Tea, pith, and monkey business.

It affords a luxury to the rich, and a blessing to the poor; and the moral effect of the beverage, as preventing recourse to stronger stimulants, is indubitable.... The deprivation of the article of tea would be of no slight importance." So wrote a contributor to the Illustrated London News in February 1857, extolling the virtues of tea. Where it could be afforded, the taking of tea had come to replace the drinking of ale as a healthy alternative to the disease-laden public water supply. The newspaper text was illustrated with a woodcut of a young woman said to be gathering tea (Fig. 3)--though in fact she was picking mulberry leaves to feed silkworms.

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The woodcut was taken from a Chinese gouache (Fig. 4) that itself was based on a drawing of a woman picking mulberry leaves (Fig. 1), one of the depictions of the "360 Professions" found in three albums from the studio of the painter Tingqua, who was active in Canton (now Guangzhou) from the 1830s to 1870. (1) Tingqua worked for the Western market and these albums were used as pattern books to show prospective customers the sort of thing that could be painted to order. (2) The gouache is executed on pith, a natural material cut from the inner spongy tissue of Tetrapanax papyrifera, a small tree native to the uplands of southwestern China and Taiwan and used as an inexpensive alternative to paper by Chinese artists painting works for export in the nineteenth century.

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