Sun Yat-Sen's Lost Tea and the Cultural Revolution
The first president of China, Sun Yat Sen, was a tea afficiando. So too was the deposed emperor, a teenaged Pu Yi.
The two men, one young, depowered and rigid, one old, benign and relaxed, met under tight security in the summer of 1920, and were seated alone in an isolated and small iron lace pagoda set in a colonial garden of what had been the Czar's Embassy, until abandoned the year before. The two men spent most of a day together in this quiet and pleasant intimacy. The only person who was within ear shot was a beautiful 15 year old Shanghainese girl, who both men complimented on her long eyelashes. The girl was Butterfly Wu, and went on to become a famous Chinese movie star.
In her memoirs, Butterfly Wu says the two idealogical adversaries gave her a gift: a handsome bronze tea pot from the Xian dynasty, the lid sealed in wax bearing the Emperor's calligraphic signature. They told her not to open it until the year 1988 (""8"" being good luck in Chinese numerolgy). Butterfly Wu says the two men placed a message into the pot, signed by the two of them, wrapped around a sheath of fine green tea.
Butterfly Wu kept the pot through out her years of fame, and died in 1961, in poverty arising from the Communist Revolution.
The pot was inherited by her grandson, a capricious man who sold the heirloom (without opening it, realising the seal was worth more unbroken) in 1967 to an antique dealer from San Francisco.
Before the dealer could leave the country with the relic, his shipment was seized by cadres of the Red Guards. The Emperor's seal enraged the political zealots, who threw the teapot into the Yangtze river.
Subsequent dredging of the delta by both the government and private individuals have failed to recover the teapot.
The mystery of the tea leaves, and the message form Sun Yat-sen and the Last Emperor, remains unsolved to this day. Some historians have speculated that the tea was in fact the fabled Phoenix tea, consumed only by Chinese royalty, of which none remains.
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