Several journal articles from the period discuss the well-known “Lie Tea,” a mixture of used tea leaves, dust from tea warehouses, crumpled leaves from other plants, soot, and, often, iron filings.14
Nineteenth-century concerns about the adulteration of food were not limited to tea, but the position of tea as a product imported from a country over which Britain had no economic or military control grants the fears of tea adulteration special consideration. According to Jack Goody’s study of the cultural significance of food consumption patterns in Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, “Adulteration is a feature of the growth of urban . . . or rural society that is divorced from primary production.”15 The problem of adulterated tea presented a more exaggerated case of the gap between production and consumption. Production was carried out thousands of miles away from consumers, and Chinese tea producers maintained strict secrecy about their methods of cultivation and manufacture, preventing the English from observing and ensuring the quality of tea exported from China.16 Politically, China had staved off European foreign powers and influence for as long as possible. Despite numerous military losses to the British and the increasing concessions granted after the Opium Wars, the Chinese remained in control of the manufacture and exportation of Chinese tea.17 Chinese officials continued to refuse British merchants access to the Chinese interior, where the tea plantations were located. According to nineteenth-century histories of tea, British tea consumers were vulnerable to the practices of Chinese tea manufacturers because the British could not monitor the production of tea.18
The anxieties over the adulteration and pollution of tea evident in these texts resonate on both individual and political levels. Anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the significance of pollution in relation to cultural taboos concerning food and eating and argues that “the processes of ingestion portray political absorption.”19 The act of consuming, according to this model, creates permeable boundaries between political entities. In Tea: Its Mystery and History, Samuel Day’s fears of adulterated China tea echo his fears of a world polluted by the breakdown of Chinese political and physical boundaries. As China became more and more accessible to foreign trade through trade negotiations and armed conflicts, those boundaries suddenly lost their ability to maintain cultural and racial distinctions: “Who could have thought that the Tea trade was destined to become one of the most important branches of our commerce, and not only so, but to occasion several wars, lead to the extension of our Eastern possessions, and precipitate the great Chinese exodus, which threatens such important results to the Pacific States of America, to Australia, the Polynesian Islands, and possibly to the world at large?” (49). According to Day, although Britain’s power to import tea from China symbolized one of the great achievements for British culture, the success of the tea trade threatened to dilute that power within the world. Not only would British consumers be polluted by adulterated, poisoned Chinese tea, but the world at large was in danger, according to Day, of being polluted by the disintegration of Chinese boundaries and the influx of previously isolated Chinese individuals into the rest of the world.
Day particularizes the Chinese threat by focusing on Chinese tea dealers, and he describes their acts of adulteration as “nefarious” (91) and “reprehensible” (92). A similarly frightening portrait of an English nation threatened by malicious, unscrupulous Chinese brokers and policy makers can be found in Cannon Schmitt’s analysis of Thomas de Quincey’s works. As Schmitt recounts, much of the tea flowing into Great Britain was financed by the British cultivation and sale of opium to China. Officially, the Chinese government discouraged and even outlawed the importation of opium, but these efforts were effectively overruled by a combination of British commercial tactics and a population of addicted Chinese opium smokers. Analyzing De Quincey’s writings, including several bellicose essays on the Opium Wars, Schmitt argues that De Quincey (and other writers at the time) emphasized Britain’s vulnerability to justify and legitimate British commercial and military aggression against China.20 According to Schmitt, creating a picture of a fragile, feminine nation helped to authorize the Opium Wars, which were intended to force China to open its trading policies and ensure both British access to Chinese goods and a continuing market for British exports.
Reversing the threat by imagining Chinese aggression against the rest of the world is a tactic that occurs in many texts of the period. Howard Mackey has analyzed essays on China and the Orient that appeared in the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review in the years leading up to the Opium Wars. Mackey quotes from an anonymous essay published in the Edinburgh Review in July 1821, two months prior to the publication of the first installment of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821): “China swallows up about one-tenth of the habitable globe; and contains, at the lowest estimation, one-fourth of the population of the whole earth.”21 In this essay, the monolithic presence of China “swallows up” a huge proportion of the world, signifying in a similar way that it could begin consuming larger and larger portions, eventually threatening England’s borders. This essay presages De Quincey’s anxieties concerning the vast and unpredictable nature of the Orient; for De Quincey, “Southern Asia is . . . the part of the earth most swarming with human life,” and thus its population could potentially swarm across its borders and toward Europe at any moment (Confessions, 108). The Orient is pictured, in these two descriptions, as incredibly unstable and active, through its swarming and swallowing: an unseen but palpably felt threat to the rest of the world. The image of “swallowing” calls to mind the literal act of swallowing the countless cups of Chinese tea—tea grown by Chinese planters, manufactured by Chinese tea producers, and sold to the British by Chinese brokers. Rhetoric reversing this image by picturing China swallowing the rest of the world can be seen as a political strategy intended to displace more-literal anxieties of drinking, swallowing, and polluting English bodies with Chinese tea.22
Reestablishing National Boundaries with “Pure Tea”
To combat the problem of permeable political boundaries, Samuel Day proposes a strategy of reinstating boundaries that had become too dangerously porous—a strategy that emphasizes the opacity and tenacity of ideological boundaries of race and ethnicity. In his text, Day encourages his readers to rely on the trustworthiness of English merchants to protect the English public from the unscrupulous practices of Chinese tea manufacturers. Reinserting unalterable differences of race into what had become a largely political and commercial transaction refocuses the debate concerning Chinese tea. Reflecting the corporate sponsorship of his text, Day specifically recommends one particular English merchant to uphold the purity of English tea—Horniman’s Pure Tea.
Horniman’s Pure Tea prided itself upon the purity of its tea, and that depended on a new Victorian innovation in tea sales—prepackaged tea.23 Previously, all tea had been sold in bulk form, blended and packaged by local grocers for individual customers. Horniman’s message, according to Denys Forrest, a twentieth-century tea historian, was that “the consumer buying a packet of Horniman’s tea in its foil-lined paper wrapping was getting a hygienically protected, uniformly weighed quantity of unadulterated leaf” (Forrest, Tea for the British, 132). Placing concerns about hygiene within an imperial context, Anne McClintock argues that late nineteenth-century packaging innovations encouraged brand recognition and, what was perhaps more important, signified Victorian interest in sanitizing products that had come from the “dirty” empire and had been handled by tradesmen.24 The introduction of individually wrapped packages of Horniman’s Pure Tea functioned as a reaffirmation of a physical barrier between Chinese tea and English tea drinkers. Because the boundaries separating the Chinese and the British were beginning to falter, as more Chinese ports opened to foreign trade and Chinese exports of tea continued to increase, British tea merchants erected new boundaries closer to home—“sealed packets,” paper packaging, and certifications of purity.25 Packaging inventions helped further the construction of tea as the English national beverage, increasing the distance between the dangerous, racially other Chinese producer and the innovative, certifiably hygienic English tea dealer.
Day’s position reflects his commitment to the free trade capitalism that followed the 1833 dissolution of the East India
