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 Company’s China monopoly. Prior to 1833, the East India Company held a monopoly on trade with China; after Parliament ended that monopoly, other companies entered the China trade and began importing tea to England. Day argues that the British government, including perhaps the East India Company, had failed to metaphorically maintain the borders between China and England, allowing adulterated tea to be sold to unsuspecting English tea drinkers:
Such an indispensable article as Tea has now become, ought to be trebly guarded against all adulteration. While the Government is unable to protect the public against the machinations of unscrupulous Chinese merchants, let the public at least endeavor to protect itself. And this it can readily accomplish. Let it but bestow its custom on a trader upon whose integrity and technical knowledge it can implicitly rely. Let it insist upon having both its black and green Teas of the natural hue, without the addition of “face,” “glaze,” or artificial colour, which but detract from its character and value. How such a discreet selection can be effected has already been pointed out. Houses of repute—such, for example, as that of Messrs. Horniman and Co.—do not conceal their names behind a retailer, but boldly give their own, coupled with a guarantee to every purchaser, however modest his purchase. (76–77)
Day argues that, since tea is an “indispensable article” of English daily life, the potential adulteration of tea is all the more threatening to the health and culture of the individual tea drinker and of the nation. Day describes the “public” as a unified body with power and discretion, whose role it was, since the government had failed to protect it, to take steps to keep its tea pure and unadulterated. Speaking on behalf of Horniman’s Pure Tea, Day advocates that English consumers should wield their buying power to protect themselves, choosing the purest, highest-quality tea from the most reputable tea merchants.26
The use of packaging and technology to create distance between commodity and consumer existed alongside of nineteenth-century marketing techniques designed to simultaneously bring the exotic Orient closer. Advertisements and grocers’ bills offered illustrations of mountainous tea plantations, pigtailed Chinese laborers plucking and manufacturing the leaves, and Chinese merchants waiting beside the shoreline with crates of tea. Tea histories include descriptions of the careful hand labor performed by Chinese tea pluckers, and they offer engraved illustrations depicting Chinese workers engaged in the various stages of tea production. Once the tea was painstakingly plucked, processed, and shipped to England, it was finally consumed by English tea drinkers in Chinese porcelain cups decorated with the famous blue-and-white stylized Chinese landscapes. These two tendencies—to create distance between England and China, and to simultaneously bring the Orient closer—are not as contradictory as they may seem, since they share the same goal of ameliorating anxieties about the boundaries of English identity. As Laura Ciolkowski argues, commodities can function as agents of border management.27 Thus, representations of Chinese landscapes on Chinese porcelain intended for the consumption of Chinese