da hong pao: big red robe & revolution
on typical workday mornings, before this surreal state of emergency began, my default workhorse beverage has always been tea. admittedly, i never quite took the pains to brew it properly. i often just throw hot water onto leaves in a travel mug, and decant after a few minutes. yet my favourite way to drink tea is still the slow and more time-consuming way — with a gaiwan on a slow leisurely weekend morning when i have all the time i need.
i’m actually rather new to ’gong fu cha’ tea, encountering it when Tao Tea Leaf opened up in Mississauga. i was too intimidated to go up and talk to the workers about all the large containers of tea they had lined up against the wall, but i ended up visiting their website, and discovered a world of Chinese tea that i was completely unfamiliar with, including the endless terroir of Chinese highlands, long lists of botanical varieties and the infinite intricacies of processing methods developed over hundreds of years.
not long ago Tao Tea Leaf held a Lunar New Year tea workshop that Tao himself hosted at the Food District. it was a 90 minute tea tasting for $15 and i learnt an enormous amount, and its really nice to be able to taste the tea in real time while someone explains it to you and fields questions about the teas at hand. besides getting a nice glass tea cup to take home, i had a chance to try about six or seven types of their tea there including their Da Hong Pao which has won an award at the North American Tea Championship. their Da Hong Pao is fantastic, but all their tea is on the pricier side, so i don’t buy from them as often.
i have a small stock of Da Hong Pao from a little tea shop in Scarborough called Lau Sun Mou Tea Co which offers a fairly wide tea selection at very affordable prices. Lai Sun Mou run a webstore and their description of Da Hong Pao reads:
As tea buyers, we search incessantly for tea trees that are the closest in genetic make-up to these rare mother trees. This batch is carefully handcrafted using strictly traditional methods, and then finished by our roaster to receive several layers of traditional “heritage” charcoal roasting.
With careful aging, often years in preparation, and multiple charcoal firings, this rare-lot high-mountain Oolong brews to deep gold hues and flavors of smooth, mellow and toasty notes in its finish. The initial brew releases the intense nutty notes from the charcoal roasting. But it’s the balance of the tea that sets the Heritage Grand Scarlet Robe apart from other Wuyis: rich, smooth, full body, sweet, mineral – each characteristic distinct, but well balanced and in harmony with the others.
Region: Wuyi County of China
Year of Crop: 2017
Dry Leaves: Open twist leaf style, dark and long leaves
Liquor: Rich red/amber color liquor
and i typically follow their suggested brewing parameters because God knows that i don’t know any better:
We do a second rinse, then proceed to steep for 1 minute 20 seconds on the first infusion. The infusion should be a full amber color before decanting. Steep the second infusion for 1 minute 50 seconds, adding 30 seconds with each subsequent infusion.
Tea Leaves: 3.5 grams /1.5 Teaspoons
Water Temp: 212°F /100°C
Steep Time: 1 min 20 sec
Lai Sun Mou’s Da Hong Pao runs at $13 for a quarter pound (roughly 113g), and this is one of their more expensive teas. Da Hong Pao is infamous for garnering some of the highest auction prices, once racking up ~$1400 for a single gram (~$10,000 for a pot) according to the BBC, which they reported as worth 30 times its weight in gold. the (very likely apocryphal) story of this tea's rarity goes like this: one time when Nixon met Mao during China's pivot away from the Soviet Union, Mao gifted him with 50g of Da Hong Pao to Nixon's displeasure, until Zhou Enlai explained that this was the half of China's harvest. this story is still told by Wuyishan monks at the monastery that once cared for the Da Hong Pao mother plants (before the communists came, and placed the plants under the care of local government). the popularity of this unverified story maybe says more about popular perceptions of American unappreciation for political overtures made by China over the decades, and Amerika's persisting antagonism to another global superpower coming into its own.
the disquieting prices that have popped up for Da Hong Pao though, are for tea leaves from the Da Hong Pao mother trees, of which there are only six, in what is now the Wuyi Nature Reserve. leaves have not been harvested from the mother trees since 2005, as measures to protect and study the mother trees were put in place. Da Hong Pao available on the market today varies widely in price, a sort of barometer of the vast shadow of inequality that has swept China since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. China’s reported Gini Coefficient is now roughly the same as that of the United States.
i’ve seen Da Hong Pao in local grocery stores like T&T for prices even cheaper than the Scarborough teashop i usually get tea from (Lau Sun Mou). Tao Tea Leaf’s Da Hong Pao (one of their more affordable teas offered) runs at $2.60/5g, so the amount i got at Lau Sun Mou for $13 would cost me about $58 at Tao. Tao’s Da Hong Pao is admittedly better — it is richer with remarkable notes of dark chocolate and baked confectionary. but i would only ever buy small amounts of it for myself. i saw a small canister at Ten Ren (less than 100g, maybe 85g) retail for $100. according to Lau Sun Mou’s website, they claim they get their tea with as close a genetic make-up to the original mother trees. its hard to tell what is true in the tea world, but it is indeed a weird consumerist spectacle.
the Teapository did a video referencing a 2009 study by the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University that sequenced the DNA of the six mother trees and compared them with tea varietals commonly sold as Da Hong Pao. the results identified a match between Qi Dan varietals and mother trees 2 and 6 (which are of the same varietal), and it showed the Bei Duo varietal as not matching any of the mother trees genetically.
as i understand it, the way Bei Dou entered the mix was by way of a tea researcher named Yao Yue Ming, who started a Da Hong Pao research lab in the early 1950s. he believed that Da Hong Pao plants grew in three places, one of which was Bei Dou peak (not very far from the mother trees). he took two cuttings from the area, and continued to covertly carry out tea research during the Cultural Revolution. often Bei Dou tea is sold under the name of Da Hong Pao, but i’ve seen it also sold under its own name — Bei Dou, which translates as North Star.
it’s hard to tell if narratives like that of Yao Yue Ming’s are told to overstate the repression of tea cultivation under the Cultural Revolution (where tea was rendered as decidedly bourgeois and decadent). i suspect the revolutionary mood and the manner it which it was actualized varied widely throughout the country. however, i think it’s worth noting a study that challenges the common narrative of repressed tea cultivation under the Cultural Revolution by the scholar Keith Forster. This is something he wrote for China Heritage Quarterly (published by the Australian National University)
it comes from a larger work he wrote with Dan M. Etherington entitled “Green Gold: Political Economy of China’s Post-1949-Tea Industry” published by Oxford University Press. the basic argument is that tea production actually increased under the Cultural Revolution, especially close to its end, such that the soaring tea yields during the first decade of reform (1979-1988) were only made possible by the enormous tea-planting initiatives that were carried out under five-year plans executed during the time of the Cultural Revolution. it’s important not to conflate the violent excesses that occurred under the Cultural Revolution with the accomplishments that may have occurred under state-planned agricultural policy. it’s easy to colour everything done under the aegis of such a period as bad, and see the terrible famines of the Great Leap Forward as representative of all of communist-era China before Deng.
