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The Material World of the “Chinese” Tea Party in Europe in the Second Half of the 17th—18th Centuries

2025· article· en· W4414266874 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueObservatory of Culture · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistorical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPossession (linguistics)ParaphernaliaConsumption (sociology)Object (grammar)EtiquetteQuarter (Canadian coin)MythologyChinese tea

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The pseudo-Chinese aesthetics of the object world of tea drinking, which developed in Europe in the second half of the 17th—18th centuries, was conditioned by the initial development within the framework of chinoiserie — the myth of distant and fabulously rich China, created by Europeans and for Europeans. With time, not earlier than the beginning of the 18th century, their own, independent traditions of material design of tea ritual develop. By this time, tea drinking had become the most important social practice, which contributed to the further formation of its rules and the formation of the associated world of things. The highest point of this process occurred in the middle of the 18th century, when things symbolizing tea drinking (primarily the cup, teapot and tea set) acquired individual and classical forms. At the same time, tea drinking in Europe becomes an established social custom with a known etiquette and a characteristic tradition. At this time it is still within the aristocratic culture: the scarcity and costliness of tea, the expensive paraphernalia accompanying its serving, and the leisure time required for its consumption strictly limited the use of tea to the upper classes. Tea drinking, as well as the possession of tea-table decorations, signified participation in current cultural trends and was a matter of social prestige. The process of “Europeanisation” of Chinese tea and the design of the object world of European tea drinking were synchronous; they reached their relative completion only by the third quarter of the 18th century, when tea consumption went beyond the aristocratic circle. This article explores tea drinking in an interdisciplinary context as a social practice generated by the chinoiserie style and revealed through the prism of the world of things. Such a formulation of the question by domestic researchers has not been applied so far. We reconstruct the process of “Europeanisation” of Chinese tea; we clarify the range of objects that accompanied tea drinking as a new social practice for Europe in the second half of the 17th—18th centuries, and identify the circle of the most significant objects that characterize the boundary stages of its development. The significance of things-symbols, which acquired the significance of cultural markers demonstrating material, cultural and social wealth and exquisite artistic taste of their owners, is determined.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.740
Threshold uncertainty score0.928

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.209
Teacher spread0.194 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it