China and the West

Hunt, Leigh. Tea-drinking [ID D31310].
The very word tea. so petty, so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of something inexpressibly minute and satisfied with a little {tee !), resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mistaken one) of that extraordinary people, of whom Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors, have a language consisting only of a few hundred words, gave us China-ware and the strange pictures on our tea-cups, made a certain progress in civilisation long before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no further, and, if numbers and the customs of "venerable ancestors" are to carry the day, are at once the most populous and the most respectable nation on the face of the earth. As a population they certainly are a most enormous and wonderful body ; but, as individuals, their ceremonies, their triflingedicts, their jealousy of foreigners, and their tea-cup representations of themselves (which are the only ones popularly known), impress us irresistibly with a fancy that they are a people all toddling, little-eyed, little-footed, little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overweening, pig-tailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and temples with bells at every corner and story, and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over "nine-inch bridges," with little mysteries of bell-hung whips in their hands, — a boat, or a house, or a tree, made of a pattern, being over their heads or underneath them (as the case may happen), and a bird as large as the boat, always having a circular white space to fly in. Such are the Chinese of the tea-cups and the grocers' windows, and partly of their own novels too, in which everything seems as little as their eyes, little odes, little wine-parties, and a series of little satisfactions. However, it must be owned, that from these novels one gradually acquires a notion that there is a great deal more good sense and even good poetry among them than one had fancied from the accounts of embassies and the autobiographical paintings on the China-ware ; and this is the most probable supposition. An ancient and great nation, as civilised as they, is not likely to be so much behind-hand with us in the art of living as our self-complacency leads us to imagine. If their contempt of us amounts to the barbarous, perhaps there is a greater share of barbarism than we suspect in our scorn of them.
At all events, it becomes us to be grateful for their tea. What a curious thing it was, that all of a sudden the remotest nation of the East, otherwise unknown, and foreign to all our habits, should convey to us a domestic custom which changed the face of our morning refreshments ; and that, instead of ale and meat, or wine, all the polite part of England should be drinking a Chinese infusion, and setting up earthenware in their houses, painted with preposterous scenery !...
But to the right tea-drinker, the cup, we see, contains not only recollections of eminent brethren of the bohea, but the whole Chinese nation, with all its history, Lord Macartney included ; nay, for that matter, Ariosto and his beautiful story of Angelica and Medoro ; for Angelica was a Chinese ; and then collaterally come in the Chinese neighbours and conquerors from Tartary, with Chaucer's and the travels of Marco Polo and others, and the Jesuit missionaries, and the Japanese with our friend Golownin, and the Loo Choo people, and Confucius, whom Voltaire (to show his learning) delights to call by his proper native appellation of Kong-foo-tsee (reminding us of Congo tea) ; and then we have the Chinese Tales, and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, and Goldsmith brings you back to Johnson again and the tea-drinkings of old times ; and then we have the Rape of the Lock before us, with Belinda at breakfast, and Lady Wortley Montague's tea-table eclogue, and the domestic pictures in the Taller and Spectator with the passions existing in those times for china-ware, and Horace Walpole, who was an old woman in that respect ; and, in short, a thousand other memories, grave and gay, poetical and prosaical, all ready to wait upon anybody who chooses to read books, like spirits at the command of the book-readers of old, who, for the advan-
tages they had over the rest of the world, got the title of Magicians. ..