the little teashop i purchased my Da Hong Pao from (Lau Sun Mou) is run by a third-generation Hong Kong tea merchant. around the time i first visited it, i was also reading up on how British Imperialism unfolding here in what is now Mississauga intersected with their colonial interventions in China. certainly British gunboat diplomacy during the Opium Wars had everything to do with the existence of Hong Kong.
last spring i started working on an audio piece on the Missinihe (more commonly known as the Credit River in the municipality i live in). one of my angles on the story was a little ‘heritage’ mill town on the Missinihe (not far from where i live) now known as Meadowvale Village.
i interviewed a longtime resident of Meadowvale Village who grew up in the neighbourhood: Terry Wilson, he’s the one behind Miniature Meadowvale Village — a collection of scaled-down 19th-century versions of buildings that once stood around the area.
one of the stories he told me while showing me around the grounds, was about the Apple Tree Inn and the two ladies who ran it for two decades. this is the description of the place in a City of Mississauga Heritage Report:
i interviewed a longtime resident of Meadowvale Village who grew up in the neighbourhood: Terry Wilson, he’s the one behind Miniature Meadowvale Village — a collection of scaled-down 19th-century versions of buildings that once stood around the area.
one of the stories he told me while showing me around the grounds, was about the Apple Tree Inn and the two ladies who ran it for two decades. this is the description of the place in a City of Mississauga Heritage Report:
“Mary Farnell was a widow in 1920 when she sold the property to Mary Yates and Helen Beardmore. They turned the property into a respectful and popular rooming house and Tea Gardens named the Apple Tree Inn because of the large apple tree that stood outside the front door. This apple tree had to be removed in 1976 because of old age, disease and decay…. The Apple Tree Inn operated from 1922 until 1944. In the days of prohibition and temperance, the Apple Tree Inn was the only place in the Village where residents could go for tea and a light meal. Patrons were served their tea lunches in the garden where they could enjoy Mary Yates’ wall of tea roses that grew up the side of the natural ridge at the back of the property. In addition to the tea service, the Apple Tree Inn was a boarding house for 20 years that catered to summer or Christmas visitors to the area and, most famously, to student artists from the Ontario College of Arts from 1921 to 1925. Every summer, students from the OCA, led by instructor and well known Canadian artist John William Beatty, came to Meadowvale to paint the landscape, houses, Rowencroft Gardens and the many Credit River vistas. While in Meadowvale, the students and Beatty stayed at the Apple Tree Inn. Villagers’ memories of the 1920s, as described in the Perkins-Bull Collection, recall how residents would see the students setting up their easels on the lawns of the property at the corner of Pond Street and Barberry Lane early every morning. Prominent Meadowvale resident and artist Fred Haines was an active member of the OCA and likely played a major role in arranging J. W. Beatty’s excursions to the area.”
one of these artists who would visit Meadowvale Village in the interwar years that the Apple Tree Inn ran their tea room was the Group of Seven painter A.J. Casson, whose grandmother lived in the area. these are a couple of stories Terry Wilson told me about the artists who used to visit Meadowvale Village.
he sketched some of the old mill buildings while there, and would eventually bring painters like A.Y. Jackson to the area to paint landscapes with him in the summer. below is a painting Casson did of the Gooderham Mill in Meadowvale.
he sketched some of the old mill buildings while there, and would eventually bring painters like A.Y. Jackson to the area to paint landscapes with him in the summer. below is a painting Casson did of the Gooderham Mill in Meadowvale.
a strand of this story that i didn’t manage to squeeze into my 10 minute audio piece was the way the Opium Wars intersected with the history of the Missinihe here in Mississauga. my audiopiece focused on the 19th century mills set up along the Missinihe by settlers, and how they decimated the fish populations that the Anishinaabe relied upon for their food and culture. many of the mills processed white pine trees for British Navy ships that would be deployed in British colonies all around the world, while also participating in a vast deforestation project that destroyed the ecosystems on which the Anishinaabe relied upon for their livelihoods here in Mississauga. the major mills around Meadowvale Village were set up shortly before the Opium Wars, such that it may be possible the white pine trees of Mississauga were in the very Royal Navy boats involved in British gunboat diplomacy in China. of course tea was a central commodity involved in the Opium Wars. there was a growing demand for tea in Britain, and since China did not want any wares manufactured in Britain but solely wanted silver, precious bullion was draining into China at an alarming rate. Opium (which was illegal in China) was the only way the British could conceive of reversing that flow of silver.
in the midst of the Opium Wars, the Taiping insurrection was getting under way. the Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin called it the first modern revolution in China and the ‘ancestor of the “anti-feudal, anti-imperialist popular revolution” as formulated later by Mao’. i discovered this fascinating historical event after a family friend gave me a bookstore gift certificate, and with it, i bought Stephen Platt’s book “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom”, which was on sale at the time. i’ve since acquired Jonathan Spence’s book “God’s Chinese Son” (i snagged it from a Trinity College (U of T) booksale for $3), and downloaded a variety of other e-books on this fascinating tale of a failed Chinese bureaucrat who became convinced he was the brother of Jesus and the new messiah who would overthrow the Qing government and set up a new kingdom of peace and prosperity for all. in a textbook on Asian religions, there is a fascinating remark about how ‘taiping’ means ‘great peace’, which is a reference to earlier Daoist movements that tried to overthrow the Han dynasty, such as the Yellow Turban Rebellion.
Marx wrote somewhat dismissively of the Taiping revolution in an 1862 article published by the German broadsheet paper Die Presse (the same liberal one that operates today). Mao was far less dismissive of the Taipings, which is curious because people of any religious faith are still not permitted to join the Chinese Communist Party. Roland Boer in his book “Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition” explores a fairly different view of the Taipings that Chinese Marxists had:
“When Chinese Marxist scholarship has faced the question of religion, it has often resorted to Engels’s methodological assumption in interpreting the sixteenth-century Peasant Revolution in Germany: theological language was a cloak for political and economic factors, an approach that is indebted to an application of the base-superstructure model…
The Taiping Revolution itself appears in the context of a discussion of progressiveness: this revolution and the Republican Revolution of 1911 were progressive, albeit in terms of challenging and then abolishing ‘feudal’ society. Note what has happened: as Mao’s analysis proceeds, the position of the Taiping Revolution has shifted. In the accounts I mentioned earlier, it was one of a longer list of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements, or one of a number of peasant revolutions that should be analysed in terms of class conflict. Now the Taiping Revolution is first in the list of progressive revolutions in a Chinese context. Implicit here is the sense that the ‘great significance’ of this revolution is that it opens up a new phase in revolutionary history.
