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Origin and Brief History of
the Tea Caddy
The earliest
storage containers for tea leaves came from China. These were round, square
or flatsided bottle-shaped jars made of pottery or porcelain, and fitted
with lids used to measure their contents. The term "tea caddy" emerged
in the late 1700s. The word "caddy" evolved from the Malay-Chinese word
kati, meaning a measure of about six hundred grams or about twenty-one ounces (1-1/3 pounds) of tea
which filled a single-compartment wooden box.
Beginning in the seventeenth
century many different materials were selected for making tea jars and tea
caddies. Wood, silver, pewter, mother-of-pearl, papier-mache, lacquerware,
and tortoise shell were used in addition to pottery and porcelain, which was
the preferred medium. Tea jars produced at that time were either made in
China for European export or in Europe, modeled on Chinese patterns.
After the reign of George I
(1714 - 1727) tea became more readily available. This auspicious turn of
events led to the development of a tea chest with two separate compartments
-- one chamber for storing green tea (Hyson) and the other for black tea
(Bohea).
The Commutation Act of 1784 was probably the single most
important stimulus in the development of the tea caddy in eighteenth-century Britian. Up to this time,
tea had been so expensive that it could be enjoyed only in small quantities and exclusively by the
elite, who usually kept their tea leaves in beautifully decorated canisters of silver, enamel, or ceramic that were
set into finely made caskets of wood, tortoiseshell, shagreen, or other decorative material. The act reduced the
tax on tea dramatically and so made it more widely available. Not surprisingly, the storage vessels for tea
leaves, produced as part of the tea equipage, became more varied than ever before.
Tea caddies became more
elaborate in the Regency Period (1810 - 1835). While seventeenth-century
Europe favored porcelain tea caddies, the eighteenth century preference
turned to caddies made of fine wood. As well as caskets with removable canisters and sometimes a central glass bowl
either for the mixing of tea or for sugar (another expensive item in the tea ritual), there were now containers with one or two lidded compartments
lined with metal foil. Tea caddies were made in an increasingly wide range of shapes -- oval, round, octagonal,
navette (oval with pointed ends or boat-shaped), serpentine, rectangular or square. Some were made in the shape of fruit
and, like earlier square or rectangular caddies, were fitted with lock and
key to keep the precious contents safe. The area around the keyhole was often decorated with ivory,
mother-of-pearl, or metal. Typical of the last two decades of the eighteenth century were tortoiseshell contrasted with ivory, silver, cut steel,
or mother-of-pearl, papier-mâché or japanned tin with delicately painted borders of classical motifs in tune with the
fashionable style of Robert Adam; and silver decorated with bright-cutting or embossing. Marquetry examples
represented the majority of tea caddies at this point, but there was also an interesting group decorated by amateurs in
the paper filigree technique known as quilling.
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