For All the Tea in China
A decade or more ago, I picked up For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose from the free box that used to sit outside a used bookstore down the street from my office.* And then it sat on my shelf, unread.
I will admit, it made its way to the top of the to-be-read pile recently because I was doing a lot of traveling and wanted something that was physically light but had some mental heft to read in route. It turned out to be a very good choice for many reasons, including the fact that the heart of the book was about one man’s travels through China in the 19th century. His travails made the annoyances of modern air travel look small indeed.
For All the Tea in China is the story of how the British East India Company sent botanist Robert Fortune to China in 1848 with the mission of acquiring tea plants and smuggling them out of the country. Their goal was to establish tea plantations in the Himalayas, allowing them to circumvent China, which was then tea purveyor to the world. In 1851, he made a second trip—this time to acquire tea experts to teach Indians how to properly grow and process the plants he had acquired. (Getting them out of the country was just as illegal as smuggling the plants themselves.)
Rose tells the basic story as an adventure, with overtones of the imperialist adventure stories I happily read as a child,** complete with disguises, untrustworthy local employees, pirates, and territorial East India Company agents. She uses that story as a framework for discussing the role of botany in general and tea in particualar in the growth of the British Empire, the details of tea production, and the tea trade in Britain. She makes interesting side trips into subjects like Linnaeus’s classification system,*** Wardian cases (what we known as terrariums), and ship building.
Well worth the read, with or without a mug of tea at hand.
*That box was a treasure trove. For years I checked it almost every day and scored some wonderful things, including a 1913 edition of the unabridged Funk & Wagnalls that holds a place of honor in my study.
**Oh all right, I still read them on occasion. But now I am aware of the problematic elements that escaped me when I first discovered them.
***Which led me into a side trip of my own as I realized that I had put Carl Linneaus in the wrong century in my mental chronology of the world.
Happy birthday, Sigrid Schultz!
Sigrid Schultz was born on January 15, 1893, shortly before the world’s fair known as the World’s Columbian Exposition.
Sigrid spent her early childhood in an area with the evocative name of Summerdale, now part of the Edgewater neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. The neighborhood, located within the Chicago city limits, was largely undeveloped. There were four houses on the block where the Schultz home stood. Native prairie, rich with prairie hens, pheasants, quail and a riot of bright wild flowers, ran alongside the fenced-in gardens, creating a wild playground where Sigrid roamed in the company of three boys from the house closest to the Schultz home, protected by the family’s St. Bernard, Barry, who had served as her “nanny” since she was a baby.
The idyllic Chicago childhood of Sigrid’s memory came to an end in 1901, when Sigrid was eight. Her father moved her family to Europe following an important portrait commission. He intended to stay in Europe for two years. It would be 1941 before Sigrid would once again live in the United States, but she always thought of Chicago as home.
And there is no doubt that she learned things during her years in Chicago that laid the groundwork for her later career as the Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune: the importance of language, the power of hospitality, and the necessity of standing up against bullies and prejudice.
Happy birthday, Sigrid!
Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
Bridget Quinn first introduced readers to the eighteenth century French painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard in Broad Strokes, her rollicking account of fifteen women artists “who made art and made history (in that order).”* In Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Quinn returns to her subject in a work that is equal parts biography, historiography, and memoir. She traces not only Adélaïde’s life,** but the artist’s role in Quinn’s own life as art historian and author. She introduces the reader to the broader context of art and artists in pre-revolutionary France and the restrictions on women artists within that context. She examines Adélaïde’s artistic rivalry with the better known artist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, which was in some ways constructed as a result of those restrictions. She follows Adélaïde’s attempts to navigate the French art world, the royal system of patronage, and the dangers of the French revolution—and her support of other women artists. Along the way, she makes Adélaïde’s mastery as a painter clear for the modern reader/viewer.
Personally, I have every intention of visiting the masterpiece that hangs in the Met on my next visit to New York thanks to Bridget Quinn.
If you are interest in art, women’s history, or the places where they overlap, this one’s for you.
*I just noticed the double meaning of "Broad" in the title. *Duh*
** See my interview with Quinn in my series of interviews for Women’s History Month in 1922*** for her discussion of using first names for women artists. Her article on the subject triggered my own fascination with the subject.
***I’m running the series again this March, featuring some good people doing a wide range of work.