Yiyun Huang
Yiyun Huang is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of History, Wuhan University. He earned his PhD in early American history from the same institution in 2023. He is currently working on his first book which examines the medicinal exchanges between late imperial China and early North America. It seeks to explain how and why the ideas of tea as medicine transferred from China via Europe to early America. His research has received support from the American Historical Association, the Omohundro Institute, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Antiquarian Society, among others.
Wuhan University
Session
This paper analyzes how Chinese ideas about tea’s healing properties fit into Western medicine. It seeks to explain how and why 17th and 18th-century Europeans adopted or refused to incorporate Chinese tea as medicine. It argues that the rise of empirical science as well as race and gender factored into European scholars’ decision to whether embrace or denounce tea. Late Ming and Qing China (from 1600 to 1800) monopolized the production of tea and the associated medicinal knowledge such as how to make tea-based remedies. Through transoceanic commercial and religious networks, Jesuit missionaries as well as British and Dutch naturalists brought Chinese information and conviction about tea as medicine back to the Atlantic World. This body of knowledge was diffused in Western Europe widely through printed texts and prompted different responses among scholars.
There were debates among three groups of European intellectuals over tea’s health benefits. Cosmopolitans such as British translator John Chamberlayne embraced Chinese ideas of tea’s curative effects. Skeptics, then, did not trust these ideas. Physicians such as Thomas Short studied tea within the Galenic humoral framework and used chemical experimentations to observe and determine its medicinal efficacy. Additionally, the parochial such as British merchant Jonas Hanway were vehemently against the consumption of Chinese tea on the basis of racialized and gendered ideologies. While the debates went on until the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of tea as medicine gained a dominant position as the skeptics agreed that tea had healing properties.