Yet even when he acknowledges the importance of the Taiping Revolution, Mao is wary. Part of his wariness arises from the need to retain some form of innovation for the communists. This problem of old and new had bedevilled the efforts of Kautsky, Luxemburg and Lunacharsky in relation to the Christian and Marxist forms of communism in Europe and Russia. So also with Mao in his own way. Thus, while the Taiping were ‘progressive’, they were progressive in the sense that they were seeking to overthrow what was still a feudal society under foreign oppression. By contrast, the communists offer a different type of progressiveness, in the context of capitalism, class conflict and the parties that represent classes, politically conscious people, and a politically progressive Red Army. Another part of his wariness was due to the fact that the Taiping Revolution was deeply formed by foreign influences. Indeed, this was part of the troubled engagement with foreign influences on China, the subject of so much debate at the time. Aware of all that was negative of the Chinese imperial system, Mao tried to work through to a way of appropriating foreign influences while constantly transforming them in light of Chinese conditions.
The reality is that the Marxism Mao embraced also had a ‘Western’ provenance analogous to the revolutionary religious tradition that appeared with the Taiping revolutionaries. It too was the result of foreign influence that was transformed in and shook up China."
returning to Marx, he had actually earlier written a less dismissive but fairly eurocentric assessment of the Taiping Uprising for the New-York Daily Tribune — a Republican paper edited by the Fourier socialist Horace Greeley that circulated among American statesmen like Abraham Lincoln in the mid 19th century. Marx saw the Taiping Uprising as a weakening of Chinese state power (the Qing government), which would enable European penetration into China and force open markets that had previously been closed off to British manufacturing. what is fascinating about this (rather orientalist) article Marx wrote in 1853 (“Revolution in China and in Europe”) is that tea is a commodity of central importance to his analysis:
“The attention of our readers has often been called to the unparalleled growth of British manufactures since 1850. Amid the most surprising prosperity, it has not been difficult to point out the clear symptoms of an approaching industrial crisis… there must… in due time arrive a moment when the extension of the markets is unable to keep pace with the extension of British manufactures, and this disproportion must bring about a new crisis with the same certainty as it has done in the past. But, if one of the great markets suddenly becomes contracted, the arrival of the crisis is necessarily accelerated thereby. Now, the Chinese rebellion must, for the time being, have precisely this effect upon England. The necessity for opening new markets, or for extending the old ones, was one of the principle causes of the reduction of the British tea-duties, as, with an increased importation of tea, an increased exportation of manufactures to China was expected to take place. Now, the value of the annual exports from the United Kingdom to China amounted, before the repeal in 1834 of the trading monopoly possessed by the East India Company, to only £600,000; in 1836, it reached the sum of £1,326,388; in 1845, it had risen to £2,394,827; in 1852 it amounted to about £3,000,000.”
to summarize, Marx is underscoring the potential crises at stake where manufacturing outstrips the market demand for goods. part of the impetus for British imperial ambitions in China was to find a new foreign market for goods that a depressed local market in Britain did not want. it is the old capitalist problem of producing desire, which I suppose why so many Marxists are so fascinated by Freud. there is a very good reason why a capitalist economy must constantly generate desire for things that people don’t really want. because they’ve invested a lot of money in machinery to make these goods, and unless enough people buy these goods, they will not receive an adequate payback on that expensive machinery. this is why i love Bini Adamczak’s explanation of capitalism in her book “Communism for Kids”:
“Capitalism exists today all over the world, and it's called capitalism because capital rules. This isn't the same as saying that capitalists rule, or that the capitalist class rules. In capitalism, there are certainly people who have more power than others, but there isn't a queen who sits on a throne high above society and commands everybody. So if people no longer rule over society, who does? The answer may sound a little strange. Things do. Of course we don't mean this literally, since things can't do anything, least of all rule people. After all, they're just things. And not all things have this power; only special things do. Or to put it better, only a special form of things do. These special things don't fall from the sky or come flying down to Earth in UFOs shooting people with laser beams. They're just the things that people create to make life easier, to serve them. Strangely, over time, people forget that they made those things, and soon enough, people begin to serve the things!”
the intrinsic logic of capitalism then is a type of idolatry. it recalls for me Habakkuk 2:17-19:
“For the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you;
the destruction of the animals will terrify you—
because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth,
to cities and all who live in them.
What use is an idol
once its maker has shaped it—
a cast image, a teacher of lies?
For its maker trusts in what has been made,
though the product is only an idol that cannot speak!
Alas for you who say to the wood, “Wake up!”
to silent stone, “Rouse yourself!”
Can it teach?
See, it is gold and silver plated,
and there is no breath in it at all.”
returning to Marx’s article on the Taiping Uprising, he explains that the British reduced taxes on tea so as to increase the import of Chinese tea, hoping to increase the demand for British wares in China. he shows the upward movement of annual export figures for UK goods to China (especially increasing after the dissolution of the East India Company monopoly in 1834). next Marx shows the increasing importation of Chinese tea:
“The quantity of tea imported from China did not exceed, in 1793, 16,167,331 lbs.; but in 1845, it amounted to 50,714,657 lbs.; in 1846, to 57,584,561 lbs.; it is now above 60,000,000 lbs. The tea crop of the last season will not prove short, as shown already by the export lists from Shanghai, of 2,000,000 lbs. above the preceding year. This excess is to be accounted for by two circumstances.”
Marx then goes onto explain how despite British attempts to maintain this trajectory of increased British tea imports and manufactured exports, a shortage of silver is putting this trade relationship at risk.
On one hand, the state of the market at the close of 1851 was much depressed, and the large surplus stock left has been thrown into the export of 1852. On the other hand, the recent accounts of the altered British legislation with regard to imports of tea, reaching China, have brought forward all the available teas to a ready market, at greatly enhanced prices. But with respect to the coming crop, the case stands very differently. This is shown by the following extracts from the correspondence of a large tea-firm in London:
"In Shanghai the terror is described as extreme. Gold had advanced in value upwards of 25 per cent., being eagerly sought for hoarding; silver had so far disappeared that none could be obtained to pay the Chinese dues on the British vessels requiring port clearance; and in consequence of which Mr. Consul Alcock has consented to become responsible to the Chinese authorities for the payment of these dues, on receipt of East India Company’s bills, or other approved securities. The scarcity of the precious metals is one of the most unfavourable features, when viewed in reference to the immediate future of commerce, as this abstraction occurs precisely at that period when their use is most needed, to enable the tea and silk buyers to go into their interior and effect their purchases, for which a large portion of bullion is paid in advance, to enable the producers to carry on their operations."
At this period of the year it is usual to begin making arrangements for the new teas, whereas at present nothing is talked of but the means of protecting person and property, all transactions being at a stand.
