Tea vendor at the Exposition Universelle, 1867

A carte-de-visite portrait of one the Chinese women who ran the Chinese tea kiosk at the Exhibition Universelle held in Paris in 1867. A printed caption in the lower margin identifies her as 'Tcheou-Ya-Nai' from the province of Canton in China. Her bound feet are very much on display here.

‘This is the Chinese tea-gardens. Really, it is one of the humbugs of the place, originated by some clever and influential Parisian to whom the Imperial Commissioners have most unfairly given permission to share each visitor an entrance fee of half a franc. From old dinner plates, and possibly from the notes of some recent travellers they have taken the design of a pleasure house of the Celestial empire. It is pretty enough and well finished .When you are caught inside you find it is nothing better than an indifferent restaurant, where, if you take refreshment, you will find the entrance fee to be but a small item indeed of the expenditure. I would advise people by all means to pay their half franc and visit this fantastic place. The two wretched Chinese girls were duly installed here yesterday, and are alone worthy of a visit. […] The park is now open in the eventings, though the doors of the inner buildings are scrupulously closed at six. Hundreds, if not thousands, linger about the cafes till nine or ten o’clock. At this Chinese tea-house there is a sort of nightly entertainment — jugglers, acrobats, and knife-swallowers, and all that horribly uninteresting style of performance which vulgar Londoners love so much’ (Irish Times, 10 May 1867).

The same journalist also complained about the kiosk's swallows’ nest soup priced at 20 francs a bowl, which he dismissed as ‘some abominable Parisian mixture.’

According to a British journalist, ’three real Chinese girls — bearing the respective names Sugar, Ink and Flower, the Chinese equivalents of which I have forgotten — were on the spot to pour out Chinese tea in Chinese teacups. We are told by a Parisian chronicler that to gain over to Paris these three unmarried damsels of the small-footed class was a triumph of no small magnitude […] One of the young ladies — Sugar, I think — is very pretty, with a sweet look in her almond-shaped eyes’ (The Queen, 18 May 1867).

Photographed by [Charles Albert] Bertall of Paris.