A tea chest label at Boston's Old South Meeting House was long presented as a relic of the Boston Tea Party. New research by Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, suggests otherwise. The label, donated in 1987 by descendants of Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells, was said to have been recovered after protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. After a year of research, Brown concluded it was actually made nearly a century later.
The decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as earlier scholars had done. The characters were used phonetically to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that shipped Asian tea to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s. Working with the Wells family, Brown traced the label to a relative who traveled to California during the Gold Rush era and later operated a business known as the California Tea Store.
Brown argues that claims of a revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s. He says the discovery does not make the label historically insignificant. Instead, it shows how ordinary objects acquire historical authority and how historical memory itself is made. History, he suggests, is never finished: even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal new stories when asked new questions.