“...if the means are not applied to secure the leaves in April and May, the early crop, which includes all the finer descriptions, both of black and green teas, will be as much lost as unreaped wheat at Christmas.”
Now the means for securing the tea leaves will certainly not be given by the English, American or French squadrons stationed in the Chinese seas, but these may easily, by their interference, produce such complications as to cut off all transactions between the tea-producing interior and the tea exporting sea ports. Thus, for the present crop, a rise in the prices must be expected – speculation has already commenced in London – and for the crop to come a large deficit is as good as certain. Nor is this all. The Chinese, ready though they may be, as are all people in periods of revolutionary convulsion, to sell off to the foreigner all the bulky commodities they have on hand, will, as the Orientals are used to do in the apprehension of great changes, set to hoarding, not taking much in return for their tea and silk, except hard money. England has accordingly to expect a rise in the price of one of her chief articles of consumption, a drain of bullion, and a great contraction of an important market for her cotton and woollen goods. Even the Economist, that optimist conjurer of all things menacing the tranquil minds of the mercantile community, is compelled to use language like this.
“We must not flatter ourselves with finding as extensive a market as formerly for our exports to China ... It is more probable, therefore, that our export trade to China should suffer, and that there should be a diminished demand for the produce of Manchester and Glasgow.”
It must not be forgotten that the rise in the price of so indispensable an article as tea, and the contraction of so important a market as China, will coincide with a deficient harvest in Western Europe, and, therefore, with rising prices of meat, corn, and all other agricultural produce. Hence contracted markets for manufacturers, because every rise in the prices of the first necessaries of life is counterbalanced, at home and abroad, by a corresponding reduction in the demand for manufactures.
Marx, likely mistakenly, assumed the Opium War that Britain had initiated with China was what instigated the Taiping Uprising, and his principle question was if this revolution in China would somehow spark revolutions in Europe:
“it may safely be augured that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent. It would be a curious spectacle, that of China sending disorder into the Western World while the Western Powers, by English, French and American war-steamers, are conveying “order” to Shanghai, Nanking and the mouths of the Great Canal. Do these order-mongering Powers, which would attempt to support the wavering Manchu dynasty, forget that the hatred against foreigners and their exclusion from the Empire… have become a political system only since the conquest of the country by the race of the Manchu Tatars?”
Marx then explains one of the main justifications of the Qing (Manchu) government’s tight restrictions on ‘foreigners’ entering the inland regions of China:
“…this was done by the fear of the new dynasty, lest the foreigners might favour the discontent existing among a large proportion of the Chinese during the first half-century or thereabouts of their subjection to the Tatars. From these considerations, foreigners were then prohibited from all communication with the Chinese, except through Canton, a town at a great distance from Peking and the tea-districts, and their commerce restricted to intercourse with the Hong merchants, licensed by the Government expressly for the foreign trade, in order to keep the rest of its subjects from all connection with the odious strangers. In any case an interference on the part of the Western Governments at this time can only serve to render the revolution more violent, and protract the stagnation of trade.”
this sets the context for the fascinating story of Robert Fortune, which I first encountered in the pharmacology professor, Richard Miller’s book “Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs.” this story of Fortune was further elaborated upon for me in an episode on Gastropod that drew heavily from Sarah Rose’s book “For All the Tea in China”. Robert Fortune was a Scottish botanist, under the hire of the East India Company, sent into China to collect the best tea plants and seeds from the interior of the country, and figure out the processing methods used to coax such delicate flavours from these leaves. i think it’s rather laughable that Western countries are constantly going on about the ‘rule of law’ in developing countries like China, when corporations like the East India Company had no qualms about directly defying Qing policy regarding the movement of foreigners within their mainland borders. also, it’s tremendously ironic that western corporations go on complaining about Chinese IP espionage or ‘strong-armed’ technology transfer contracts attached to foreign investment. i don’t care very much for intellectual property, especially where it concerns vital needs for people’s survival, but i do find it rather gross at how that double standard exists historically. just an example from the writings from Robert Fortune’s publication “Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Provinces in China”, where he literally has sub-chapter titles like “Chinese Deceit” and “Cunning of the Chinese” and writes things like:
“Another example may be given to show the cunning and deceit of many of the Chinese here as elsewhere.”
here, Fortune goes on to complain about a nurseryman in Shanghai who justified the high price of certain flowers Fortune was looking for because he said they came from very far away. Fortune would shortly after discover that the plants were bought not farther than 6 miles from beyond the walls of Shanghai. yet Fortune finds it necessary to generalize this nurseryman’s behaviour as deceit that is characteristic of all Chinese people, and ironically this was all coming from a man who pretended to be Chinese, lied his way across China, and surreptitiously stole plants from peasants and monks on behalf of a powerful and wealthy corporation.
the seeds and Wardian cases full of tea plants eventually made their way to the Calcutta Botanic Garden under the care of Hugh Falconer. among the most important of these Wardian cases was an early experimental one Fortune sent, with a mulberry bush he had collected in the silk-making regions of China. in this Wardian case, he sprinkled seeds he had collected from Da Hong Pao plants in the Wuyi mountains, and they had successfully reached Calcutta, germinating along the way to the absolute delight of Falconer. this is the connection Rose draws between Fortune and Falconer:
“Fortune’s seeds would be placed under Falconer’s care. Falconer, like most naturalists of Great Britain, was self-reliant and systematic, accustomed to working alone and to being right—much like Fortune. He was a surgeon and a dedicated East India man, and as good a custodian for Fortune’s tea seeds as he could wish to have. Falconer believed tea was crucially important to the future of the company, that the garden at Calcutta was at the crux of India’s tea project, and that his legacy as superintendent depended on the success of this scheme. Fortune and Falconer, two gardeners, were of one mind when it came to the need to steal tea from China."
one interesting side note that i think is fascinating about Falconer is his forays into palaeontology:
“Falconer was skilled and erudite, a botanist but also an avid if amateur paleontologist. He was the first to articulate the evolutionary theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which holds that sexually reproducing species will show long periods of stasis for most of their fossil record, but when evolution does occur, it appears to happen rapidly and all at once. While working in the Himalayas, Falconer discovered one of the first fossilized monkey skulls—a fact noted by Charles Darwin in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. On home leave to Britain in the middle of his Indian career, Falconer shipped to the British Museum an incredible five tons of fossil bones embedded in their rock matrices.”
