For All the Tea in China Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Min River, China, 1845

  Chapter 2 - East India House, City of London, January 12, 1848

  Chapter 3 - Chelsea Physic Garden, May 7, 1848

  Chapter 4 - Shanghai to Hangzhou, September 1848

  Chapter 5 - Zhejiang Province near Hangzhou, October 1848

  Chapter 6 - A Green Tea Factory, Yangtze River, October 1848

  Chapter 7 - House of Wang, Anhui Province, November 1848

  Chapter 8 - Shanghai at the Lunar New Year, January 1849

  Chapter 9 - Calcutta Botanic Garden, March 1849

  Chapter 10 - Saharanpur, North-West Provinces, June 1849

  Chapter 11 - Ningbo to Bohea, the Great Tea Road, May and June 1849

  Chapter 12 - Bohea, July 1849

  Chapter 13 - Pucheng, September 1849

  Chapter 14 - Shanghai, Autumn 1849

  Chapter 15 - Shanghai, February 1851

  Chapter 16 - Himalayan Mountains, May 1851

  Chapter 17 - Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock, 1852

  Chapter 18 - Tea for the Victorians

  Chapter 19 - Fortune’s Story

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  VIKING

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  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Sarah Rose, 2010

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Rose, Sarah.

  For all the tea in China : how England stole the world’s favorite drink and changed

  history / Sarah Rose.

  p. cm.

  First published: London : Hutchinson, 2009, with title For all the tea in China : espionage,

  empire, and the secret formula for the world’s favourite drink.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19001-2

  1. Tea trade—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. Tea trade—China—History—19th century. 3. Tea—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Tea—China—History—19th century. 5. Fortune, Robert, 1813-1880—Travel—China. 6. Spies—Great Britain—Biography. 7. Business intelligence—Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. East India Company—History—19th century. 9. China—Description and travel. 10. Himalaya Mountains—

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Scott

  The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  [Tea] is an exceedingly useful plant; cultivate it, and the benefit will be widely spread; drink it, and the animal spirits will be lively and clear.

  —Robert Fortune, quoting a Chinese proverb

  Prologue

  There was a time when maps of the world were redrawn in the name of plants, when two empires, Britain and China, went to war over two flowers: the poppy and the camellia.

  The poppy, Papaver somniferum, was processed into opium, a narcotic used widely throughout the Orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The drug was grown and manufactured in India, a subcontinent of princely states united under the banner of Great Britain in 1757. Opium was marketed, solely and exclusively, under the aegis of England’s empire in India by the Honourable East India Company.

  The camellia, Camellia sinensis, is also known as tea. The empire of China had a near complete monopoly on tea, as it was the only country to grow, pick, process, cook, and in all other ways manufacture, wholesale, and export “the liquid jade.”

  For nearly two hundred years the East India Company sold opium to China and bought tea with the proceeds. China, in turn, bought opium from British traders out of India and paid for the drug with the silver profits from tea.

  The opium-for-tea exchange was not merely profitable to England but had become an indispensable element of the economy. Nearly £1 in every £10 sterling collected by the government came from taxes on the import and sale of tea—about a pound per person per year. Tea taxes funded railways, roads, and civil service salaries, among the many other necessities of an emergent industrial nation. Opium was equally significant to the British economy, for it financed the management of India—the shining jewel in Queen Victoria’s imperial crown. While it had always been hoped that India would become economically self-sustaining, by the mid-nineteenth century England was waging a series of expansionist wars on India’s North-West Frontier that were swiftly draining whatever profits could be derived from the rich and vast subcontinent.

  The triangular trade in botanical products was the engine that powered a world economy, and the wheels of empire turned on the growth, processing, and sale of plant life: poppies from India and camellias from China, with a cut from each for Great Britain.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century the British-Chinese relationship was a tragically unhappy. The Exalted and Celestial Emperor in Peking had “officially” banned the sale of opium in China in 1729, but it continued to be smuggled in for generations afterward. (Notably, the sale of opium was also forbidden by Queen Victoria within the British Isles. She, however, was largely obeyed.) Opium sales increased quickly and steadily; there was a fivefold growth in volume in the years 1822-37 alone. Finally, in 1839, the leading Chinese court official in the trading port of Canton, rankled by the profligacy of the foreigners and the pestilence of opium addiction among his own people, held the entire foreign encampment hostage, ransoming the three hundred Britons for their opium, then worth $6 million (about $145 million in today’s dollars). When the opium was surrendered and the hostages released, the mandarin ordered five hundred Chinese coolies to foul nearly three million pounds of the drug with salt and lime and then wash the mixture out into the Pearl River. In response, young Victoria sent Britain’s navy to war to keep the lucrative opium-for-tea arrangement alive
.

