Matthew

‘A Sort of Tea from China’, c. 1700, a material survival of Britain’s encounter with tea in the late seventeenth century. e specimen was acquired by James Cuninghame, a physician and ship’s surgeon who visited Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698–9 and Chusan (Zhoushan) in 1700–1703.

We encounter ‘Vegetable Substance 857’ on a visit to the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum in London.

Today, the Vegetable Substances share a section of the Darwin Centre’s eighth floor with Sloane’s vast herbarium, also known as a hortus siccus or ‘dried garden’.

His method was to store items of botanical interest such as seeds and fruits, as well as vegetable products in which he perceived potential utility for trade or medicine. e Vegetable Substances, spectacular in their range, were nonetheless just one component of Sloane’s trove of antiquities, books and natural rarities – all bequeathed to the public as the inaugurating repository of the British Museum (and later the British Library and Natural History Museum).

Its samples 7
e m p i r e o f t e a
of flowers and leaves were dispatched from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas before being mounted and pressed in London into leather-bound folios (each of which now claims its own Perspex-enclosed shelf).

Further investigation among Sloane’s correspondence and scientific papers at the British Library confirms that this is James Cuninghame (d. 1709), a Scottish ship’s surgeon who twice travelled to China. It is not clear whether this tea is the produce of the hill country of Fujian, acquired when Cuninghame joined a private trading voyage to Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698, or the local manufacture of Chusan (Zhoushan), where Cuninghame accompanied an abortive East India Company

It is not clear whether this tea is the produce of the hill country of Fujian, acquired when Cuninghame joined a private trading voyage to Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698, or the local manufacture of Chusan (Zhoushan), where Cuninghame accompanied an abortive East India Company settlement in 1700 and found wild tea trees growing amid other evergreens.

and tastes Sweet with a little Bitter’t was also remarkably expensive: up to 60 shillings per pound for the best quality, ten times the cost of the finest coffee.2 Initially restricted to urban elites, the demand for tea and the number of its regular drinkers increased in Britain through the eighteenth century.

In the nineteenth century, tea became closely associated with the British way of life, transcending distinctions of social class, national geography and cultural background: as early as the 1820s, commentators instinctively identified the British as ‘a tea-drinking nation’.3

Tea became a defining symbol of British identity in a period when it all came from China and Japan: it was not until 1839 that the first ‘Empire’