Falconer was actually at first a creationist, and Darwin sent him a copy of his Origin of Species, and Falconer eventually embraced evolutionary theory, though with his own nuance of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, which is a fascinating intervention in evolutionary biology that the Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould was deeply involved in. i always thought Gould’s socialist politics juxtaposed along side his affinity for a revolutionary theory of evolution (as articulated in ‘punctuated equilibrium’) was especially germane.
anyway, one of the reasons Sarah Rose says that Fortune was sent to China in the first place was that British gunboat diplomacy had basically forced open the legitimate opium market, and now the British suspected that the Qing government would attempt to grow its own opium to keep silver from draining out of the country. this is exactly what Marx wrote in his New York Daily Tribune article on the Taiping Uprising:
“At the same time it is to be observed with regard to India that the British Government of that country depends for full one seventh of its revenue on the sale of opium to the Chinese while a considerable proportion of the Indian demand for British manufactures depends on the production of that opium in India. The Chinese, it is true, are no more likely to renounce the use of opium than are the Germans to forswear tobacco. But as the new Emperor is understood to be favourable to the culture of the poppy and the preparation of opium in China itself, it is evident that a death-blow is very likely to be struck at once at the business of opium-raising in India, the Indian revenue, and the commercial resources of Hindostan. Though this blow would not immediately be felt by the interests concerned, it would operate effectually in due time, and would come in to intensify and prolong the universal financial crisis whose horoscope we have cast above.”
therefore, the East India Company knew that it could very well lose its opium market in China and it would not be able to afford a steady import of Chinese tea. so it set about trying to start its own tea plantations in India, but it needed better seeds and cuttings than were currently at their disposal — the best that China had to offer. that is why Fortune was sent on his covert mission into the Chinese interior. during his time there, one of the most precious cuttings that Fortune managed to acquire during his time in the Wuyi Mountains of Fujian were those of Da Hong Pao. Sarah Rose recounts his stay at a Buddhist monastery:
“From the monastery Fortune was within a day’s walk of the Big Red Robe bushes, the Da Hong Pao, source of the most rarefied tea in the world—and certainly the most expensive. The three 200-year-old bushes stood under the three characters Da, Hong, Pao, which had been carved into a rock face and were fiercely protected by the monks.”
Rose then recounts the legend behind Da Hong Pao, which involves nine dragons that ravage the slopes of Wuyi, until a god comes to slay them, and each dragon’s corpse became a tall peak to form the Nine Bend River. then Tie Hua, a Buddhist abbot, saw three bushes appeared as if they were glowing (the motha trees!!). i imagine it was something like Moses and the burning bush he encountered when God told him to lead an insurrectionary Exodus to liberate the Jewish people from slavery. anyway, Tie Hua sent his monkey up the cliff to these illuminated bushes, where heaven and earth intersected, and the monkey plucked the leaves of the bush, which Tie Hua brought with him back to the monastery. there at the monastery, a local scholar was gravely ill, such that he might miss the imperial examinations he was supposed to take. Tie Hua brewed him some tea from the glowing bushes, which helped the scholar recover in time to take the examinations and pass. later on, as a court scholar of the emperor, he recounted his great recovery to the emperor during a time when the empress had become gravely ill. the scholar had brought with him leaves from those special tea bushes and brewed it for the empress, who as you might have expected, recovered swimmingly. the emperor sent the scholar back home with a majestic red silk blanket to protect the bush’s roots during the coming winter frost — hence the name Big Red Robe (Da Hong Pao).
ironically, it would be Hong Xiuquan who failed the imperial examinations three times, that would swallow his disappointment and then go on to lead a peasant revolution that almost overthrew the Qing government — all this during the time Robert Fortune was covertly roaming through China to smuggle tea plants to British plantations in India.
Da Hong Pao (at least the varietal) was also likely involved in an earlier revolutionary moment in history, though one that occurred curiously on the other side of the planet. tea from the Wuyi Mountains constituted the majority of the tea that was dumped into the Boston harbour during the Boston Tea Party protests. “The Boston Tea Party” by Benjamin Woods Labaree (published by Oxford University Press) recounts tea from three ships carrying black tea including Bohea (240 chests), Congo (15 chests), Soughing (10 chests), and green tea including Singlo (60 chests) and Hyson (15 chests) all dumped into the harbour. Bohea was the mercantile term for the Wuyi Mountains. its etymology is often explained as a corruption of the name ‘Wuyi’, but Sarah Rose explains it this way:
“Because Wuyi’s tea leaves appear to bloom a purple shade and then turn red as they ripen, Wuyi tea was known in the local dialect as bo he, meaning red tea, which when anglicized became bohea.”
while the Tea Party movement might conjure up impressions of white conservatives complaining about immigrants, high taxes, and social welfare programs, the people behind the Boston Tea Party seemed very far removed from the movement today that lays claim to such a tradition. Jill Lepore’s “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History” was my first introduction to such a fascinating encounter with this battle over the American revolutionary narrative.
it may be no surprise that Marxist historians have been deeply fascinated by the American Revolution, and are one of those groups involved in the discursive disagreements over how to understand the American Revolution. Lenin called it “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars” and also wrote
“The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century.”
the Wuyi (Bohea) tea dumping in Boston was led in large part by the revolutionary Samuel Adams. Harry Braverman, who was an American metal worker, political economist, and Marxist revolutionary, wrote searing critiques of Soviet obsession with Taylorist and Fordist ’scientific’ management principles, and also championed the life of Sam Adams. while writing under the pseudonym of Harry Frankel in a journal called The Militant and later compiled into a book called “Sam Adams and the American Revolution” by Pathfinder Press (both admittedly Trotskyist publications, though Braverman’s politics became a lot less sectarian later in life), Braverman said of Samuel Adams:
“At the head of the Boston mass movement was Sam Adams, the most capable, intransigent and farsighted leader of the American Revolution. He was the greatest revolutionary leader ever developed on this continent, and one of the greatest the world has ever known. Sam had been a fully conscious revolutionist for at least eight years before Concord and Lexington, and a revolutionist in deeds, if not yet fully in his consciousness, for a dozen years prior to that.”
many popular contemporary accounts of Samuel Adams on sites like YouTube deride Adams as an incompetent failure at his work as an accountant, businessman and bureaucrat, but I think Braverman’s sympathetic framing of it is actually tremendously humane:
“Before Adams was fully caught up in these struggles, his family tried to equip him with a “respectable” profession. He was first sent to the counting house of Thomas Cushing, merchant, but Cushing soon turned him out with the remark that he was training young men for business, not politics. Years later, Sam Adams was to have trouble with this same merchant's son. He often tried to hammer it into the younger Cushing that he was training young men for politics, not for business…
When Adams left the office of tax collector in 1765, his accounts showed a delinquency of some 7000 pounds. Historians who are anxious to blacken Adams's reputation whisper slyly that Adams was involved in “the worst scandal” attached to the name of any signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Many efforts were made in revolutionary times to smear Adams with this charge of larceny. This campaign was never successful in view of Adams's well-known character. His reputation for strict personal honesty and his extreme selflessness and constant poverty make it incredible that he took any money for himself. As he explained, he had never collected these taxes, and the money never passed through his hands. Adams's close personal relations with the very people of Boston from whom he was supposed to collect taxes and his easygoing way in the business world must be taken into account, and it is most probable that he was the kind of tax collector we would all like to deal with. As a matter of fact, the Bostonians didn't want to release him from the job.”