  In battle, Britain trounced China, whose rough wooden sailing junks were no match for Her Majesty’s steam-powered modern navy. As part of the peace treaty, England won concessions from the Chinese that after a century of diplomatic entreaty no one had thought possible: the island of Hong Kong plus the cession of five new treaty or trading ports on the mainland.

  Few Westerners had penetrated the Chinese interior since the days of Marco Polo. For two hundred years prior to the First Opium War, British ships had been restricted to docking at the entrepôt of Canton, a southern trading city at the mouth of the Pearl River. Britons could not officially step foot outside their warehouses, and many had never even seen the city walls, 20 feet thick and 25 feet high and only 200 yards away from the foreigners’ district. Now, with their triumph in the war, the interior of China was opened to the British—just a crack—for business.

  With five new cities in which to trade, British merchants began dreaming of the lush silks, delicate porcelains, and perfumed teas stockpiled in the Chinese interior, just waiting to be sold to the wider world. Merchants conceived of the possibility of dealing directly with Chinese manufacturers, rather than the cantankerous middlemen or Hongs who commanded the Canton warehouses. Bankers had visions of untold riches, of mineral wealth, and of crops, plants, and flowers—a giant country filled with unmonetized commodities.

  The new order established by the First Opium War was an unstable one, however. Forced by British gunboats to sign the intolerable treaties, China, the once proud and self-contained nation, had been thoroughly shamed. British politicians and traders worried that the humiliated Chinese emperor might upset the delicate balance established by the peace accords by legalizing opium production in China itself, thus breaking India’s (and, in turn, Britain’s) monopoly on the poppy.

  An idea now took hold in the City of London: Tea could and must be secured for England. The Napoleonic Wars had long since ended by the time of the Opium Wars, but the brave men who had fought at Trafalgar and Waterloo still held enormous sway over foreign policy and opinion. Henry Hardinge, a great general who had helped defeat Napoleon beside Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, warned of the risk posed by a defiant China when he was governor-general of India:It is in my opinion by no means improbable that in a few years the Government of Pekin, by legalising the cultivation of Opium in China, where the soil has been already proved equally well adapted with India to the growth of the plant, may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue. Under this view I deem it most desirable to afford every encouragement to the cultivation of Tea in India; in my opinion the latter is likely in course of time to prove an equally prolific and more safe source of revenue to the state than that now derived from the monopoly on Opium.

  If China legalized the opium poppy, it would leave a crucial gap in the economic triangle: England would no longer have the money to pay for her tea, her wars in India, or her public works projects at home. Chinese-grown opium would put an end to the shameful economic codependence between the two empires, the unhappy marriage sealed by the exchange of two flowers. It was a divorce that Britain could ill afford.

  The Indian Himalaya mountain range resembled China’s best tea-growing regions. The Himalayas were high in altitude, richly soiled, and clouded in mists that would both water tea plants and shade them from the scorching sun. Frequent frosts would help sweeten and flavor their liquor, making it more complicated, intense, delicious.

  As botanical products swelled the balance sheets of the Oriental trade, they became so important to the world order that the men who studied them—men who were once popularly regarded as mere gardeners—began to be appreciated as the botanists they were. By the mid-nineteenth century, botanists were no longer viewed as humble men in hats and hobnailed boots, tending to their bulbs, flowers, and shrubs, but as swashbucklers and world-changers, whose collections of foreign plants had potential scientific, economic, and agricultural value in England and throughout the empire. New technology for transplanting live flora had also grown more sophisticated, allowing professional plant hunters to collect and transport ever more exotic specimens.

  No longer confined to China’s southernmost coast, Britain now had greater access to the areas where tea was cultivated and processed. If the manufacture of tea in India was to be successful, Britain would need healthy specimens of the finest tea plants, seeds by the thousand, and the centuries-old knowledge of accomplished Chinese tea manufacturers. The task required a plant hunter, a gardener, a thief, a spy.

  The man Britain needed was named Robert Fortune.

