I made this demo using Highcharts Maps, and data from different Wikipedia pages to track the coffee bean journey. I even wrote a whole article about how I made it technically https://www.highcharts.com/blog/tutorials/animated-map-chart/

Never knew coffee originated in Yemen. I would have thought coffee plants need tropical climate and not semi arid climate in Yemen. Is Yemen tropical too ?

If this map shows where coffee beans were planted, then I doubt Amsterdam. Dutch tried a lot of places in their colonies to plant them but only succeeded in Java, definitely not Amsterdam. Also where is Ethiopia?

If it is the distribution map, where is Ottoman Empire, where is Italy?

Visualisation is nice, but the data is bad.

Could you please also post the Wikipedia articles that you used? This article tells quite the different story of how coffee spread through the world.

if i’m not mistaken coffee arrived in brazil via guyane. actually someone went kinda undercover and smuggled some seeds from there. at least this is what i remember from elementary school classes. coffee was an important part of the history of the city/region where i was back then (paraíba valley).

I thought it was from Ethiopia for some reason. Ah, the plant is from Ethiopia. The Yemenis cultivated it.

"The Yemenis procured the coffee beans from the Ethiopian Highlands via coastal Somali intermediaries and began cultivation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

So they missed part of the journey. :)

Who cares about the actual data? Read my blog. (and buy my product.)

That is just a very late history of coffee trade.

Why leave out the fact they came from Ethiopia? Yemen was just the first to trade it internationally (although even here, was it Yemeni traders or traders in Yemen?), but they got the coffee from Ethiopia...

This isn't even a case of the data being terrible, it's just misleading and not representative of what the source outlined. You should also include years. Visualization itself is nice though.

It didn't...even the Wikipedia page linked describes the fact that local ethnic groups in Ethiopia knew it was stimulant and how Somali traders brought it to Yemen...you have to have a plant (&know it's value and use) to bring it elsewhere & trade.

How is it missing part of the journey if they literally are the beginning of the journey?? 😭😭 Ay. I'm going to bed. This is too much.

When you look at the importance of coffee in Yemeni vs Ethiopian culture, it's also just anecdotally obvious where it originated & has been drunken long before the Wikipedia article can document vs who received it and traded it. Go to an Ethiopian person's house and you'll be there for two hours whole someone brews you coffee from the green bean in a traditional clay pot. It's a whole thing.

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My mind is absolutely blown that coffee didn't leave Ethiopia until 1414. Imagine the change in history if Rome knew about coffee [earlier].

(I guess technically the Roman Empire lasted about 40 years after 1414).

Pretty sure it's native to Ethiopia.

I think you missed my point. We're discussing OP's graphic in this thread, not the wikipedia article. :) I meant that OP's graphic was missing the part of the journey beginning in Ethiopia.