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A sample of loose leaf ‘Russian tea’
A small sample of loose-leaf tea raises more questions than can be answered: is it Queen Mary tea or Russian? Was it produced in Britain, Russia, or as the catalogue record suggests, in Tibet? What is its story?
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The Tea Horse Road
Michael Freeman, photographer and author of ‘Tea Horse Road: China’s Ancient Trade Road to Tibet’, explores the pressed tea bricks in MAA’s collections and the longest trade route in the ancient world.
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Brick Tea and Currency
By Aayushi Gupta In my previous blog post on this object, I pursued one of the clues found on the label on its back. That label also gave us another clue – ‘Given to me by A.C. Haddon 29 Dec 1900’. Who was this tea brick given to? Why did Haddon give it to them?…
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‘Square Face’: Gin, Currency, and Colonialism in Africa
By Mark Elliott A bottle of European gin made its way from Germany to Nigeria, where it was collected by an English missionary. Discover it’s stories of trade in West Africa, currencies, colonial exploitation, Christianity, traditional African religious practices, sociality, alcohol consumption and prohibition.
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The Russian Brick Tea Trade in Hankou, China
By Aayushi Gupta In the object collections at MAA I found nine tea bricks – six from China, two from Tibet, and one unknown source. Encountering Russian inscriptions, however, did not make sense; were tea bricks produced in Russia? Where did they travel, and how did they get there?
Welcome to the MAA Digital Lab
MAA Digital Laboratory 