The Cultural Significance of Coffee

Coffee, a familiar but mysterious drink, like a strong wind blowing into our world from the west, is gradually changing our life and temperament. You may be infatuated with its bitter and mellow taste, perhaps intoxicated with its romantic and slightly melancholy implication, or perhaps infatuated with its infinite European bourgeois style. But have you ever tried to appreciate and grasp the western culture it contains from its history, popularity and evolution?

The hometown of coffee is in the south of Ethiopia Plateau in Africa. It was discovered around the 6th century AD. Because of its refreshing effect, local people began to chew coffee beans and drink them with brewed coffee. This ethos was blown to Arab countries by Ethiopia and soon became the representative drink of Islamic countries. /kloc-At the beginning of the 7th century, santis, an Englishman, met coffee for the first time in Constantinople (now Turkey), the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Since then, coffee, as a medicine and "oriental drink", has been familiar and obsessed by more and more Europeans. 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 Shop by Marchman Ellis, translated by Li Meng and Chen Guangxing, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007, p. 34). In the late 1960s, cafes appeared in many British cities. 1670, the first coffee shop outside Britain appeared in Boston, the colonial city of Massachusetts Bay in North America. That's in Paris 167 1, Vienna 1685, new york 1696, Venice 1720, and 65438. Since then, this drink has conquered the western world with a moderate but strong momentum. It is in cafes on street corners and roadsides, in cups of bitter liquid with fragrance, in the noise of one song after another, that great political thoughts are produced, which breeds modern political changes that destroy the world, promotes the industrial revolution that swept the world, gives birth to literary works that shocked ancient and modern times, and forms western social culture.

Cafe has included a social communication paradigm from the beginning. It reflects people's willingness to stay together and communicate. In the cafe, everyone is equal, regardless of status and origin, which is reflected in the "egalitarianism in the seat" of the cafe. Whoever buys a cup of coffee can get a chair in the cafe and sit for as long as he wants. When drinking coffee, people have an equal say, express their views, and sometimes even quarrel. People regard cafes as places to express opinions, exchange ideas and get news. Cafe seems to play the role of information network system in today's society. Under the effect of coffee, people are sober-minded and emotional, and try their best to express their dissatisfaction with the design of the existing system and ideal system; They desperately acquire knowledge and increase their knowledge from communication with others; They try their best to find creative inspiration and realistic materials in their own brains ... In this way, in a seemingly chaotic cafe, a debate about * * * and socialism broke out between the conservatives in the British Civil War, which promoted the process of the British revolution; French enlightenment thinkers exchanged disputes and formed their own modern social and political theories, which gave birth to the French Revolution. As a result, cafes are clearly regarded as signposts of modern revolution, which exist silently in history and are indispensable.

/kloc-After the 8th 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 the "seat equalitarianism" was gradually broken. There has also been a hierarchical differentiation in cafes, where aristocrats and upper-class people gather in high-end cafes for entertainment. Simple and cheap forms of making and selling coffee have also been developed, the most typical of which are coffee bars and coffee stalls. However, as an important part of daily diet, the historical and cultural influence of coffee has not diminished. The most typical example is the promotion of coffee to the industrial revolution. Warm and refreshing coffee is an important comfort and support for workers during the industrial revolution. Their living environment is harsh, their working hours are extremely long, and they don't even have time to cook three meals. Coffee and bread have become sacred products. Coffee has also changed from an aristocratic drink to an essential refreshing agent for the working class, which has cultivated an understanding among the workers.

In addition, coffee has a group of great believers who can not be ignored in history. They have made great contributions to western culture, and their works handed down from generation to generation can be called treasures in the history of human civilization. The publication of these works is inseparable from the company of cups of fragrant coffee: Balzac drank 50 thousand cups of coffee while writing "Human Comedy" in his life; Van Gogh, a Dutch post-impressionist painter, was obsessed with the world in cafes. He pushed open the door of Algasa cafe again and again at night and recorded the scene in the cafe with a brush. German musician Bach's coffee theme work "Cantata No.2 1 1", also known as "Coffee Cantata" (Cantata: the genre of large vocal divertimento), realizes the perfect combination of coffee and music; The famous philosopher Sartre insisted on writing in the duet cafe in Paris every day even when the air raid alarm sounded and the whole city was in chaos during World War II. There are many such examples. This group of people have a devotion to truth, a yearning for art and a pursuit of beauty. Coffee is not the reason why their works came out, but how important it is to them!

As an "oriental drink", coffee has been endowed with great western significance. For hundreds of years, this mellow bitterness has attracted all kinds of people, so it has penetrated into all fields of modern western society and flowed in Europe for centuries like blood. Today, it has become a typical representative of western culture and returned to the eastern world again. This is the beauty of the history of coffee development and the attraction of coffee culture.