GoKawiilMIT historian dates Boston Tea Party chest label to 1860s, not 1773
Tristan Brown, an MIT history professor, spent a year investigating a Chinese tea chest label held at Old South Meeting House, long believed to be debris from the 1773 Boston Tea Party and donated by descendants of blacksmith Thomas Wells in 1987. By reading the inscription as Cantonese rather than Mandarin, Brown determined the characters phonetically spelled out Smith, Archer & Co., a US tea trading firm active in the 1860s and 1870s, meaning the label postdates the Tea Party by nearly a century.