Matthew

‘A Sort of Tea from China’, c. 1700, a material survival of Britain’s encounter with tea in the late seventeenth century. e specimen was acquired by James Cuninghame, a physician and ship’s surgeon who visited Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698–9 and Chusan (Zhoushan) in 1700–1703.

We encounter ‘Vegetable Substance 857’ on a visit to the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum in London.

Today, the Vegetable Substances share a section of the Darwin Centre’s eighth floor with Sloane’s vast herbarium, also known as a hortus siccus or ‘dried garden’.