Key Facts about Mocha Port

About Mocha Port:

• Mokha, or Mocha, is a historic town located in southwestern Yemen, on the Red Sea.
• It was long famous as Arabia’s chief coffee-exporting center and the source of the term mocha.
• It is the chief port on the northern approach to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
• History:
  • Tradition holds that Mokha was founded in the 14th century by Sheikh ʿAlī ibn ʿUmar al-Shādhilī, the leader of a Sufi order (tariqa) who is supposed to have brought coffee drinking to Arabia from Ethiopia across the strait.
  • An important trade center through the 17th century, it was regularly visited by Indian traders, who traded finished metal products for Yemeni coffee and myrrh.
  • It also dealt with Egyptian merchants, who sailed to Mokha on the summer northwesterly Red Sea winds.
  • Coffee for the European and Middle East markets was Mokha’s chief export from the 15th century.
  • Trading establishments were maintained there by the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, and, briefly, the Danes and the French.
  • Long under Ottoman suzerainty, Mokha was surrendered to the imam of the Zaydī Shiʿah, Muḥammad al-Muʾayyad I, in 1636.
  • It prospered in the 17th and early 18th centuries; even the port of Zeila (in present Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden) became tributary to Mokha and its rulers until 1884.
  • The Ottomans held the town again from 1849 to 1918.
• Decline:
  • The conflicts between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire, and those between the Ottoman Empire and the Zaydī imams, contributed to the port’s decline.
  • The decline was hastened by the development of coffee plantations on the island of Java (now in Indonesia) by the Dutch and by the rise of the South American coffee industry (early 18th century).
• The modern port was established in 1955 and came to serve as a minor logistics and military hub between the major commercial ports of Aden and Hodeidah.