Black Gold. Antony Wild

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СКАЧАТЬ sent the fleet of more than 100 ships and 27,000 men to Hormuz and beyond with his deputy, the eunuch Hong Bao. Unable to land at Aden as a result of local fighting, he secured the permission of the Emir of Mecca to sail up the Red Sea to the port of Jiddah, where the Chinese were received with due honour. As well as their usual interest in trading, a translation of an Arab text Hut yaw fang (‘The pharmaceutical prescriptions of the Muslims’) had appeared in China to intense interest there, and particular attention was paid to the acquisition of Arab drugs and medicines. The use of aloes (a purgative and tonic), myrrh (for the circulation), benzoin (a gum that aids respiration), storax (an anti-inflammatory), and momocordia seeds (for ulcers and wounds) was recorded. It is significant that at this stage there is no mention of coffee: both the Chinese and Arabs would have had good cause to have analysed its properties if it had been a known substance at the time. It seems that knowledge of coffee was still confined to the Ethiopian Highlands. Qat is likewise absent from the pharmacopoeia.

      Although there are Chinese reports of Mecca and Medina, they are surprisingly cursory: with Zheng He at Calicut and in failing health, the precision of purpose seems to have left the voyage. He died on the way back to China in 1433 at the age of 63, and was buried at sea. The returning fleet carried an ambassador from Aden, and yet another giraffe, and although pleased with the outcome, Zhu Zhanj, the Emperor since 1426, who was of a more introspective Confucian turn of mind than his grandfather, never subsequently authorized another voyage. Confucius believed that a healthy Chinese state should be able to provide for all its own needs, and that active involvement in foreign trade was beneath the divinely ordained dignity of the Middle Kingdom. It was for this reason that China had remained a relatively closed nation throughout its history, and why the Treasure Fleets were such a dramatic aberration. Once Confucianism regained the high-ground, the shipyards closed down, and the country turned in on itself again.

      A Sufi missionary, Shahkh Shadomer Shadhili, is reported to have introduced qat to Ta’izz in 1429, and, whether or not it is true, the date is significant, as it is at around that time that the Chinese were present in the Arabian and Red Seas – the fifth and seventh Treasure Fleets of Zheng He. If the Yemenis had been introduced to tea as a result of these visits, either by experience, by report, or possibly by purchase, and if the emerging Sufi community was already familiar with its stimulating properties by repute, then the scene is set for the necessary discovery of infusions based on dried leaf material with similar properties to tea. The Sufis were eager to embrace chemical assistance in order to get closer to God, and help was at hand.

      Tea leaves in China were made in a number of ways: the three most common, green, oolong, and black teas, were produced by differing combinations of sun-drying, pan firing, rolling, fermenting, and final firing. The coffee industry today is curiously coy about the fact that the current way of preparation is one of only many ways, and that coffee can also be a tisane or tea: an infusion of dried vegetable matter in hot water. Ethiopians, as we have seen, still sometimes drink a coffee made from the leaves (as opposed to cherry or bean) of the coffee plant. For one, amertassa, green coffee leaves are allowed to dry naturally in the shade, then infused. The other, kati, is made from leaves that have been pan fired. The use of dried leaf material in this way is very similar to tea, and kafta, a drink made from the dried leaves of the qat plant, is likewise related. Furthermore, in Yemen and other parts of Arabia today it is common to find kish’r, which is an infusion of the dried coffee cherry from which the beans have been removed. These cherries are sold in the markets in open sacks alongside green coffee beans, and are as much in demand. Kish’r has a pleasant, light fruity flavour with hints of its smoky coffee origins, but has more in common with a herbal infusion such as verbena or melise. Coffee cherry has also been detected in the manufacture of a cheap instant coffee. The evolution of these coffee teas through the use of the roasted bean into the beverage we now know as coffee was slow, and these varieties continued in parallel, as indeed they still do. Coffee did not spring into the world as a fully-fledged double espresso to go.

