The quote?
Other cases of smuggling seem even less moral. Consider the Scottish botanist in China in the 1840s who dressed up in local garb, shaved the front half of his head, pulled his remaining hair into a ponytail, infiltrated a state-run plantation, and stole 20,000 prize tea plants for transport to India. You'd be hard-pressed to make a humanitarian case for Earl Grey. (From The Icepick Surgeon by Sam Kean)
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| An illustration from a book published in 1851 that depicts the cultivation of tea in China, from NPR |
By the time tea started becoming a big deal in Europe (around the 1600s), the Chinese had been drinking it for over 2,000 years. In fact, according to this website, "The earliest written account of China's tea culture is documented in the poem A Contract with A Servant by Wang Bao, written during the Western Han dynasty between 206 BC and 9AD."
By the 1800s, tea was the most popular drink in the British Empire. The empire, at this point, controlled about 25% of the earth's surface, the largest empire in the world, and yet they did not control the tea. Tea was understood, controlled, grown, and supplied by China and China alone. This complicated matters, as Britain couldn't control the quantity or price of the tea they did get. So, by the 1800's, they decided to solve this problem by cornering the marketplace, as it were. Establishing a way to grow and supply tea from a location they controlled.
India.
They had to plan how this was going to be done, however, and they needed the right man for the job, someone who wasn't afraid of travel, who had a grasp of botany, who understood what was needed, and wasn't afraid to get it no matter what.
Enter Robert Fortune.
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| Robert Fortune, from Smithsonian |
Fortune was born in 1812 in Kelloe, Berwickshire, to a poor family, and spent much of his childhood following his father around on the farm.
After finishing an apprenticeship, he was employed by Moredun House just south of Edinburgh. (After some research, I learned the Moredun House was the family home of James Stewart, which was renamed "Moredun House" in 1769.) After a brief stint at Moredun House, Fortune was relocated to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. In 1840, he and his family were moved to London, where he took a position at the Horticultural Society of London's garden at Cheswick. In 1843, he was commissioned by the Horticultural Society to undertake a three year plant collecting trip to southern China.
Fortune was a bit different than a lot of other botanists at the time. In England during his lifetime, botany was a big deal, on the ascent, as it were. Botanists were highly respected with university degrees and prestigious jobs. Many of them were wealthy, upper class. Fortune, however, was poor. He learned through hands-on training rather than university degrees, working his way up through the ranks by experience rather than book learning.
Before Fortune's time, China and England had been involved in a bit of a trade system, where England would trade opium for tea. According to this article, "the Chinese emperor hated that opium was the medium of exchange, because a nation of drug addicts was being created. So the emperor confiscated all the opium [and] destroyed it all... England sent warships. And at the end of the day, they realized that if they were going to keep pace with the British tea consumption and not deal with the Chinese, they had to own it themselves." (Opium wars, in the mid 1800s)
So, Fortune was approached by a representative of the East India Trading Company, which was, at the time, probably the most important multi-national corporation in the world. They wanted the best tea, from the best gardens in China, but it wasn't really as simple as that. They needed plants, yes, but they also needed to know the secrets of the industry, and they needed someone at the helm of all this who would not only understand what he was looking at, but also how to teach it to others.
Fortune's task was risky, and so the East India Trading Company paid him five times his annual salary for the job. He made several trips to China, the first traveling as a merchant. The second, in 1848, as a smuggler, and this was when he successfully stole most of his seeds and plants.
At the time, no westerner had traveled as far into China as Fortune had. There were laws in place that kept foreign nationals within a day's travel to certain port cities, and they weren't allowed to venture beyond those points. To get as far into the country as he did, Fortune often had to disguise himself, and traveled with a servant whose task was, essentially, to help the ruse, and to sort of pave the way for Fortune. An example on the Smithsonian's website is as follows, "With [his servant] Wang walking five paces ahead to announce his arrival, Robert Fortune, dressed in his mandarin garb, entered the gates of a green tea factory. Wang began to supplicate frantically. Would the master of the factory allow an inspection from a visitor, an honored and wise official who had traveled from a far province to see how such glorious tea was made?"
And often times, that worked. He would be let in, and shown around. He'd ask questions, and have them answered.
On this trip, Fortune made away with roughly 13,000 specimens of tea plants and 10,000 seeds. It didn't stop there, however. He even took some Chinese tea farmers to India with him, uprooting entire families along with all their knowledge, their farming and tea processing tools, and their plants as well, depositing them in India where they were tasked with helping the burgeoning tea industry there flourish.
It wasn't easy, though. On his first smuggling trip, most of the plants died on their way from China to India. On his second trip, he knew he had to devise another way to preserve his plants, and so he fashioned a carrying case out of Wardian glass to keep them safe.
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| From the Smithsonian website |
Ultimately, Fortune introduced some 20,000 non-native plants into India's Darjeerling region which was the first step in breaking China's monopoly on tea.
The result for China, however, was catastrophic. Before this, China controlled the tea market. Annually, they produced some 250,000 tons of tea a year, and exported about 53% of that. It was so plentiful, it accounted for around 60% of all of China's exports. After Fortune's many thefts, China's tea production fell to around 41,000 tons annually, of which only 9,000 tons were exported. (stats from this website)
India's economy boomed, overtaking China's within Fortune's lifetime, India surpassed China as the world's largest tea grower. China fell even further behind as other Western countries saw what Britain had done as an opportunity, and soon similar raids into the country for plants and tea growing secrets were made by the Dutch and the Americans, further damaging China's economy and industry. Between this, and lopsided treaties following the Opium Wars, China's economy wasn't able to truly begin to recover until the mid-1900s.
In an interview with author Sarah Rose, who wrote For All the Tea in China, she says, "It astonishes me. China has pretty much never really come back from that, certainly not in the Western markets. Now that Asia has such a booming economy, the Chinese are again pretty fierce tea producers. But it took a hundred-plus years."
It wasn't for over 100 years later that China was once again able to claim the title of the world's largest tea exporter.
Further Reading
The British Botanist Who Destroyed 19th Century China's Economy
The Scottish Spy who Stole China's Tea Empire
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