Sun Qua, Chinese School (active 1830-1870) Ca. 1843

twelve leaves depicting various stages of tea cultivation: tilling, planting the tea sapling, fertilizing, picking the tea leaves, sorting, sunning, pounding and drying, firing the tea, grading, weaving the boxes and packing, shipping and selling, each mounted on paper and framed by pale blue ribbons, the covers of green cloth woven with red and blue flowers over cardboard, a blue label inscribed Sunqua in red

Sunqua, an artist working in Canton and Macau was best known for his landscape and ship paintings as well as works on pith paper and his work is discussed by Carl Crossman, The China Trade, 1991, pp. 124-126, who also illustrates an album of watercolors on the cultivation of tea by an unknown artist, pp. 440-441.

An almost identical album is in the John G. Johnson collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Inv. no. 174b.