This paper unveils the previously seldom-known commercial connections between China and Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is often assumed that during this high time of western imperial expansion, these two non-western societies had little interactions with each other due to their predicaments from within and without. However, records show that China exported tea, silk, and soybeans while importing cotton, cigarettes, and cigars from Egypt. Merchants handling the transfer of these products and consumers enjoying their consumptions were the dynamic forces behind these commercial ties. On the supply side, Chinese and Egyptian merchants had frequent contacts in Southeast Asia and India where their products were first exported to and then relayed to their respective final destinations. The locales of Chinese-Egyptian interactions were not limited to China and Egypt. Spaces of other cultures also mediated their encounters. The shipping of commodities, however, was often carried out by the British vessels. Chinese and Arab apparatus of trade were under the British control as well. On the consumption side of the story, the needs of exchanging foreign products also reveal the material cultures of China and Egypt. Whereas Chinese soybeans were used as a substitute for more expensive protein sources such as meat, Egyptian cotton met the demands of many Chinese textile factories. Egyptian cigarette and cigars were exotic luxuries for Chinese urban elites. So was Chinese tea and silk for the Egyptian upper class. As a result, Chinese and Egyptians from different places in the socioeconomic spectrum—from elites to commoners, and from rich merchants to poor factory workers—all had at least some exposure to the idea of each other, even if many of them never had a chance to directly interact with each other. Although in their minds they might have very different imaginations about what China or Egypt was like, they were bounded by tightly knit transnational trade networks, mediating spaces and powers, and invisible flows of material cultures.