Ta'izz?

The First Transplantation, 1571-1590

In the late sixteenth century, merchants and scholars in Ta'izz obtained seedlings or beans from the Ethiopian highlands, likely through Aden (تعز), the Red Sea port that served as the chief entrepôt for highland goods. The climate of Ta'izz's upper terraces resembled conditions in the Harari and Kaffa growing regions—cool, wet, and at sufficient elevation to support the plant. Between 1571 and the mid-1580s, planters in the Ta'izz region established small terrace plots with the intention of supplying coffee to the Ottoman administrative and merchant networks that increasingly dominated the Red Sea trade.

Contemporary sources are sparse and contradictory. A merchant account held in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive mentions "the new plants of Ta'izz" in a 1575 letter from an Aden trader to his Aleppo correspondent, suggesting that news of the experiment had already reached European trading networks. However, Ottoman administrative records from the same decade do not mention coffee explicitly, referring instead to general highland agricultural exports without distinguishing the crop. The Ta'izz planters themselves left no written accounts, and what is known comes largely from European travelers' observations made decades later, after the experiment had failed.

Repeated Blight and Collapse, 1585-1610

The terrace plantings at Ta'izz failed repeatedly over the course of thirty years. The fungal pathogen that had devastated coffee stands in Ethiopia—the same agent or closely related species responsible for the Harar Wilt—appears to have reached Ta'izz through seedlings, soil adhering to transplanted roots, or trade goods passing through the port. By the 1590s, planters reported that young plants blackened and wilted after two or three years of growth, a pattern consistent with the leaf-rust infections that had destroyed the highland crop's commercial viability. Attempts to replant in the 1600s met the same fate.

The climate of Ta'izz, while superficially similar to the Ethiopian highlands, may have differed in ways that left the vulnerable transplanted stock exposed. Some historians propose that the drier summers of the Yemeni escarpment created stress conditions that made young plants susceptible to fungal infection; others argue that the pathogen's range was simply wider than the Ethiopian highlands alone, and that Ta'izz lay within the zone of its natural distribution. The evidence does not settle the question. What is certain is that by 1610, Ta'izz planters had abandoned coffee cultivation entirely and turned to other highland crops—notably qat (khat), which thrived in the same elevation and climate and offered a stimulant market without the cultivation failures that had plagued coffee.

Later History and Present State