Skip to main content

For All The Tea in China by Sarah Rose: book review



For All The Teain China (2010) is sub-titled How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History. It is therefore about the early history of British tea from 1845 to 1852 during the British Raj in India.

Tea is from the camellia plant (Camellia sinesis) and the Chinese empire had the monopoly on it. The British-owned East India Company (EIC) sold opium to China and bought tea with the earnings. The Indian Himalayan region resembled China’s best tea-growing regions, so could England grow tea there – in her own territory? To do so, it meant that England would need to get China’s best tea plant seeds and the very best of their tea knowledge.

By 1848 EIC decided to try to get tea plant seeds from China. If successful, the EIC would “enact the greatest theft of trade secrets in the history of mankind.” And Scottish horticulturist, Robert Fortune, would be the person to do it. At 35 years of age, he had just written Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Province of China to rave reviews. During his three years in China he had made an important discovery: green tea and black tea came from the same plant, and the difference in the taste was in the processing. He also made another important discovery that “provided an irrefutable argument for British-manufactured tea.” Certainly, he was exactly the person who knew enough about the region, and tea, to take on the challenge.

Robert Fortune was working in the Chelsea Physic Garden near London, and was married to Jane for ten years, with two children, when EIC employed him to “hunt tea” – in fact his brief was “to steal samples of one of the world’s most economically valuable plants, keep them healthy, and arrange for their successful transplantation on another continent” (that being India). He would be paid five times his current annual salary, but he would have to go “deeper into the country [China] than any Briton had ever dared, beyond the reach of British influence.”

And he did. It sounds simple. The steps to preparing a cup of tea, according to Fortune, are: Boil water. Ready cup. Add dry leaf. Drink. But that leaf had to be the best. That’s what Fortune was looking for. In China Fortune found the Wuyi monks in the Fujian Province also kept meticulous records of their tea plantings, just as he did. He had found the perfect leaf. Now he had to steal it and get it to India.

He transported 13,000 young tea plants to India by ship. “Nearly all the tea plants had arrived dead in India” – a year of Fortune’s work was down the drain. There were only 80 healthy survivors. There were also seven packets of seeds, but with “not one seed having germinated” it was a monumental setback. However, Fortune remained “sanguine, focused, and not the least bit apologetic … he concerned himself purely with solutions.” He found another way, an innovative way to transport the seeds.

By 1851 tea plants were growing in the Himalayan region of India called Darjeeling, 7000 feet above sea level. It was “a real-life Shangri-La, charming and green, picturesque and pleasant.” The curator of the plantation was Scottish horticulturist, Archibald Campbell, whom had just been released from six weeks in a Himalyan prison “for his botanical crimes.” By the time the Chinese realised what Fortune had stolen it was too late. But it was still no easy road to success. Finally the tea made it to England. Although England had been a nation of tea drinkers for over a century prior to Fortune’s plantations, cheaper tea became a boon to the rapidly urbanized empire. Demographers and doctors had noticed a drop in the mortality rate as the taste for tea became increasingly popular in England. “England’s great tea experiment in India was a phenomenal success.”

The book concludes with Fortune’s fate and fortune.


This is an interesting history of the drink that most people now take for granted. The history of liquid jade is a story worth telling.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pir-E-Kamil - The Perfect Mentor by Umera Ahmed: book review

The Perfect Mentor pbuh  (2011) is set in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan. The novel commences with Imama Mubeen in medical university. She wants to be an eye specialist. Her parents have arranged for her to marry her first cousin Asjad. Salar Sikander, her neighbour, is 18 years old with an IQ of 150+ and a photographic memory. He has long hair tied in a ponytail. He imbibes alcohol, treats women disrespectfully and is generally a “weird chap” and a rude, belligerent teenager. In the past three years he has tried to commit suicide three times. He tries again. Imama and her brother, Waseem, answer the servant’s call to help Salar. They stop the bleeding from his wrist and save his life. Imama and Asjad have been engaged for three years, because she wants to finish her studies first. Imama is really delaying her marriage to Asjad because she loves Jalal Ansar. She proposes to him and he says yes. But he knows his parents won’t agree, nor will Imama’s parents. That

Flaws in the Glass, a self-portrait by Patrick White: book review

The manuscript, Flaws in the Glass (1981), is Patrick Victor Martindale White’s autobiography. White, born in 1912 in England, migrated to Sydney, Australia, when he was six months old. For three years, at the age of 20, he studied French and German literature at King’s College at the University of Cambridge in England. Throughout his life, he published 12 novels. In 1957 he won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award for Voss, published in 1956. In 1961, Riders in the Chariot became a best-seller, winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 1973, he was the first Australian author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Eye of the Storm, despite many critics describing his works as ‘un-Australian’ and himself as ‘Australia’s most unreadable novelist.’ In 1979, The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but he withdrew it from the competition to give younger writers the opportunity to win the award. His autobiography, Flaws in the Glass

The Beggars' Strike by Aminata Sow Fall: book review

The Beggar’sStrike (1979 in French and 1981 in English) is set in an unstated country in West Africa in a city known only as The Capital. Undoubtedly, Senegalese author Sow Fall writes of her own experiences. It was also encapsulated in the 2000 film, Battu , directed by Cheick Oumar Sissoko from Mali. Mour Ndiaye is the Director of the Department of Public Health and Hygiene, with the opportunity of a distinguished and coveted promotion to Vice-President of the Republic. Tourism has declined and the government blames the local beggars in The Capital. Ndiaye must rid the streets of beggars, according to a decree from the Minister. Ndiaye instructs his department to carry out weekly raids. One of the raids leads to the death of lame beggar, Madiabel, who ran into an oncoming vehicle as he tried to escape, leaving two wives and eight children. Soon after, another raid resulted in the death of the old well-loved, comic beggar Papa Gorgui Diop. Enough is enou