Coca-Cola: how plants providing cocaine and caffeine are behind the soft drink name’s origins

The name of the all-American drink ‘Coca-Cola’ is a compound formed from its two essential ingredients, with origins in other languages

Attempts at Chinese names resulted in phrases of nonsensical semantics until ‘kekou kele’ (‘ho lohk’ in Cantonese) came along – ‘happiness you can taste’

2-MIN READ2-MIN

The coca leaf and kola nut - which provided cocaine and caffeine, respectively - are embedded in the Coca-Cola name’s origins. Photo: Shutterstock

Lisa Lim has held professoriate positions at universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Perth, including as Head of the School of English at the University of Hong Kong.

Published: 7:45am, 17 Oct 2023

“The M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story” exhibition features artists reconsidering cultural identities during China’s rapid modernisation in the 1990s.

Ai Weiwei’s A Ton of Tea (2006), a cube-shaped compressed block of pu’er tea on a wooden pallet, interrogates traditional Chinese culture.

Juxtaposed against this is He Xiangyu’s Coca-Cola Project (Extraction) (2009): the 127 tonnes of Coca-Cola distilled into resin for the sculpture – some 60,000 bottles – represented the average amount of Coca-Cola sold in the artist’s hometown in a year.

Coca-Cola certainly features regularly as a quintessential symbol of Western – American – culture and consumerism. It also figures in Ai’s Han dynasty jar overpainted with the Coca-Cola logo.

He Xiangyu’s “Coca-Cola Project (Extraction)” (2009) features in the “The M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story” exhibition in Hong Kong. Photo: M+ Sigg Collection

Interestingly, the name of this all-American drink, developed in 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, by pharmacist Dr John S. Pemberton (copied from the Italian sweet wine tonic), is a compound formed from its two essential ingredients, with origins in other languages.