Here’s the tea
When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story.
当麻省理工学院历史学副教授特里斯坦·布朗（Tristan Brown）首次检查在老南聚会所（Old South Meeting House）展出的一张中国茶叶箱标签时，他没有理由怀疑其背后的故事。
Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. But after a year of research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later.
波士顿铁匠托马斯·威尔斯（Thomas Wells）的后代于1987年捐赠了这张标签，称其是在1773年殖民地抗议者将茶叶倒入波士顿港后被找回的。但经过一年的研究，布朗得出了不同的结论：这张标签是在近一个世纪后制作的。
The decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done. He found that the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for shipment to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s.
决定性的线索在于，他用粤语而非此前学者所用的普通话解读了上面的中文。他发现这些汉字在当时的文献中以略有不同的形式被用作音译，代表了“Smith, Archer & Co.”这家美国公司的名称，该公司在19世纪60年代和70年代收购亚洲茶叶并运往美国市场。
Working with the Wells family, he traced the label to a relative who traveled from Michigan to California during the Gold Rush era before returning and operating a business known as the California Tea Store. Brown argues that claims for its revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s.
通过与威尔斯家族合作，他将这张标签追溯到了一位亲戚身上，此人在淘金热时期从密歇根州前往加利福尼亚州，回乡后经营着一家名为“加州茶叶店”（California Tea Store）的生意。布朗认为，关于其革命性血统的说法很可能是后来在19世纪70年代的百年纪念活动中产生的。
The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant, he says. Instead, what began as an inquiry into a supposed artifact of the Boston Tea Party became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made. “History is never finished,” he says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.”
他说，这一发现并没有使这张标签失去历史意义。相反，这项最初旨在调查波士顿倾茶事件疑似文物的研究，演变成了一项关于普通物品如何获得历史权威，以及历史记忆本身是如何形成的研究。“历史永远不会终结，”他说，“当我们提出新的问题时，即使是在博物馆里存放了几十年的物品，也能揭示出全新的故事。”