The tea I brought back from Shanghai is flowery, fragrant and pale green; but these cups are red. Identical enamel mugs, emblazoned with ‘patriotic’ propaganda to inspire the comrade, were among the few perks of a factory worker’s job. An inescapable icon of the logic of daily life in Maoist China, these socialist steins also represented a small sanctioned luxury — a hot cuppa on a freezing day, in a city where heating was disdained because it was judged ‘too far south’ to be really cold when it snowed. The cups came home empty at day’s end; returned to be filled again next day. Once as essential an element of Chinese interior décor as the ancestral altar, they are still coming off the assembly line — as RMB 35 collectibles, to grace the mantels of the global consumers of Chinese tourism.

 How ironic that I found Esydragon, the quirky shop whose shelf had this one enshrined, while I sat sipping coffee from a jam jar at the hipster Kommune across the courtyard, down the artsy alley of Tian Zi Fang. How much more ironic that I now have the lid on it, in freshly green Bengal, brewing a red bush tea under the Chairman’s hat, to fuel the efforts of an itinerant Indian worker ant whose home office knows no closing claxon.







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