Descendants of Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label to the Old South Meeting House in 1987, saying it had been recovered during the destruction of British tea in 1773. Because so few objects from the protest survive, the label appeared to offer a rare material connection to the event. The decisive clue lay hidden in its Chinese text. Earlier researchers had approached the text through Mandarin, but Brown found that one sequence of characters was being used phonetically. Read in Cantonese, it rendered the name 'Smith, Archer,' identifying Smith, Archer & Co., an American trading firm active in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s. The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant. Instead, it reveals a different story ' one connecting Chinese migration, Pacific commerce, family memory, and the ways Americans constructed the history of the Revolution. Brown presents his open-access findings in 'Tea Chest Label,' published July 3 in the June 2026 issue of...
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