A Chinese inscription has debunked the legend surrounding the Boston Tea Party relic

The label was added to the collection of the Old South Meeting House historical museum in Boston in 1987. Descendants of the blacksmith Thomas Wells donated it as an item said to have been saved during the Boston Tea Party.

This made the find particularly valuable. In December 1773, American colonists dumped a shipment of British tea into Boston Harbour in protest against Britain’s tax policies. Very few authentic artefacts that can be definitively linked to this event have survived.

At first, Brown, too, had no doubts about the family account. Moreover, the label had previously been examined by experts associated with the British Museum and Harvard University. They were unable to definitively confirm its 18th-century origin, but neither did they rule out the possibility.

The historian then decided to investigate two things at once: the origin of the artefact itself and the meaning of the Chinese inscription.

Details

It was the inscription that proved to be the key to the mystery.

Previous attempts to interpret it had relied on the pronunciation of the Chinese characters in Mandarin. Brown noticed that one sequence of characters was probably not used in its literal sense, but to represent the sound of a foreign name.

When the researcher read it using the Cantonese pronunciation, the name ‘Smith, Archer’ emerged.

This made it possible to identify the company — Smith, Archer & Co., an American trading firm that was involved in import and export and operated in East Asia in the 1860s and 1870s. In particular, the company purchased Chinese and Japanese tea for shipment to the US.

Consequently, the label could not physically have come from the tea chests destroyed in Boston in 1773.

Brown then attempted to trace the object’s true history.

His research led him to John Milton Wells — a relative of the family who had travelled from Michigan to the San Francisco area during the Gold Rush. On his return home, he went into the food trade, and his business was listed in directories under the name ‘California Tea Store’.

A surviving trading card shows that Wells sold imported Asian tea. The researcher believes that it was through this business that the 19th-century Chinese label may have found its way into the family collection.

In other words, rather than being linked to revolutionary Boston, its history is most likely connected with large-scale trade between East Asia and the US almost a century later.

How the legend of the Boston Tea Party arose

The scholar suggests that the link between the label and the events of 1773 may have arisen much later — against the backdrop of the celebrations marking the centenary of American independence in the 1870s. At that time, many families were particularly keen to emphasise their ancestors’ connection to the founding of the United States.

By the early 20th century, the story had already reached the local press: a newspaper reported that the label had allegedly been removed from a tea chest during the Boston Tea Party.

The gradual repetition of the same version in family stories, newspapers, commemorative events, and later in museum interpretations may have transformed an unconfirmed legend into a story that was perceived as authentic.

However, the research provides no grounds for considering the label to be a deliberate forgery. The artefact itself is genuine — it is the story attributed to it that has proved to be erroneous.

Why this is important

The debunking of the legend has not rendered the label useless to historians. On the contrary, it now tells a different story – one of trade links between China, Japan and the US in the 19th century, the movement of goods across the Pacific Ocean, and how family traditions can, over time, become part of a nation’s historical memory.

The study also demonstrates just how important it can be to re-examine long-established museum objects. In this case, the decisive factor was a combination of archival documents, old trade directories, newspapers and the correct interpretation of the Chinese inscription.

As Brown notes, history is never definitively complete: even objects that have been in museum collections for decades can tell a completely new story if we ask them new questions.

Source

The study by MIT historian Tristan G. Brown, ‘Tea Chest Label’, was published in *The American Historical Review* in 2026. The author investigated the origins of a Chinese label previously linked to the Boston Tea Party by comparing the Chinese inscription with archival materials, trade directories, newspapers and documents from the Wells family.