Tea as a Metaphor

“I will discuss the history of tea in greater detail at a later time,” Afong Moy announces to her audience in The Chinese Lady, after demonstrating the proper way to pour and drink Chinese tea. 

It’s 1834, and Afong Moy has been performing this ritual for crowds who pay 25 cents to watch her eat, walk, and pour tea in her ornate museum room. The tea ceremony is part of her exhibition, a window into “exotic” Chinese culture for Americans who have never seen someone like her. But when she returns to the subject of tea later in the play, the lesson is darker than anyone expected. 

“Tea is Chinese,” she tells us. “It is ancient and traditional and ours.” But when the British encountered Chinese tea in 1615, they didn’t just admire it, they claimed it, and built their entire culture around it. And when China wouldn’t give them what they wanted, they went to war for it.

Twice.

Tea, in The Chinese Lady, is more than a beverage. It’s a metaphor for cultural appropriation, colonial violence, and the fine line between appreciation and exploitation. And to understand why Afong Moy keeps returning to tea throughout the play, we need to understand tea’s own complicated journey from China to the rest of the world. 

Tea Is Chinese

For almost 5,000 years, tea has been woven into the fabric of Chinese life, culture, and philosophy. According to legend, the Chinese emperor Shen Nong discovered tea by accident around 2737 BCE when a leaf from a wild tea bush fell into his pot of boiling water. By the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), tea had evolved from a medicinal drink to an art form, elevated to Cha Dao, “the Way of Tea,” a meditative practice rooted in Taoist and Buddhist principles.

Tea marked weddings, festivals, and family gatherings, accompanied scholarly pursuits, fueled late-night poetry sessions, and provided comfort in times of grief. Tea wasn’t just a drink, it was a language, a philosophy, a way of honoring the everyday as sacred.The culture was as complex and layered as the beverage itself. 

And then the British arrived. 

Tea Becomes “British”

In 1615, British traders encountered Chinese tea for the first time, roughly 4,300 years after the Chinese had discovered it. Within decades, it became an obsession that would reshape British culture and China’s fate. 

By the 18th century, tea was so integral to British life that they built elaborate rituals around it. But here’s what they rarely acknowledged, if at all: every leaf, every technique, every tradition they claimed as their own came from China first. The British didn’t invent tea culture, they imported it, repackaged it, and erased its origins so thoroughly that many people today think of tea as quintessentially English. The problem was that Britain had no tea of its own. And China, unimpressed by British goods, wasn’t interested in trading. So Britain did what colonial powers do: they found a way to take it by force. 

Enter the Opium Wars. 

The Cost of Tea

Britain’s solution was opium. Grown in British-controlled India, opium flooded into China. By the early 19th century, millions of Chinese people were addicted. The drug devastated families, drained the economy, and destabilized communities.

When the Qing Dynasty tried to stop the opium trade, Britain declared war, not once, but twice. The result was catastrophic. The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 forced China to cede Hong Kong, open ports to foreign trade, and pay massive reparations. A second war in 1856 brought even more humiliating terms. China didn’t just lose land, it lost sovereignty. The Opium Wars shattered the Qing Dynasty’s authority and plunged the nation into what historians call the “Century of Humiliation,” a period of foreign domination, and profound national trauma that would last until 1949.

This is the history Afong Moy references when she says: “Is this not comforting? That one culture can be so moved by another that it simply cannot resist the urge to appropriate it for themselves?”

It’s a devastating line, delivered with a smile. Because Afong Moy knows what the audience doesn’t yet: there’s a difference between sharing and taking.

Sharing vs. Taking

Cultural exchange can be beautiful. When one culture is moved by another’s traditions with respect and acknowledgement, something new and meaningful can emerge. But The Chinese Lady forces us to ask: What happens when “exchange” is actually extraction? When appreciation becomes appropriation? When curiosity becomes exploitation? 

Afong Moy was brought to America in 1834, sold by her family for two years of service to traders Nathaniel and Frederick Carnes. She was fourteen years old and her job was to educate white audiences about Chinese culture: to pour tea, to walk on her bound feet, to eat with chopsticks, while strangers paid 25 cents to stare. The Carnes brothers promised it would lead to “greater understanding and goodwill between China and America.” Whether Afong Moy believed this, we’ll never know as there are almost no records of her own words or thoughts. But Lloyd Suh’s play imagines her journey, giving her a voice that history denied. 

The British took tea and erased its origins. Americans took Afong Moy and turned her into a spectacle. In both cases, something sacred was transformed into a commodity. And the people who created it were left invisible.

Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady

Tea tells Afong Moy’s story, about being looked at but never seen. About having your culture admired and stolen in the same breath. About the violence that often hides beneath the language of “cultural appreciation.”

Today, we still wrestle with these questions. When does appreciation cross into appropriation? Who gets to profit from culture, and who gets left behind? What do we owe to the origins of the things we consume? The Chinese Lady doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it invites us to sit with discomfort, to look at Afong Moy, really look at her, and ask ourselves: Are we truly seeing her, or just watching?