Braverman goes on to characterize the Boston Tea Party and Samuel Adams like this:
“The British East India Company, exploiter of the masses of India and darling of the British crown, had large quantities of tea in its warehouses, unsold and unsalable. This tea had paid a duty of twelve pence per pound when imported into Britain from the Far East. The Ministry proposed to return this tax to the company if it would agree to ship the tea to the colonies, where it would have to pay an entrance duty to the crown of only three pence. The colonists, in protest against the import tax, had been drinking smuggled Dutch tea. But now, under the new plan, British tea could be sold for far less than the smuggled Dutch product even after paying the import duty.
By this plan, Lord North hoped to make a double coup. He would give much needed assistance to the British East India Company, and he would dangle cheap, though taxed, tea before the colonial population. He hoped that by taking advantage of the so-called Yankee avarice he could tempt the Americans into paying the hated import duty on tea, which was then by far the most favored beverage. Once this was done, other taxed commodities could slip in through the breach.”
Yale American history professor, Joanne Freeman, explains why the issue of taxes was a pivotal issue only in so much as it was an assertion of British power over the colonies:
“By this point, the sovereignty of Parliament over the colonies had become inextricably bound up with the right of taxing American colonists.
So at this point, Parliament couldn’t back down on a tax without seeming to give up their sovereignty over the colonies. By 1770, the right of taxation was not just a means of producing revenue for the British, but it actually had become an assertion of British sovereignty over its own colonies.”
Professor Freeman goes on to cite this quote by Lord North speaking of the rebellious spirit within the colonies:
“If I thought I could appease that factious and disobedient temper which prevails [in the colonies], I should be glad to do it. And yet, to these people, who ought to be our subjects, we are to make concessions, because they have the hardihood to set us at defiance! … Upon my word, if we are to run after America in search of reconciliation, in this way, I do not know a single act of Parliament that will remain.”
as for the radical events leading up to the Boston Tea Party, Braverman describes them in this way:
“Throughout the colonies, the British provocation was met with the most determined resistance. The radical wing of the opposition now came into its own as the popular rage mounted against the British ruse. Huge mass meetings and demonstrations, reminiscent of the anti-Stamp Act campaign of 1765, swept the colonies. East India Company tea was turned back from wharfs throughout the land. In some cases, it was seized and destroyed, as in Annapolis where the tea was burned, ships and all, before it could be put ashore. In other cases, the tea was confiscated and placed under armed guard by people's militias called out by the Committees of Correspondence.”
then Braverman goes on to tell a captivating story of how the Boston Tea Party unfolded:
“The events in Boston were crucial. Here Sam Adams, with great care and deliberation, maneuvered a deadlock that could be resolved only by a revolutionary action. In the fall of 1773, three tea-laden vessels arrived from England and anchored just beyond Castle William, the British military fortification whose guns commanded the entrance to Boston harbor.
The first move made by the Boston radicals was to invite the ships into the harbor. It is plain from this that Adams intended to create an insurrectionary crisis. Once the ships had passed the guns of Castle William, a deadlock that could not be solved by any but forcible means would be created. The tea would have to be landed and pay duty, or be destroyed. The ships entered the harbor, in compliance with the invitation from the Adams forces. It was soon to become plain that the Tory authorities, under the lead of Governor Hutchinson, had also decided upon a test of strength and were not averse to the creation of the deadlock. No sooner were the ships fairly in the harbor and moored at Griffin's wharf than the Boston radicals caused an armed guard of the people's militia to be placed upon them. If the tea were to be landed, force would be required.
This was the situation that Sam Adams had foreseen and deliberately created. He now gathered his forces in preparation for the coming crisis. The demand of the radical leadership that the tea be withdrawn from the harbor was militantly supported by the people of Boston and of the whole surrounding area. Crowds of armed men flocked to the revolutionary capital to watch by day and sleep on their arms at night as the tension mounted.
Finally the crucial moment arrived. December 17 was the final date, after which the authorities would try to land the tea by force. On the night of December 16, 1773, an enormous meeting of over 8,000 people sat and waited for the governor's final reply to the repeated request for clearance papers. At length the tired Captain Rotch entered with the expected “No.” At this point, Sam Adams mounted the rostrum. He spoke only ten words: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” This short speech was one of the greatest and wisest in American history. In it is concentrated the wisdom of a people in revolution who have reached the moment when further palaver with the reactionary minority is useless and when the time for action is at hand.
Adams's brief speech was a compact analysis of the revolutionary situation; it was also a prearranged signal. As soon as he had pronounced the fateful words, the insurrection was under way. A whoop was heard from the gallery, and turning, the meeting saw a troop of “Mohawk Indians,” Boston radicals in warpaint, blankets and feathers, who raised the shout, “Boston harbor a teapot tonight.” Sam Adams's “Mohawks” led the way to Griffin's wharf, many thousands from the meeting following. Boarding the tea ships, where the armed guard of the Sons of Liberty awaited them, they dumped into the harbor chests of tea to the value of some 18,000 English pounds. The ships' crew helped, and the thousands who lined the shore watched and cheered. The deed was done. The revolutionists, with Sam Adams at their head, had flung down the gauntlet of revolt to the armed might of Imperial Britain.
The Boston radicals were not the only ones who destroyed tea. Similar deeds were done in other colonial cities. But in Boston, the upheaval was so great, the activity and support of the masses so widespread, the challenge of the revolutionists so obvious and deliberate. that the Boston insurrection precipitated the final revolutionary crisis.
