While much has been written about tea utensils as signs of politeness, by comparison very little has been discussed about the box of tea, an indispensable article in the East India Company’s China trade. Still less has been written about the smallness of the box, which facilitated the movement of tea across ocean and land and shaped the aesthetics of protest in North America. Might the box of tea enable us to reassess how the material culture of an emergent British empire was fundamentally an empire of small things? This chapter analyzes smallness as the hallmark of a British colonial aesthetic sharpened by the complexities of the China trade. It examines boxes of tea as maritime merchandise before turning to botanical containers and tea caddies as sites of sensory engagement. Smallness, this chapter contends, emerged as a paradigm of intimacy that embedded an article of botany and commerce into the ebb and flow of domestic life. Like porcelain tea utensils, the small box played its part in tea ceremonies, while securing the careful management of a luxury product.

The eighteenth century has been considered a flourishing era during the Qing dynasty, but the century also witnessed an upsurge in interpersonal violence that triggered a protracted crackdown on crime. Part of a broader ‘legislative turn’, Qing rulers responded with legislation that fine-tuned existing laws, created new offences, restricted pardons and expanded the use of the death penalty. By embracing a strategy that deployed the presumed deterrent power of capital punishment, eighteenth-century emperors presented staggering practical and ideological challenges that threatened to overwhelm the judicial bureaucracy. Violent crime exposed fissures in the social order that endangered bedrock principles such as ties of filiation, patriarchal privilege, social hierarchy and female chastity. Evidence gleaned from homicide reports illustrates incidents of horrendous violence that were inextricably linked to macro-economic and demographic changes. The rural poor engaged in survival strategies that were desperate, pathetic and horrifically violent. Unfortunately, the crackdown on crime alone could not adequately address the inequities of eighteenth-century economic and demographic change that undermined social and economic norms, vitiated conventional concepts of justice, and disrupted the ideological consensus of Chinese civilisation.