Chinese Tea Makes A Splash

“Canton ahead!” The wooden ship’s deck shuddered. The British crew on the Bombay had been at sea for more than a year. In those months, sailors had been blown overboard in storms and lost to illness. Scurvy had broken out. A mast had snapped in a gale south of the Cape of Good Hope. That cost the East India Company vessel a couple of months to fix. Now that their destination was finally in sight, everyone was topside as a pagoda rose into view.

The merchant ship inched forward as it fought the current. Entry into the Pearl River Delta was through a strait called Bocca Tigris — the Tiger’s mouth. A Chinese gun emplacement cast a wary eye on the foreign devils, and a pair of Chinese boats rowed out to escort the vessel.

The Bombay joined a row of competing ships docked at Whampoa Roads outside the city. Western vessels were not permitted upriver, and the crew was confined to a narrow factory district outside the city walls called the thirteen hongs. In 1757, the Qing government ordered all ports except Canton, to be closed to foreign traders, especially the English. This was triggered by British attempts to encroach on the emperor’s territory through Tibet and Nepal, along with unsanctioned visits to other cities.

By imperial decree, contact with Chinese nationals was severely limited. Indeed, it was forbidden for the two groups to even learn each other’s language. Despite this, by the mid-1700s Chinese merchants figured out how to communicate with their customers through a phonetic form of common English phrases.

The streets near the factories were lined with shops filled with highly desirable export goods. Silks, enameled housewares, and exquisite lacquerware were just some of the items for sale. As one visitor wrote, “There is such a peculiarity, such a neatness and ingenuity about everything made by the Chinese, that a European feels in the situation of a child, taken, for the first time in his life, into a large toy-shop.”

Riches Brew

For extra ballast on the voyage home, the first teapots to Europe, formed from heavy red clay in the town of Yi Xing, were stacked in the lowest hold. Every inch on the ship was worth money. A smart sailor could use his pay to load up on Chinese goods and double or triple his bankroll back home. After a few voyages, he might join the middle class in England.

In any case, the foreigners were here to buy. Some £30,000 in Spanish silver coins were sealed with tar in the hold of the Bombay. These first saw light as ore from the prolific silver mines of South America that was smelted and then minted into coins in Lima, Peru. The obverses depict the crowned arms of Peru, while the reverses feature a globe topped by a crown flanked by two pillars. Each 8 reales coin contained around 27 grams of .910-fine silver.

A 1986 5 Yuan silver coin has very similar specifications to the Spanish 8 Reales and illustrates what the Bombay might have looked like. The Empress of China 5 Yuan commemorative coin contains 26.7 grams of .900-fine silver and is 36 millimeters in diameter. In 1728 and again in 1750, the Spanish government decreed that the gold-to-silver ratio was 16:1. Everywhere else in the world, it was closer to 15:1. This made silver in Spain undervalued relative to gold and led to a flood of foreign gold imports and silver coin exports. By virtue of quantity and quality, Spanish silver became the world’s standard trade coins. Annual mintages in Lima alone could reach into the millions of coins.

In Canton, the Chinese merchants tested these coins and stamped them with chop marks as verification. While copper alloy cash coins were the legal tender of China, silver was demanded for tax payments. Also, the silver was needed by the British to pay a tax on tea exports to the emperor in Beijing.

So, what did the British captain plan to buy with the silver coins in his ship? All the tea he could carry! Eventually, if the journey went well, whatever the Bombay delivered would be sold at the East India Company’s tea auctions in London. There, the company could triple its investment on the voyage.

Teatime

Throughout Britain and its colonies there was a mania for tea, one that the company was eager to promote. The first tea arrived in London in the 1650s. Its taste, so different from common English drinks, became a sensation. Initially, it was also rare and expensive and therefore fashionable. The first teas imported were a cheap variety of black tea – called Bohea after the hills where it grew – but no one in Britain knew that, yet.

More supply was needed to meet the insatiable demand. Due to excellent growing conditions, the mountainsides of Fukien Province in China were planted with tea trees. It took time, but by the 1720s, the supply of Bohea tea overflowed and its price fell. The brew became affordable for ordinary folk and lost its caché. The chi-chi crowd moved on to more novel and delicate tea varieties. Regardless, the overall demand for tea in England and its colonies quadrupled from 1720 to 1740 and doubled again in the eight years from 1763 to 1771.