The Boston Tea Party developed over a period of several months, and the masses throughout the colonies were kept well informed by the radicals of the events as they took place. When the deadlock was broken, a nationwide support had rallied behind Sam Adams, and when the British Ministry answered the Tea Party with the Coercive Acts, the battle was joined.”
as fascinating as this “factious and disobedient” insurrectionary spirit is, there is a dark and racist dimension to it that the Harvard historian Philip Deloria (son of Vine Deloria Jr.) explores in his landmark work “Playing Indian”. it is famously known that the great Boston Tea Party protest was an embarrassingly racist performance of redface that is part of a well-documented historical phenomenon that constitutes the centre of Deloria’s landmark book. i first encountered the phenomenon while reading about William Lyon Mackenzie. A group of men dressed themselves as indigenous men, and raided Mackenzie’s office and smashed his printing press before throwing it into Lake Ontario. this was likely organized by Samuel Jarvis, a corrupt figure of the elite class (known then as the Family Compact) who eventually was removed from his position as Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Upper Canada, after a commission uncovered acts of bribery, fraud, religious discrimination, and neglect of the welfare of indigenous communities under his supervision. this is the asshole Jarvis Street is named after in Toronto.
now to return to Philip Deloria’s book “Playing Indian”, there are a few working parts to this argument that i think are worth summarizing before inserting excerpts. Deloria claims that so-called ‘Old World’ traditions of “Carnival had always worked both to question and to reaffirm social orders.” many of these carnivalesque acts of protest that occurred back in England involved acts of blackface. the revolutionary acts of misrule were transformed in various ways when colonists were trying to form some sort of so-called ‘New World’ identity. they drew on contradictory notions of noble savagery to express protest against and distinction from the British Empire, and acts of redface and valourization of reimagined indigenous chiefs were often their means of doing so. at the heart of this contradiction of American identity Deloria draws on the work of D.H. Lawrence who wrote:
“There has been all the time, in the white American soul, a dual feeling about the Indian. The desire to extricate [him]. And the contradictory desire to glorify him.”
of this, Deloria writes:
“This is, of course, the familiar contradiction we have come to label noble savagery, a term that both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them.”
to contextualize the revolutionary protest at the Boston Tea Party (which was ultimately redface street theatre), Deloria describes the traditions of Carnival, of ‘Blacking’, and the attendant rituals of misrule back in England:
“What I shall refer to as carnival was associated with specific occasions—holidays and market days, for instance—although the inverted world of carnival consciousness could appear at any time and was a significant element in misrule rituals. What I shall call misrule, although it often occurred in the context of specific holidays, had an aggressive, critical quality that could be mustered at any time to protest transgressions of the social order. Taken together, manipulated by colonists, and transformed by the infusion of Indianness, misrule and carnival offered porto-americans a platform for imagining and performing an identity of revolution…
Carnival had always worked both to question and to reaffirm social orders. The Pennsylvanians emphasized the questioning elements that implied rebellion. By trying to stamp out festive humour and fertility celebrations, New Englanders pushed their rituals in the opposite direction—toward misrule and a single-minded concern with protecting social order…
The changing uses of misrule appear with special clarity in early eighteenth-century England, where centuries-old traditions of masked social sanction took on more overt revolutionary contours around the problem of deer poaching… subject to regulation since at least the fifteenth century, maintained a long tradition of blackening their faces in order to disguise their identities. These poachers were the cultural (and perhaps literal) ancestors of those who would later celebrate Pennsylvania’s utopian abundance and egalitarian hunting opportunities… Between 1720 and 1723, groups of so-called Blacks dominated Windsor Forest. Disguised in blackface, they hunted deer in large mounted groups calculated to intimidate gamekeepers. If a king’s official seized a dog or a poached deer or levied a fine, a party of Blacks would soon appear at the door and threaten to burn his house unless the penalty was quickly returned… Blacking drew much of its power from socially prescriptive misrule rituals. In France and Britain, the Abbeys of Misrule had protected moral economies [E.P. Thompson’s term] and enforced social custom through noisy charivari parades featuring effigies of adulterers, men beaten by their wives, and other transgressors… Such rituals frequently featured blackface, masking, and ritual burning, but they were cut from different cloth than those of carnival. Rough music groups acted to reinforce traditional, customary social orders, not to play on the edges of revolution. In Windsor Forest, however, blacking and misrule began to acquire a more fully developed revolutionary shape… In 1723, the English Parliament, concerned with the threat to royal authority and rumours linking Black groups with the Jacobites, passed the Black Act, an extreme piece of legislation suited more to revolutionaries than to forest dwellers protecting customers rights. It mandated the death penalty for blacking, hunting at night and assembling in disguise. Backed by a network of informers and a troop of soldiers, officials made sweeping arrests of suspected Blacks in Windsor Forest. Eventually four Blacks were executed, six were sentenced to transportation overseas, and several more were indicted.”
reading this, i could not help wonder to what extent the tradition of anarchist black bloc can be traced back to these insurrectionary carnivalesque acts of misrule committed back in England. i wonder if there is any connection, and i wonder what critical race theorists think of this. the next piece of Deloria’s argument involves the sole festival that persisted in Puritan New England, which was a burning of the pope’s effigy:
“By the mid-eighteenth century, officials had stamped out every traditional festival save one. Maypoles, morris dances, summer kings and queens, autumn harvest festivals, Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter celebrations all disappeared. Only Pope Day (November 5), an anti-Catholic celebration grafted on to an ancient complex of winter holidays, remained, a misrule directed against a rival church… the Tea Party and the American Revolution itself can be seen as a culmination of a long transformation of misrule-based social protest that extends back to Windsor Forest and beyond.”
this persisting ritual of misrule began being channeled towards the British government:
“In Boston, colonial crowds retained the festival qualities that lingered over Pope Day even as Samuel Adams and other leaders tried to turn its misrule to more overt revolutionary ends. Ty the early 1760s, charivari parades that had once featured the pope displayed British and colonial officials hanging and burning in effigy… On the day of the first Stamp Act riot a festive craziness — something akin to that of Pope Day — crackled in the air. Liberty boys turned puns on the Stamp Act, stamping papers into the ground, and on the English Lord Bute, epitomized as evil and represented by a boot.”
yet the revolutionary schematic of eradicating the old and inaugurating the new could also be mapped onto indigenous genocide in an odd and unsettling way. Deloria explains the tradition of Tammany societies (which emerged after the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, which among other things, placed new taxes on imported tea, to help pay for the enormous expense of the French-Indian War):
“After the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, increasingly resistant colonists gleefully promoted Tammany from king to “tutular [sic] saint of America” and turned their May Day songs and revels into overtly politicized demonstrations of patriotic Americanness. The Indian saint’s supposed motto, Kwanio Che Keeteru… became… a patriotic slogan of the Tammany societies: “This is my right; I will defend it.” The societies created a body of myth to celebrate the recently canonized Tammany and the American continent for which he stood… Growing aged, Tammany refused to burden his family but instead put his lodge to the torch and reclined peacefully inside, perhaps destined to rise again someday. As they imaged and then appropriated this phoenixlike figure, the white members of the society sought to stake their claim on an essential Indian Americanness.”