  1

  Min River, China, 1845

  On an autumn afternoon in 1845, long before Robert Fortune made his name as one of the world’s great plant hunters, it seemed very likely that he would die in China. For two weeks he had been confined to a listless junk near the city of Fuzhou, at the mouth of the Min River. His ordinarily robust constitution was near collapse. With a raging fever, he took to his bunk in the cabin of a seagoing cargo boat, dizzy from the smell of bilgewater and rotting fish. The junk’s deck, laden with timber from the countryside, also held Fortune’s cargo, which included trunk-size glass boxes filled with flowers, shrubs, grasses, vegetables, fruits, and all manner of exotic plant life. These glazed cases, known as Wardian or Ward’s cases after their inventor, were on their way with Fortune to London—if he ever made it that far. With his long legs dangling off a bunk made for the shorter Chinese, Fortune, only thirty-three years old at the time, imagined himself dying in the boat’s hold, being swaddled in his grimy bedclothes, and then unceremoniously hurled overboard into a watery grave.

  He was in the last days of a three-year expedition to China, conducted at the behest of the Royal Horticultural Society of London, to find and collect samples of the Orient’s botanical treasures. Fortune’s assignment included procuring “the peaches of Pekin, cultivated in the Emperor’s Garden and weighing 2 lbs.,” among other imagined delicacies. In addition to living flora, he would take home a pressed herbarium and intricate botanical drawings penned by the finest draftsmen in China. With every seed, plant, graft, and clone collected, Fortune was advancing Western knowledge of the East and of botany.

  Each new plant he cataloged was significant not only for its novelty value but for its possible utility to the British Empire. The nineteenth-century world had been revolutionized by the mechanized manufacture of natural products into refined goods: Cotton became cloth on automated looms, iron ore was transformed into train tracks and steamships’ hulls, and clay became stoneware and porcelain. China was a frontier of agricultural riches and industrial possibilities.

  But, lying feverish in his bunk, Fortune could not believe he or his plants would ever find their way safely back to the gardens of Britain. He was in the greatest danger he had ever known, notwithstanding the three years he had already spent living in China as a foreigner.

  “It seemed hard for me to die . . . without a friend or countryman to close my eyes, or follow me to my last resting place; home, friends, and country, how doubly dear they did seem to me then!” he later wrote.

  Fortune’s life was emblematic of that of many entrepreneurial Britons who were seizing the opportunities offered by the expansion of the empire. His roots were modest. His early education in rural horticulture took place at the elbow of his “hedger” father, a hired farmworker. He had no formal higher education beyond his parish schooling in the tiny town of Edrom, in the Scottish Borders; his knowledge of natural history was not obtained at the universities of Oxford or Edinburgh, but from folk practice and professional apprenticeship. He gained a first-class certificate in horticulture, a trade qualification, but lacked the degree in medicine that was a common accompaniment to an interest in botany among those he aspired to join as a peer. For all that, Fortune was ambitious, and for many nineteenth-century Scots as well as English second sons of some talent and no sinecure, seeking one’s chances abroad was the only way to advance in the rig
id Victorian social hierarchy. There were untold possibilities to make a decent living by exploiting the untapped resources of the empire.

  With his lively mind, Fortune rose quickly through the ranks of horticulture, first in the Botanic Garden at Edinburgh and later at the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens in Chiswick. Based on his skills at cultivating orchids and hothouse ornamentals—the rare, showy plants from the Orient—Fortune was the Society’s first choice to be dispatched to explore China at the close of the First Opium War. Founded in 1804 by John Wedgwood, Charles Darwin’s maternal uncle, the Society was the arbiter of all things green and growing in England. At its lively meetings botanists and zoologists presented papers and discussed the latest developments in their fields, which were multiplying rapidly with the increase in British global dominion. Its journals detailed the classification of the newest plants from the farthest reaches of Her Majesty’s empire. The Society’s botanists were busily engaged in the great project of naming and describing every species according to the methods by which they reproduced, a system recently introduced in Europe by the great Carl von Linné, known as Linnaeus.

  Victorian England had a passion for natural exotica, for the insects, fossils, and plants that had been collected over the decades by its missionaries, officers, and merchants on the high seas. With the rural peasantry moving off the land and into the city as industrialization took hold and farmland was enclosed by the gentry, Britons began to yearn for nature in all its forms, and a new market evolved to supply British households with plants. Potted ferns of all varieties became a national obsession and soon were seen everywhere: on decorative porcelain, wallpaper, and textiles; in the conservatories of the rich; and on the windowsills of the poor. Easy to grow and propagate, and hardy enough to transplant, ferns had a wild, uncultivated look that reflected the national pastoralism.