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Lot Essay
Two fine and rare early 19th-century pictures depicting the delivery and packing of tea in a Canton warehouse. Tea is seen being delivered into a packing hall in canisters and poured into a corner of the hall, before being decanted into lead-lined tea chests and then trodden down before the chests are sealed.
'Hong merchants had warehouses throughout the western suburbs and across the river on Honam (Henan ... ) Island, where they kept their merchandise. They also had a factory in the Thirteen Hong area, where they had living quarters and where foreigners could go to examine their wares.' (P. A. van Dyke and M. Kar-Wing Mok, Images of the Canton Factories 1760-1822, Hong Kong, 2015, p.xix).
Most of the warehouses belonging the Hong merchants were in the western district of Canton, a little away from the Hongs and Old and New China Streets, its neighbouring alleyways lined with shops: 'The shops in the suburbs beyond, in Fan Street, Lantern Street, Physic Street and Rising Dragon Street, also had a great deal to interest the foreigner. In the autumn of 1838, shortly before the 'opium crisis', the English amateur artist William Prinsep, who in Bengal had been a student and patron of George Chinnery, was able to visit a variety of different establishments that were technically out of bounds. Prinsep's memoir recalls that in the company of the French artist Auguste Borget, he 'wandered through the crowded streets behind the European Hongs ... The two artists were received hospitably by the shopkeepers, who served them 'boiling but exquisitely good tea of course without sugar and milk.' ... Prinsep also went to a tea warehouse, where he saw the tea being trodden down into chests by Chinese men whose bare feet 'were sufficiently clean for the purpose.'' (P. Conner, The Hongs of Canton, Western Merchants in South China 1700-1900, as seen in Chinese export paintings, London, 2009, pp.76-7).
'The evidence given by witnesses before the Committee of the House of Commons, appointed in 1847 to enquire into the Commercial Relations with China, contains a great deal of information with regard to British trade with China, and as tea was the chief export, much of the evidence related to that commodity. ... Mr R. M. Martin in his Report on Tea, July 1845, printed in the Committee's proceedings, says:– "It is more than probable that tea has now reached the limit of its consumption in England and that any reduction in taxation ... would not augment the use of this innutritious leaf." The import into England in 1846 was about 56½ million lb.' (J. Orange, The Chater Collection, London, 1924).
'Hong merchants had warehouses throughout the western suburbs and across the river on Honam (Henan ... ) Island, where they kept their merchandise. They also had a factory in the Thirteen Hong area, where they had living quarters and where foreigners could go to examine their wares.' (P. A. van Dyke and M. Kar-Wing Mok, Images of the Canton Factories 1760-1822, Hong Kong, 2015, p.xix).
Most of the warehouses belonging the Hong merchants were in the western district of Canton, a little away from the Hongs and Old and New China Streets, its neighbouring alleyways lined with shops: 'The shops in the suburbs beyond, in Fan Street, Lantern Street, Physic Street and Rising Dragon Street, also had a great deal to interest the foreigner. In the autumn of 1838, shortly before the 'opium crisis', the English amateur artist William Prinsep, who in Bengal had been a student and patron of George Chinnery, was able to visit a variety of different establishments that were technically out of bounds. Prinsep's memoir recalls that in the company of the French artist Auguste Borget, he 'wandered through the crowded streets behind the European Hongs ... The two artists were received hospitably by the shopkeepers, who served them 'boiling but exquisitely good tea of course without sugar and milk.' ... Prinsep also went to a tea warehouse, where he saw the tea being trodden down into chests by Chinese men whose bare feet 'were sufficiently clean for the purpose.'' (P. Conner, The Hongs of Canton, Western Merchants in South China 1700-1900, as seen in Chinese export paintings, London, 2009, pp.76-7).
'The evidence given by witnesses before the Committee of the House of Commons, appointed in 1847 to enquire into the Commercial Relations with China, contains a great deal of information with regard to British trade with China, and as tea was the chief export, much of the evidence related to that commodity. ... Mr R. M. Martin in his Report on Tea, July 1845, printed in the Committee's proceedings, says:– "It is more than probable that tea has now reached the limit of its consumption in England and that any reduction in taxation ... would not augment the use of this innutritious leaf." The import into England in 1846 was about 56½ million lb.' (J. Orange, The Chater Collection, London, 1924).