Few ship-types have ever held the public imagination like the crack vessels of the nineteenth century tea trade. At the time, the epic races from China produced intense interest and the exploits of famous clippers, such as Ariel, Thermopylae or Taeping, were still retold long after the ships themselves had disappeared - until eventually it became impossible to separate truth from legend. The trade had to wait nearly a century for a historian to sort the fact from the romance, to analyse objectively the relative merits of the ships and the economic factors that shaped their design. This work was published in 1952 as The Tea Clippers, which soon established David MacGregor as the leading authority on the subject; a revised second edition followed in 1972. However, MacGregor's research is a continuous process, and this latest edition is necessary in order to incorporate all the new information which has recently come to light. Besides widespread additions to existing chapters, there are new sections on early China traders and on American clippers, while the larger format has allowed the inclusion of over three times the number of illustrations in earlier editions. Now completely revised and expanded, The Tea Clippers is certain to become the standard work once again.