How A Taste For Chinese Tea Minted America’s First Millionaires
Nina Martyris
“China, China, China,” rants Donald Trump, the presidential hopeful who loses no opportunity to blame America’s economic woes on China and its “unfair” trade policies. But how did the fortunes of the free world and the Middle Kingdom become so inextricably intertwined? What started it all?
The roots of U.S.-China trade can be boiled down to one fragrant little word: tea. The history of the tea trade is a fascinating story of wealth, adventure and cultural exchange, but also a tragic one of human suffering and cruelty.
Although many Americans gave up tea as an unpatriotic beverage after the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and turned to coffee, the majority still craved it. And it was this overwhelming demand for tea that motivated the newly independent United States, finally free from the monopolistic clutches of Britain’s East India Company, to sail to China in search of it.
On a beautiful February morning in 1784, the first American trade ship to China, Empress of China, set sail from New York. To pay for the tea, its holds were filled with 242 casks of choice New England and Appalachian ginseng, for which there was an enormous demand in China. Everything about that maiden voyage was symbolic: Feb. 22 was George Washington’s birthday; a 13-gun salute was fired to represent the 13 states; the two goods being bartered were indigenous to the two countries.
“It amounted to an economic Declaration of Independence — a commercial counterpart to the purely political Declaration of 1776,” John Haddad, author of America’s Adventures in China, tells The Salt.