Chinese devil chaser mask brought back from the Yangtze River area by Captain Wilbur Carver of Searsport. He was a young naval officer when he purchased this mask, in service on the China station in the 1930s.
This ship portrait was done by an unknown Chinese artist. China had a tradition of ship portrait painting that dated to English artists teaching the craft to Chinese artists starting in the 1840s. The Clarissa B. Carver was built by George A. Carver in Searsport in 1876 for Captain Jonathan Dow. Under the command of Leroy Dow, she was lost in a collision with a steamer near Kobe, Japan in 1885.
Landing a boat at Sunda Strait, photographed by Joanna Colcord aboard the ship State of Maine in 1900. Sunda Strait is the passage between Java and Sumatra, and it is the gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
Chinese export ceramic tea bowl and saucer, with scalloped blue and white border and enameled decoration. Design has Mandarin man and his lady at the tea table and a boy at the window.
Chinese tea box, decorated with two horses on front. Bottom reads "Per Mails Steamer, Choicest Specialty Selected First Crop Lap Sang Souchong." By the time this tea was exported, the fastest way to get tea from China was by fast steamship, the same steamship that carried the mail. The days of racing to England with the fresh tea crop under sail were gone.