      At the time of the visits of the Treasure Fleets, the Ethiopian Highlands were within the trading range of the merchants of Aden and Mocha, and Sufi missionaries also ventured across the Red Sea. It would seem perfectly plausible for a Sufi, inspired by what he had seen of tea drinking amongst the Chinese visitors, to learn what he could of the manufacturing process from them. Aware from his own learning that none of the plants in the conventional Arab pharmacopoeia had the characteristics he sought, he may have taken the opportunity of a missionary trip to Ethiopia to experiment with various endemic plant types there, and settled on coffee and qat as the most interesting. At this stage, in imitation of the Chinese, only the leaves of the coffee plant were used for the infusion, but as they contain less than 1 per cent caffeine, they might not have been sufficient for his ecstatic purpose. However, these things vary considerably according to brewing method and quantities used. Weight for weight, tea contains twice the quantity of caffeine as Arabica coffee, but as the volume of vegetable matter used is much less than half, the net effect is less caffeine in the final beverage. Coffee leaves could thus have been brewed ‘strong’ to provide a high caffeine yield, but this would have made the drink itself unpalatable. It is significant that qat loses much of its potency when its leaves are dried; thus as a tea it does not have a particularly interesting effect. This is why Yemenis today favour the chewing of the fresh green leaves, and perhaps also explains why qat has only recently started to find a wider public with the invention of airfreight.

      It is at this point in coffee’s history that a number of real people finally begin to peer from behind the purdah screen. When the first European merchants came to Yemen in the early seventeenth century, they were naturally very curious about the origins of the coffee that they had come so far to buy. Amongst the stories they were told by the local traders were many that were obviously fantastic, including those of fabulous multi-coloured coffee birds and plague-ravaged princesses. Interestingly, the story of Kaldi and his dancing goats was not amongst the stories recorded by the Europeans. This tale of the discovery of coffee is so favoured in our times that it has assumed the status of established fact. It involves a goatherd, Kaldi, who sees his flock eating coffee cherries and then dancing. Kaldi likewise eats and dances, and then tells the abbot of a nearby monastery of his discovery. Angered by what he regards as a diabolical substance, the abbot throws some cherries on a fire; the resulting aroma, however, convinces him that they must be of divine origin, and he makes an infusion of the beans which he gives to his monks to help to keep them awake during night prayers. The omission of the Kaldi story from those told to the earliest Europeans is a clear indication that it was probably the later invention of a coffee house storyteller. Some of the stories, however, concerned genuine historical Sufi leaders, of whom sufficient is known to be able to evaluate whether they could have instigated the hypothetical scenario of the Sufi missionary in Ethiopia outlined above.

      The first candidate is one dear to the heart of the coffee trade, ‘Ali Ibn ‘Umar al-Shadhili, patron saint of the coffee port of Mocha. As an English sailor named William Revett reported in 1609: ‘Shaomer Shadli was the fyrst inventour for drynking of coffe, and therefore had in esteemation’. It is understandable that the town which owed much of its wealth in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to coffee should seek to associate its prosperity with its pet saint, whose tomb is one of the few fine buildings that remains there. However, he died in 1418, and while it is conceivable that he may have been in Aden when Zheng He visited the year before, it is unlikely that he would have been able to make a trip to Ethiopia, returning with the newly invented tea substitute, before he died. In addition, the earliest descriptions by the historians Abu al-’Abbas Ahmad al-Shardji and Mohammed al-Sakhawi of the life of Shaykh ‘Umar fail to mention his discovery of coffee, which after all would have been a very distinguished addition to his curriculum vitae. Finally the Shadhilaya Sufi order from which he derived his name was founded in the thirteenth century and was known for its orthodoxy and sobriety, and the writings of the order make no mention of coffee.

      The second contestant is Mohammed bin Sa’id al-Dhabhani, also known as Gemaleddin, who was both a Sufi and a mufti (religious leader) in Aden. Although he died in 1470, somewhat late to have met Zheng He in 1417, he would have been alive in 1433 when the seventh СКАЧАТЬ