Short answers, pulled from the story.
Purple first appeared in prehistoric art during the Neolithic era, where artists in the Pech Merle cave used sticks of manganese and hematite powder to paint animals and hand outlines between 16,000 and 25,000 BC.
Citizens of Sidon and Tyre in Ancient Phoenicia began producing a dye from the spiny dye-murex snail as early as the 15th century BC. The process required thousands of tiny snails to be found, their shells cracked, and a tiny gland removed to extract the juice that transformed from white to yellow-green, then green, then violet, and finally a red that darkened into the color of dried blood.
An eighteen-year-old British chemistry student named William Henry Perkin invented the first synthetic aniline dye, a purple shade called mauveine, in 1856. His experiments produced the dye while trying to make a synthetic quinine, and it quickly became fashionable after Queen Victoria wore a silk gown dyed with mauveine to the Royal Exhibition of 1862.
In April 2007, it was suggested that early archaea may have used retinal, a purple pigment, instead of chlorophyll, to extract energy from the sun. If true, large areas of the ocean and shoreline would have been colored purple, a theory called the Purple Earth hypothesis.
Purple is the primary color used by many European and American political parties, including Volt Europa, the UK Independence Party, the Social Democrats in the Republic of Ireland, the Liberal People's Party in Norway, and the United States Pirate Party.
In Chinese astrology, the North Star was the home of the Celestial Emperor, and the area around the North Star is called the Purple Forbidden Enclosure. For that reason, the Forbidden City in Beijing was also known as the Purple Forbidden City, and purple often represents the highest, holiest, and most sacred values in China.