well thank you all for coming i'll try to stay close to the microphone but i may wander over to the picture to point things occasionally and this is a subject i'm not a historian i'm a freelance writer and this is a subject i wrote about in detail a few years ago for smithsonian magazine and i've continued to be interested in this partly because i'm a member of the p b s sex museum and partly because there's so many left over so many traces of the china trade still you can see and visit in the greater boston area and this of course is a reenactment of the boston tea party when you hear about the tea party here that the issue that aggravated the colonist and seven hundred seventy three was it was a matter of taxation without representation which is true but the underlying issue really was england did let american colonists sail to china if we if we wanted to buy t v and americans by the late seventeen hundreds of are addicted to t v you had to buy t that have been shipped from china to end and then shipped again from england here so you were paying for a middleman in addition to the tax and that it was probably stale and as soon as the revolution was over i mean even before the treaty of yorktown was signed in seventy three people began making plans to sell directly to china for the first time we're free of things and you know england allowed us to trade with the west indies but not the east indies and that changed after the revolution now you can see this is a map from just before the revolution european map and you see it's labeled east indies that's it today that would mean the islands around the malay peninsula indonesia but east indies or east india and the eighteenth century really meant this whole region south asia india southeast asia philippines the spice islands around java and then china and this trade has been going on for centuries and when the united states got involved in the time i'm really going to focus on is the heyday of the early china trade you know we created the first body of financial fat cats in america the first group of millionaires this country ever seen and one thing you'll notice in  this the sure of india for example is extremely detailed you know you can tell that sailors knew every port and islands are very detail batavia modern danger corridor but if you look at china it's empty top of the pearl river delta this was the only port for centuries that have been open to western trade at all you can see at the mouth as the pearl river there on the west even though it's been six seven months coming here only the captain and the supercargo would be the business manager aboard a ship and other dignitaries could come ashore and even then only for two or three weeks at the house and the trading room where westerners would count and make deals with their chinese counterparts on the second floor would be sleeping quarters where these americans could stay for tired produces all that we ourselves need but since our tea rhubarb and silk seem to be necessary to the very existence of the barbarous western peoples we will imitating the clemency of heaven who tolerates all sorts of fools carcajou aboard one of those trips to build a scale model natural three an actual scale model ship while they were selling and naval architects recently used that model  reconstruct the ship and this is one hundred thirty feet long which makes it thirty feet longer than the typical east indian from the us in the period i'm talking about english ships are much bigger  drop and if you had a huge ship it could be a real disaster if you committed to filling it with the wrong thing and very often i should mention what these ships would and eventually they will go to china and each step what you want to do is leave home with something that was cheap and abundant like soccer and you'd sell somewhere where that same product was scarce and expensive and train they didn't want barrels of beef and brining it on crates of ladies boots or kegs of nails and stuff that you could sell in lots of parts of the world use for things are all things that china that was all fun but it didn't make a dent in the intrigue and balance of developed with china because a lot of silver dollars were flowing from here to there and you can't buy silver coming out of china so americans imagine that it was itself a place of great luxury he's just these key containers give you an idea of how  would you like to come up and pick up your tea on chesterton's just like this but we have the real mccoy here from george packer this gives you an idea just in a nutshell of how  desirable he was you know what i think of the tea i have in my house i have boxes in my pantry they're way past their sell by date but two hundred years ago you locked unity you didn't want your service to help themselves when you were l and again you know later on england improved its ways of making china staffordshire china became big but in seventy nine e one hundred ten there is no substitute for chinese ceramics and you could tea in china not at all this is totally made for the western trade this is an english style tea party and here's some paint last year where probably sixteen piece service in a niche had to hell been beverly really historical society and the idea would be it was cheap enough even though you know three dollars was a lot more money and eight hundred is today is still within reach for even a prosperous farm family to have imported chinaware and the third general category of sort of book goods there would be considered luxury goods where so other kinds of cost to win especially so i don't really have a good picture so trouble with silk is a wore out and a t was drunk up so most of what we have is china where you think about export hard you think about chinese goods from the days of the all chin china i would look at this is propaganda to help sales this is a time when when people thought about cloth production he thought of the english factories which is where the in seventy nine nine he was probably america's first millionaire this is an ad for india goods from one of his ships that did come back from india in seventy nine one and i should mention that we talk about the china trade in terms of total volume and number of trips there was more trade with india than with china the difference was india in tea from china if you had a good enough cargo you could actually retire after one trip not so in your goods but remember the earlier ad from in law