“We’ll Give Up Old China and Live in Japan”: George Grossmith’s Cups and Saucers and Britain’s Pacific Realignments in the 1870s

George Grossmith’s Cups and Saucers (1876) is a small-scale operetta freely adapted from Ernest d’Hervilly’s farce La Soupière (1874). Like the French work, it is a satirical response to the contemporary “mania” for collecting china; unlike La Soupière, it has a powerful Asian dimension and comments on Britain’s relationships with China and Japan through the potent cultural symbols of chinaware and tea. Appearing just two years after China and Japan nearly came to war over the latter’s posting of an expeditionary force of 3,600 men to Taiwan, Cups and Saucers has its two protagonists singing “We’ll give up old China and live in Japan” as it aligns itself with the progressive, Westernizing tendencies in Japan, now seen as the more promising Pacific gateway.