Like modern-day business cards, trade cards were given to customers by businesses as a form of advertising. This selection of cards from tea dealers illustrates some of the motifs and imagery used to market tea in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These include tea clipper ships, tea chests, Chinese people, pagodas, Chinese script and figures of Britannia.

Trade card of Arnaud & Green

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Trade card of Twinings

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Trade card of a tea dealer

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Trade card of F. Graham

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Trade card of W. Grimshaw

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Trade card of Thomas Owen

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