The Cultural Enlightenment of Coffee

The 16th century Turkish law stipulated that if the husband could not meet his wife's need for coffee, the woman could use it as an excuse for divorce. The cafe culture merges with enlightenment and rationalism, which gives the cafe the reputation of "penny university" and "democracy club". When drinking coffee has become a common hobby of civilians and aristocrats, the concept of hierarchy in their minds has really entered the time of disintegration. As power spread coffee around the world, the spirit of freedom that spread from cafes sprouted and grew, disintegrating the tyranny and power of the rulers little by little.

Coffee is something that permeates the body, mind and culture bit by bit. Elegant people, intelligent people, beautiful women, talkers, idlers, rappers, when everyone starts drinking coffee and enters the cafe, coffee is gradually "embedded" in all aspects of business, literature, art, social life, and so on. It has a continuous impact on people's physical, psychological and spiritual. Coffee in the process of spreading, step by step to remove the gods, from "the masterpiece of the devil Satan" to "Constantinople's charming golden coffee", a collection of demons and angels in one, hell and love in one, black blood emits fragrance to nourish modern civilization, promoting cultural exchanges and even integration.

In 1414, when Zheng he's fleet of tea arrived in the port of Aden, the young Sufi religious leader Guemal Ledin decided to drink coffee in the Chinese way of drinking tea, so he began the process of secularization of coffee. Coffee was first planted in Taiwan in 1884, which opened the prelude to the development of coffee in China. In 1902, a French missionary brought the first coffee sapling to a Yi mountain village called Zhu Kula in Dali. In 1905, the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway Bar became the first cafe of Chinese mainland. Of course, the coffee culture was still formed in Shanghai in the 1820s. Outside the cafe was "the sound of sirens on the Huangpu River, neon lights flashing every night", while in the cafe, "suits and gowns and mandarin coats are shoulder to shoulder. The four vernacular languages are mottled with European and American languages."

As for the relationship between coffee and the Chinese revolution, what we remember most is "that large cup of steaming proletarian coffee" described by Lu Xun in the Revolutionary Coffee Shop. Although coffee is only a small episode of the Chinese revolution, it is the breeding ground of left-wing culture, and even Lu Xun admitted that "I learned a lot there." At that time, Chinese people generally did not go to cafes, and foreigners did not pay much attention to coffee drinkers, so many revolutionary meetings were prepared and held in cafes.