Ellen Coolidge sailed for China in July 1839 to join her husband. As a woman she had to live on the island of Macau, a Portuguese colony, while Joseph spent most of his time in the Guangzhou offices. Other women accompanied their husbands to China. But Ellen was highly-educated and adventurous, a favorite granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson. She learned to read Greek, Latin, French and Italian in part under his direction. She met Coolidge, a young Boston merchant, in 1824 when he came to stay at Monticello for several months. They were engaged when Coolidge returned to celebrate the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette to Virginia, and married soon afterward.

My research so far has yielded fascinating connections between the Coolidges and the merchant communities based in the Pearl River, a social milieu in which Ellen was an active participant and observer. I have gained some insight into her life there from several letters she wrote from China, now at the Baker Library at Harvard Business School. We don’t know yet when or why the couple was presented with these gifts. It was not unusual for the Chinese security merchant contracted to load a foreign ship to present his trading partner with gifts upon the shipment’s finalization — such as the carved elephant tusk given to Salem merchant A.A. Low by the preeminent Chinese merchant Houqua.

But Coolidge was a contentious figure. While well-connected in the US and Europe, he was not a born businessman. He was a one-time partner in Russell & Co., who started a new firm with Augustine Heard due to his disputes with the firm’s other partners — and in large part, to compete with them by proving himself. Coolidge’s reputation in the port prompted his wife to advise him to use only Heard’s name when announcing their new enterprise, Heard & Co.

Heard himself was deeply ambivalent about their prospects within the darkening climate of Sino-British conflict, himself remaining in Massachusetts. Ellen also had a particularly dim view of politics in the port. In one of her many letters to Heard, whom she regarded as a close friend, she wrote:

"We are neither at war, nor at peace, the Chinese bluster and ‘talk big,’ the English talk, talk and say nothing after all, the Portuguese are equally good in a contest of words as either of the more powerful nations by both of which they are despised and condemned. I have never had one feeling of alarm, though how many of contempt for both men and measures I dare tell only to you."

Considering her statesman-grandfather’s role in her education, her verdict of diplomatic incompetence on the brink of the first Opium War was likely warranted. She left China in April 1841 due to the rising tension.

Both objects are small, but stunning. Bringing them together at PEM gives both scholars and visitors a fuller picture of early US-China commerce — and in particular, the often-overlooked role of women in the social and political life of the trade. See these objects and follow the stories in the new Asian Export gallery at PEM, which opened this fall.

Susan Eberhard is a former Mellon Foundation curatorial fellow in the Asian Export Art department at PEM and a PhD Candidate, History of Art, University of California, Berkeley.