was king dirty sister and i think there was some other connection they were just so in are married they're like the royal families of europe but they lose each other enough that they would sue each other and you know somebody's daughter worth twelve feet too long you have to take the end of they would go to each other's you know rules you know right down the street and jacob was appointed our secretary of the navy but thomas jefferson he turned him down said well why don't you ask my brother ben so artificial curiosities which is really in the days before history books which are just starting to be written this is how our people show their reference to history by collecting pieces of brain showing it to people  and then just stop letting it circulate otherwise or pass it around it's very cool so this is just some sample pages you see a fishing line made of the intestines of an animal someone bring nothing home captain don't do it and put it in place and some of these things are still on this play in the hall granite heart of the museum an ornament made of human hair and a little further down several swallows now from s ra eaten by the chinese and soups you know this is educational but still that wasn't the point that was something on the side you did as part of your duties of belonging to this society you didn't sell halfway around the world to collect stuff like that you said halfway around the world which is a dangerous thing to do to get rich and to get very rich these people wanted to make a killing off and were sea captains by the time they were nine hundred twenty and they were ready to retire at thirty of course these are the ones we know about the victors write the history books right the people that lost everything you know we don't know about them they didn't leave us mansions and then talk about it in this one back to some farm but these are peppercorns and this was the first burst of real wealth in salem king much as he could on the ship the russia pepper in those days was not a spice really it was actually a preservatives and the time before refrigeration was a way to slow down the rate at which meat  spoiled so it was very desirable people would import it here and then really export it to italy for example and the rajah saw this pepper for seven times the value of the outgoing cargo including the with all these other sailing boats riding at anchor and a malay trader said the captain still must be a great nation just judging by all the books so these are some othe people had so much money they didn't even know what to spend it on you go in the garden or painting the house it's like every surface is carved but unfortunately gardner had some reverses and  decided to go himself as a merchant on one last voyage actually to europe for a very rich cargo that would make himself whole this is just before the work of eighteen twelve a british warship mind that kind of thing did happen and as far as you know the manor as everything this is king derby's teahouse he had family mcintyre the famous architect built for him and this summer a city where the north shore m and shipmaster usually would have a certain amount of cargo room a lot of to them where they could do their own trading on the side not was a big part of how they got wealthy but also sometimes it is one seniors and the most popular things little tiny cameo and i think it's pretty good it's in a western style these people study what the westerners liked this would not be the way chinese painter repeat for a chinese market a chinese custom he would lend money to traders he knew a fair right for an agreed upon cargo that you couldn't afford it entirely he even gave john kerry for a small fortune in silver can see the person you want to deal with in china he was said to have twenty six million dollars in his own account even after paying these fines of his twenty six million silver dollars and his only account in the eight hundred thirty four that's true he was the richest man in china and therefore the richest man in the world and this was a gift by the way augusta heard of ipswich was one of the people that really relied on and stop me if you've heard all this before because i'm sure you've had meetings about cushing since belmont is named after his estate but  been in real estate real roads manufacturing very well connected and he sent his nephew to china when christian was sixteen years old to work as a clerk in a shop that  there and more people were hired christian was promoted came up partner i have to say does any has anyone here ever seen a picture of john perkins  no pictures i've never found one so let's pretend he's in the middle of this picture this is a british painting from a thousand other fires this is two years after christian came to china with he and one of the things he and his cousin later stretch his legs if he was invited this was a whole place of tropical splendor with ornamental trees and fountains and canals and chinese bridges pavilions  picture is actually from an eight hundred forty one book of landscape by many andrew jackson county which was the best sellers the first american book on landscape or use christians garde you know just like gardeners out one last voyage how to make up for my losses guess and other people like you know perkins who retired early or jay to crime you know they come back and run for congress or run for  in china he's not just black ben and he made a fortune but he was a full ship master of the age of nineteen a really good sailor he made a lost it went back to china made another fortune this is war and franklin delano roosevelt was about a grandmother who is c e o russell and company and you might ask yourself what's going on out of this period where they're making fortunes coming home losing them here and just selling back to china and if you know your fortune what exactly are they selling opium and at this point this is really different from the first wave in the twenty's eight hundred thirty s and the beauty of opium from the point of view of the people trafficking and it was it created its own market i told you the chinese are really picky and it was hard  mention that trade with china continued of course and we got bigger and bigger because less glamorous this is probably the last sailing ship sailing ship to go to the east this is the pan in eight working for chinese merchants carrying stuff from one part of china if you want to see the china trade ship today this is th