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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.




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