now we arrive at the disturbing ritual of burning an effigy of ‘king’ Tammany (an indigenous chief):
“On May Day, for example, European revellers danced around the maypole—an ancient symbol of the united of the old sacrificial king and his successor—to celebrate not only the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, but also the oneness of the old year and the new. They frequently burnt the old king and used fire and ash symbolism to evoke the phoenix like connection between death and new life…”
“Tammany societies also celebrated the death of the Indian saint as an overthrow of an aged fertility figure. In Charleston, South Carolina, Tammany followers reenacted his mythic end by literally setting him on fire…”
i find it curious because this insurrectionary act of burning the effigy of the king and its connotation of sacrifice, and then its later adaptation to an indigenous chief largely reconstructed within Anglo-American imagination — this all recalls for me the crucifixion at the core of the Christian tradition and the Roman appropriation of its revolutionary significance. this is another comment by Deloria that helps make sense of how American identity was wrapped up in the suppression of the old by the new:
“Tammany’s death was a metaphor for the “disappearance” of Indian people from the land, the destruction of the old cycle, the dawning of another era in which successor Americans would enjoy their new world. His implied rebirth, on the other hand, suggested that Americans were not successors so much as aboriginal Tammanys themselves. And if the new ruler was literally the same as the old, it was only fitting that the Tammany members shared his identity by clothing themselves in Indian garb.”
almost like how Christians of the Constantinian Roman Empire are the ‘body’ of Christ in the world. to make a short remark about my much earlier comments about how water mills along the Missinihe (Credit River) near where i live contributed to the rapid deforestation of the area and the displacement of the Anishinaabeg communities that lived here, along with the steady supply of lumber for British Royal Navy ships that were involved in colonial interventions all over the world. pictured below is the mill stone of the Silverthorn Grist Mill, although Francis Silverthorn during his time there added a sawmill onto his complex. did this very saw mill process wood for the Royal Navy?
anyway, i find it strangely unsettling the way appropriated indigenous culture was used to protest claims made on North American lumber by British monarchical power:
anyway, i find it strangely unsettling the way appropriated indigenous culture was used to protest claims made on North American lumber by British monarchical power:
“When he was appointed the king’s surveyor-general and assistant governor of New Hampshire in 1730, David Dunbar promised zealous enforcement of the Mast Tree law, an ordinance requiring him to claim trees suitable for ships’ masts for the Royal Navy. During the forty-odd years preceding Dunbar’s appointment, lax enforcement of the Mast Tree law and similar regulations had become status quo in New Hampshire. Local residents developed a system—juries that refused to indict or convict, paper townships created to evade private property restrictions, political manipulation, and threats of violence—that ensured their control over the lucrative lumber and shipbuilding trades…
In 1734, Dunbar sent a party of men to enforce the Mast Tree law on the residents of Exeter. Midway through their meal at the town inn one evening, the party heard whoops and screams. The inn’s door slammed open and a file of men entered and headed directly for Dunbar’s table. The intruders wore blankets wrapped Indian-style and sported caps and feathers on their heads. They had blackened and painted faces, and they grimaced and brandished clubs at the frightened group… The Dunbar encounter may be the first recorded meeting with New England’s white Indians. It was certainly not the last
…Indians helped the Mast Tree rioters define custom and imagine themselves a legitimate part of the continent’s ancient history. Indians and the land offered the only North American past capable of justifying a claim of traditional custom and a refiguring of the rhetoric of moral economy… White Indians laid claim, not to real Indian practices, of course, but to the idea of native custom—the specifics to be defined not by Indians, but by colonists.”
the American revolutionary spirit, lionized by Marxists like Braverman, must be more carefully evaluated for the way it instrumentalized indigenous peoples, and i wonder to what extent leftists today instrumentalize and use indigenous peoples also and to what extent Rousseau-ian notions of noble savagery still pervade today’s radical politics:
“In the 1730s, after decades of conflict with local Indian people, New Hampshire residents hardly valued actual Indians. In donning Indian dress, of course, they were engaging in a dialogue not about Indians, but about themselves and their beliefs, and the dialogue was directed primarily toward colonial and imperial authority. Yet the rioters did differ from the Tammany paraders. The Philadelphians’ urban setting tempted them to downplay actual Indians and accompanying images of savagery. Tammany was a noble figure. When the Mast Tree rioters played Indian, they engaged both noble and savage, interior and exterior Indian Others. As they sympathetically evoked noble American commonalities, the loggers’ Indian disguise played simultaneously on the contradictory image of the savage Indian who existed outside the pale of law and civilization. Masked disguise of any sort allowed one to hoot and howl and beat up the king’s surveyors. The feeling of moral detachment that came with being masked or in blackface was amplified, however, when the mask was not simply an anonymous blank but rather the sign of an Indian Other who existed outside of social boundaries. If a loyal colonist would not assault the king’s men, and Indian savage surely might… Like the carnival revellers in Philadelphia, New Englanders used Indianness to create an identity psychologically attuned to resistance and, eventually, rebellion. Carnival and misrule thus sprang from European roots and became infused with revolutionary messages through the figure of the Indian.
…Using Indian identity, misrule, and carnival inversion, Tea Party revolutionaries crossed the boundaries of civilized law in order to attack specific laws that displeased them and to speak to the British from a quintessentially American position. Their Indian disguises (or claims of disguise) played ambiguously on social boundaries. By being Indian and not-Indian, repulsive savage and object of colonial desire, representation of social order and disorder, the Tea party Indians revealed the contingency of social order itself and thus opened the door to the creation of the new.
Bostonians blended rhetoric—in which Indians represented America on handbills and in songs—and ritual—in which printed and oral words could be made material in the streets. By smearing their faces, speaking “ugh”-peppered pidgin English, and throwing tea from merchant ships, colonial rebels brought cultural understandings to life through dramatic performance. Through this “theatricalize rhetoric” they solidified their common understanding of themselves as Americans, their freedom an ancient thing linked intrinsically to the continent, its custom, and its nature.”
i’d like to finish with a rather disturbing British cartoon (from London Magazine, which published the likes of Keats and Wordsworth) involving the force-feeding of East India Company tea (perhaps tea from the Wuyi Mountains of China) down the thought of a sexualized indigenous woman, which was meant to symbolize the American colonies. Deloria notes that “British cartoonists used Indians to symbolize the colonies as alien and uncivilized and therefore needful of (and deserving) the rule of the empire.”
there’s so much to think about, from the complicated ways identity intersected with American revolutionary politics, the Taiping insurrection that unfolded in China, the British gunboat diplomacy of the Opium wars, the complex global commodity markets of the 19th century that Marx commented upon, the covert espionage missions of Robert Fortune to pull tea into the orbit of an enormous British corporation that had its own military forces. so much history behind a simple Wuyi oolong called Da Hong Pao.
to end on a lighter note, this is an entertaining video of the couple behind Zhen Tea in Ottawa visiting the Wuyi Mountains and the Da Hong Pao mother trees. i watched this half-drunk on vermouth one evening and literally felt like i was on vacation. it was amazing.
to end on a lighter note, this is an entertaining video of the couple behind Zhen Tea in Ottawa visiting the Wuyi Mountains and the Da Hong Pao mother trees. i watched this half-drunk on vermouth one evening and literally felt like i was on vacation. it was amazing.
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