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Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

Essay on Tea

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Risks of Drinking Tea
Debates about the possible health risks or virtues of Chinese tea date to its first appearance in Europe, and with everyone drinking increased amounts, the debates crystallized into dominant discourses. In American press in the decades preceding the conflict with England, these discourses were primarily negative.
In 1725 a New England Courant editor reports on several letters he had lately received complaining of wives’ idleness due to excessive tea drinking, and the toll all this takes on husbands’ purses.
In 1731, one doomsayer in New York wrote:
A real Concern for my Fellow Creatures makes me give you this Trouble. I should think myself happy if I could persuade them from a custom of a fatal Consequence (I mean habitual Tea-Drinking) which so universally prevails among us. Were it only the Consideration of so much expended on what is absolutely unnecessary, it would not give me much Concern…But when not only their Fortunes, but their Health and Happiness are in Danger, I think it my Duty openly to forewarn them, and endeavour as much as in me lies, to prevent their Ruins….The continual pouring into the Body such quantities of what (if not much worse) is no better than Warm Water….Nor does the Body suffer alone, the Soul also is hindered in the free Performance of its Functions." (highlights added)
What is meant here in associating tea drinking with a “fatal consequence”? By sipping tea, it appears, English people could actually become Chinese, prone to idolatrous and indolent Chinese habits, which would ultimately promote the need for a despotic system of government, just as it had everywhere in Asia. Valiant and masculine officers would of necessity be sent to America to subjugate and enchain an enthralled, feminized people under the spell of a tainted Eastern potion—people who had in fact lost their very souls to drinking tea.
Books found in American libraries in the 18^th century including Abraham Redwood’s in Newport and Benjamin Franklin’s circulating library in Philadelphia, warned of the dire consequences of tea drinking to masculinity especially. Simon Paulli, A Treatise on Tobacco, Tea, Coffee and Chocolate, London, 1746, compared tea drinking to the “bleeding” away of masculine vigor. The author advised against exchanging “our salutary Regimen for that of the Asiatics and Chinese by following their custom of drinking tea”
In a 1757 essay on Tea author Jonas Hanway states:
Sipping tea…has prevailed over a great part of the world; but the most effeminate people on the face of the whole Earth, whose example we, as a WISE, ACTIVE, and WARLIKE nation, would least desire to imitate, are the greatest sippers; I mean the CHINESE…that it is below their dignity to perform any MANLY Labour, or indeed any Labour at all: and yet, with regard to the custom of sipping tea, we seem to act more wantonly and absurd than the CHINESE themselves."
By sipping tea, English people could actually become like the Chinese, weak and prone to indolent Chinese habits. Women would neglect their household duties, as seen in this image in their unmended clothing and untended children ready to go up in flames. Their home and business was equally at risk as men in the thrall of tea became to weak to work, resulting in dilapidated buildings. Wealth would be lost as bags of precious money leave English soil to pay for Asian commodities. In this popular scenario, tea drinking became associated with wantonness, effeminacy, and loss of control. Such scenes were graphically depicted by English artist William Hogarth. In his 1740 image "Taste in High Life," Hogarth portrays a man with a Chinese queue and tiny porcelain tea set in a nursery childlike setting, enfeebled by his slavish devotion to female fashion. His body type and general appearance are not unlike depictions of Chinese men in popular chinoiserie drawings. A year or two later in "Marriage a la Mode, Hogarth again portrays a man depleted by tea and his tea drinking female companion. Here a visibly exhausted man slouches at the tea table, his sword broken at his feet, while his wife, coquette under her mantel of Chinese idols is ready to squander more of his wealth and his clerks exits stage right bemoaning his lost estate.
By enfeebling a nation of men, tea drinking would ultimately promote the need for a despotic system of government, just as it had everywhere in Asia. Valiant and masculine officers would of necessity be sent to America to subjugate and enchain an enthralled, feminized people under the spell of a tainted Eastern potion. This anxiety about men becoming emasculated by slavish consumption of Asian goods increased in America as tensions increased with England, the Mother of the global trade in tea.