Chairman's cup

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

&nbspHow 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&rsquos hat, to fuel the efforts of an itinerant Indian worker ant whose home office knows no closing claxon.