All of this meant staggering profits for the main importer, the East India Company. Controlled by a small group of families, it also ran the distribution and even ownership of the choice of crews and the ships. Extreme wealth flowed into England, but it went to a highly concentrated group of people. East India Company profits from tea trading in 1771 were £300,000, the equivalent of $900 million today. For comparison, at this time, a skilled craftsman in London might earn around 1/10£, or $300 in today’s money, in a week.

Meanwhile, the British Empire had gotten into conflicts such as the Seven Years War and the French and Indian War. These saddled the government with a serious debt load. In response, the crown imposed new taxes, both at home and on its colonies. Taxes were raised as high as 119% on tea leaves, which led to widespread smuggling. London also imposed a suite of taxes on its colonies. Particularly irksome was a threepenny tax on a pound of tea imposed in 1767, but there were others like a tax on molasses, a key ingredient of rum. Most tax payments, along with the majority of other business in the colonies, were paid for with the same kind of coinage preferred in China: Spanish silver.

A New England Saga

The colony of Rhode Island was a center for maritime trade. Among the colonies, its charter was particularly expansive. Every public office was to be filled through an election. It was also a hotbed for independent thinking. The freest of those contrived that since Rhode Island’s charter required that all laws be approved by a representative assembly, and as the colony had no representation in British Parliament, the mother country’s laws – and especially its taxes – were invalid. In other words, the Crown had no legal right to collect taxes from Rhode Island.

This conflict broke out into the open when the Royal Navy sent a schooner, the Gaspée, to patrol the colony’s seacoast. Its mission: seize any ships that carried untaxed cargo. Tax laws, however, were so complicated and obtuse that even the best-intentioned boat might violate them. Then again, not all of Rhode Island’s shippers had any intention to pay the tolls. This was a target-rich environment for the enforcers.

The Gaspée was commanded by an aggressive young Scotsman. This son of a noble but indebted family was widely known for his foul mouth and eagerness to settle disputes with his fists. Lieutenant William Dudingston’s pay was low, but he could receive a share of the auction proceeds whenever he caught a smuggler’s ship, or any ship, for that matter. Considered little more than a legalized pirate by the colonists, his zeal to collect bounties made him a marked man around Newport and Providence — but, by the time he retired from the navy decades later, he could afford two expensive English homes.

On June 10, 1773, the Gaspée spotted a sloop near shore called the Hannah and gave chase. The skipper aboard Hannah knew these waters well. Dudingston did not. By a deft maneuver the Hannah escaped and left the Gaspée grounded. Late that night, a small flotilla of whaling boats filled with angry Rhode Island folk dressed up as indigenous peoples approached the stranded ship. Aroused too late, the sailors had barely time to fire off a few shots. A cursing Dudingston drew his cutlass and was about to strike a boarder when two musket blasts felled him. The Gaspée was forcibly abandoned, the sailors later released, and Dudingston’s rather serious wounds tended to by a doctor among the raiders. The Gaspée was burned to its waterline.

Boston’s Big Party

The incident was a virtual dress rehearsal for what followed six months later. By 1773, the supply of tea from China had caught up with demand in England. Prices, profits, and tax receipts were down. The government in London responded with a plan to dump the excess tea on the colonies. The East India Company was given an effective legal monopoly on tea imports to the colonies — which were still obliged to pay the threepenny tea tax.

On the night of December 16, 1773, the East India Company ship Dartmouth lay moored in Boston Harbor, its hold filled with Chinese tea. Dressed as indigenous Americans, a group of colonists seized control of the ship and threw 342 chests, more than 92,000 pounds of tea, into the harbor.

The Boston Tea Party is famous as a prelude to the revolution that followed. Not much thought is usually given to the long trail of commerce that led up to that event, but it involved not one, but three empires. Tea that was grown and harvested in the mountains of China was sold in the port of Canton for silver coins minted by Spain. It then passed through England. From there, its journey ended not in a kettle and a teacup, but by making a splash in the waters of Boston Bay and the pages of history.

What a trip!