The Cultivation and Export of Tea – a set of twenty-four

'Tea, an exotic herbal infusion of largely medicinal aspect when Samuel Pepys noted his first cup in his diary in 1660, had by the second half of the eighteenth century become an indispensible adjunct to civilised life and social intercourse across northern Europe and the east coast of the United States. It formed by far the largest part of the value of the trade with China and would continue to do so well into the nineteenth century, even when the Chinese monopoly on its cultivation was broken by the British establishment of tea plantations in India and Ceylon.' (C. Clunas, Chinese Export Watercolours, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1984, p.23).
The sets of watercolours painted by the Cantonese artists for the western market illustrate the various stages from cultivation and picking to packing and export, the series set in fantastic imagined landscapes, the artists unlikely to have ever visited the tea-growing districts of Fujian, Zhejian and Jiangsu.