An MIT historian has uncovered the true origins of a Chinese tea chest label long believed to be a relic of the Boston Tea Party. Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined the label displayed at Old South Meeting House, which was donated in 1987 by descendants of Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells. The family said it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.
After a year of research, Brown concluded the label was made nearly a century later. The key clue emerged when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done. He found the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for American markets during the 1860s and 1870s.
Working with the Wells family, Brown traced the label to a relative who traveled from Michigan to California during the Gold Rush era and later operated a business known as the California Tea Store. Brown argues that claims about the label's revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s.
The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant, Brown says. Instead, the inquiry became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority and how historical memory itself is made. "History is never finished," he says. "Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions."
Source: MIT Technology Review · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing