffee shop appeared in London, England, and it was also the first coffee shop in the Christian world (Cultural History of Coffee House, written by Markman Ellis, translated by Meng Li and Chen Guangxing, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007 edition, p.34). By the end of the 1660s, coffee houses had appeared in many British cities. In 1670, Boston, a Massachusetts Bay colony in North America, saw the first coffee shop outside England, in Paris in 1671, Vienna in 1685, New York in 1696, Venice in 1720, Rome in 1750... countless "first houses" followed. Since then, the drink has conquered the western world with a mild but strong momentum. It was in the cafes on street corners and on the roadside, in the bitter liquid with fragrance, in the noisy noise one after another, that great political thoughts were born, the modern political revolution was born, the industrial revolution sweeping the world was promoted, the literary and artistic works shaking ancient and modern times were born, and the western social culture was formed.

Coffee houses contain a social interaction paradigm from the very beginning. It reflects people's willingness to stay together and communicate. In the cafe, everyone is equal, regardless of status and origin, the specific performance is the cafe "egalitarianism on the seat". Anyone who buys a cup of coffee can get a chair in a cafe for as long as they want. People have equal rights to speak when drinking coffee, express their opinions and sometimes even quarrel. People use coffee shops as places to express opinions, exchange opinions and obtain news. Coffee shops seem to play a role like today's social information network system. Under the influence of coffee, people's minds are clear and excited. They try their best to express their dissatisfaction with the current system and the design of the ideal system; they try their best to gain knowledge and increase knowledge from the communication with others; they try their best to search for creative inspiration and practical materials in their own brains... Thus, in the seemingly chaotic coffee house, the Republicans and conservatives in the English Civil War broke out about the Republican debate and promoted the English Revolution process. French Enlightenment thinkers exchanged arguments and formed their own modern social and political theories, which gave birth to the French Revolution. Thus, the cafe is clearly regarded as a signpost of modern revolution, silently and indispensably existing in history.

After the 18th century, with the development of industrial society, the intensification of social differentiation and the refinement of social division of labor, cafes declined to varying degrees, and "egalitarianism on the seat" was gradually broken. Cafeterias also became stratified, with aristocrats and upper classes gathering in high-end cafes for entertainment. Simple and inexpensive forms of making and selling coffee also developed, most notably coffee bars and coffee stands. However, coffee as an important part of the daily diet, its historical and cultural effects have not weakened. The most typical example is coffee's role in driving the Industrial Revolution. Warm and refreshing coffee was an important soothing and supportive product for workers during the Industrial Revolution. They live in harsh conditions, work extremely long hours, have no time to prepare three meals, coffee and bread become the sacred food. Coffee also changed from a drink for the aristocracy to a necessary refreshing agent for the working class, cultivating a common understanding among the workers.

Coffee also has a group of great believers in history that cannot be ignored. They made great contributions to western culture, and their works handed down can be called treasures in the history of human civilization. These works can not be produced without a cup of strong coffee company: Balzac wrote "human comedy" at the same time, drinking 50,000 cups of coffee all his life; Dutch post-impressionist painter Van Gogh obsessed with the world staged in the cafe, repeatedly opened the Algarza cafe still open at night door, with a brush to record the scene in the cafe; German musician Bach's coffee-themed cantata No. 211, also known as Coffee Cantata (a large vocal genre), achieved the perfect combination of coffee and music; the famous philosopher Sartre continued to write every day in Paris's Double Couple Cafe even when the air raid sirens sounded during World War II and the city was in chaos. There are many other examples. This group of people have a devotion to truth, a yearning for art, and a pursuit of beauty. Coffee is not the reason for their works, but how important it is to them!

As an "Eastern drink", coffee has been given a great Western significance. For centuries, this mellow bitterness attracted all kinds of people, and thus permeated all fields of modern Western society, flowing like blood in Europe for centuries. Today, it has become a typical representative of Western culture, and once again returned to the Eastern world. This is the beauty of coffee history and the attraction of coffee culture.