165. Global Tea Initiatives: Horticultural Practice and Gastronomical Perspectives in Tea History. Sponsored by UC Davis Global Tea Initiative

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

As world historians have narrated, tea, along with silk and porcelain, played an integral role in defining imperial China as a crucial node within an early modern network of global trade. Indeed, the imperial edict written in response to Lord Macartney’s 1792 request for economic privileges specified tea as one of three key products in China’s manufacturing advantage. This panel extends this global line of inquiry to the study of tea by broadening the definition of tea beyond its botanical nomenclature of camellia sinensis and beyond its status as an economic commodity. Recognizing tea’s global import, the panel seeks an expanded historical geography of tea by turning an eye to methods taken from histories of art, environment, food science and literary studies. In so doing, the papers together shift historical narratives of tea from an emphasis on tea as consumption to tea as a dynamic force, steeping in flows of social and cultural networks, itself constitutive of individual and collective identities.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Ellen C. Huang, University of California, Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Poetry, Tea, and Landscape in Taiwan at the Turn of the 20th Century - Stephen J. Roddy, University of San Francisco

• The Materiality of Tibetan-Style Tea (Bod Ja) and the Constitution of the Tibetan Subject - Jon Soriano, UC Berkeley

• The Surprisingly Little We Know about Teapots and Trade Routes: Evidence for Trade in Tea and Tea Culture from China to Vietnam in the Late Ming Dynasty - Katharine P. Burnett, University of California, Davis

• Pure Tea and Complexity: Poetic Inscriptions on Qianlong Imperial Teabowls, ca. 1740-1770 - Ellen C. Huang, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant

• Susan Fernsebner, University of Mary Washington