MIT Historian Dates Boston Tea Party Label to 1860s, Not 1773

Brown’s decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done, MIT Technology Review reported. He found that the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for shipment to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s.

Working with the Wells family, Brown traced the label to a relative who traveled from Michigan to California during the Gold Rush era before returning and operating a business known as the California Tea Store. Brown argues that claims for the label’s revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s.

Brown says the discovery does not make the label historically insignificant. What began as an inquiry into a supposed artifact of the Boston Tea Party became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made. “History is never finished,” he said. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.”