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.
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