"In 1700, a pound of leaves for which a Chinese peasant was paid one penny sold in European shops for about 3 pounds. By 1800, that price had plummeted 95% to about three shillings, making tea affordable for most citizens. In 1700, only the wealthiest drank tea; at mid-century, most members of the bourgeoisie (including, famously, Dr. Johnson) consumed it regularly; by 1800 it was swilled even in the workhouses...
The East India company more than made up for the drop in price with the rise in volume, which over the eighteenth century rose from fifty tons per year to fifteen thousand...
Because tea was relatively cheap at its source in China, it was served there lukewarm with little aplomb in a handle-less cup. The Japanese, because of its expense, poured it with far greater ceremony and Europeans served it hot so as to quickly dissolve the sugar used to make it palatable to the Western tongue. This custom required a new invention: the cup handle.
The handle-less Chinese cups stacked easily and could be shipped as ballast and sold for a few pence. The handles were added later, and by the mid-eighteenth century, handle makers had become a fixture in most large European cities...
[from A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, by William J. Bernstein, Atlantic Monthly Press, N.Y., 2008.] (photo credit here)
A very interesting subject, but William J. Bernstein's prose is somewhat ambiguous when he says "The handle-less Chinese cups stacked easily and could be shipped as ballast and sold for a few pence. The handles were added later, and by the mid-eighteenth century, handle makers had become a fixture in most large European cities..."
ReplyDeleteIn fact, the handle-less imported chinese cups remained handle-less. As the fledgling porcelain manufactories of europe grew, they made cups and adorned them with handles.
But there is no evidence to suggest some kind of "retro-fitting" of handles to imported tea bowls. Chinese makers added handles as required to fill export orders. Those handles tended to resemble the handles on current european silver items.
Whilst it is stated that chinese ware was shipped as ballast, this too is not quite true.
Porcelain wares were immensely valuable when they arrived in europe, so much so that the crowned heads and aristocracies of europe paid, cajoled and imprisoned men they thought capable of creating locally made versions of the mysterious new material. It was not seen as pottery, for pottery was thick, heavy, and opaque, unlike the pale, translucent china which rang clearly, like a bell, when struck.
No surprise then that the chief experimenters in the new material were not potters, but alchemists.
The porcelain and the tea were co-shipped in a strangely satisfying and symbiotic way: the pots were loaded into tea-chests and barrels on a bed of dry tea-leaves, and layered over until covered, then the next stack, then more tea.
In that way, one cargo protected the other.
If you want to know more about the values of porcelain in the early days, look up Bottger the alchemist, Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, and the origins of Meissen porcelain.
We visited the museum at Ancient Elis on the Pelopeonnese yesterday and saw a typical English-style teacup with a handle. It was made of clay in about 1300 BC! No photos allowed unfortunately, but proof that cups with handles existed long before tea came to Europe.
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