Robert Fortune and the Great Tea Heist
Sean Paterson is a member of the RSAA living in Guangzhou
There has been much hand-wringing in the press about how Brits, especially those under thirty, are abandoning tea for coffee. The usual suspects blame Americanisation, but what many don’t realise is that the public are simply switching one Asian drink for another. Coffee is a Yemeni innovation, while everyone knows tea is Chinese. So, how did both come to be so closely associated with English-speakers either side of the Atlantic? The answer has much to do with an unassuming Scottish gardener – and thief.
Robert Fortune was born in 1812 to farmers in the Scottish Borders. With little formal schooling, he became an apprentice gardener at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. His skills eventually led to a job in London with the Royal Horticultural Society, where he became famous for his ability to cultivate exotic plants, particularly orchids. By 1842, therefore, he was a natural choice for one of the Society’s schemes. They wanted to send someone to China.
Britain and China had become fatally intertwined in the preceding century, as two very different countries trading two very different plants. In 1842, China was the world’s only producer of tea; Britain was the world’s largest opium dealer. Both were each other’s best customer. The East India Company (EIC) ran opium from India to the sole Chinese port open to foreigners, Canton (Guangzhou); in exchange they took home tea for fashionable households to sip. Ironically, much of the tea sold for export was low-grade: Lapsang Souchong, a favourite of Lord Byron and later Winston Churchill, began as an industrial accident, when tea-growers in Fujian dried their crop too quickly, leaving it with a strong smoky flavour that Chinese drinkers disdained.
At first, the British paid with Mexican silver. However, the drain on the Exchequer led London to demand that the EIC find another way to pay. They landed on something their Indian territories produced in abundance: opium. Tea is a harmless stimulant; opium is another matter entirely. In Europe it was prepared as a drink or chewed – hence why Thomas de Quincy wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater – but in China it was smoked, a crucial difference: burning opium turns a mild depressant into a diabolically addictive drug.
By the 1830s, widespread opium addiction had torn through China. It was a moral, social and economic disaster. In 1839, Lin Zexu, appointed special commissioner for the opium problem by the Emperor, wrote directly to Queen Victoria, demanding that she stop the opium trade. No reply was ever received.
Lin went on an inspection tour of Guangdong Province, centre of the opium trade. Finding the local mandarins corrupt, and often opium-addicts themselves, and appealing in vain to the European merchants in their ‘factories’, or armoured warehouses, outside the city to stop the trade, he took decisive action. Lin’s own soldiers descended on the European opium stash. Seizing thousands of crates, he had them hurled into the local salt-pans and mixed with lime, rendering the drug unusable. The waste was flushed out to sea; Lin took care to compose a poem of apology to the sea-goddess for defiling her waters.
He could not have anticipated the response. Later that year, a modern British fleet sailing from India devastated the Pearl River, swatting aside the outdated Chinese war-junks. In the aftermath of the Opium War – surely one of the most shameful episodes of imperial history – China was forced open to foreigners. The British seized Hong Kong, and extracted trading rights at a string of ports from Canton to Shanghai. Disgraced, Lin was exiled to the northwest frontier. As he left the stage, it was time for Robert Fortune to make his entrance.
With China suddenly open, the RHS wanted someone to collect as many new specimens as they could. But China was far away, and clearly a dangerous assignment, with tropical fevers, pirates, and an uncharted interior among other risks. The gentlemen of the Society wouldn’t dream of going themselves. Instead, they sent Robert Fortune.
Remarkably, he received no additional pay. The Society paid Fortune, a mere gardener, just £100 a year (about £9,900 in today’s money) and refused to increase it for as trifling an assignment as a journey to the other side of the world. They even dragged their feet when he asked for guns, eventually providing a case of rusty pistols. Despite this unpromising start, he made it to south China in one piece, and began a three-year collecting spree. When he returned home in 1847, he carried thousands of cuttings, including dozens of previously unknown species. He also produced a book, Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China (ironically, he went nowhere near the northern provinces, but stayed almost entirely south of the Yangtze), which is a typical travelogue of the early Victorian era. Fortune’s expedition would be the achievement of a lifetime by itself – but the Society wasn’t done with him yet. There was one more plant they wanted in particular: tea.
Not content with flooding China with opium in order to extract tea, the East India Company had conceived an even more daring plan. What if the Chinese monopoly on tea production could be broken? Surveyors in India’s northeastern provinces, particularly Assam, had realised that the environment was similar to Fortune’s descriptions of the great tea valleys of south China. Indeed, the Himalayan foothills of Assam provided their own native species of tea that was too bitter to drink. What if it could be cross-bred with the more palatable Chinese blends? To test this theory, they needed living samples of Chinese tea plants. The EIC therefore enlisted the RHS to send Fortune back to China, with instructions to take tea plants out by any means necessary, before trying to establish a crop in India.
For his second trip, Fortune travelled in disguise, adopting what he considered authentic Chinese clothing and hairstyles, and learning to speak a strangely-accented Mandarin. To dissuade enquiries, he claimed to be from the northwestern frontier, where European-featured ethnic minorities were not unknown. Remarkably, it worked.
Fortune spent 1848 criss-crossing south and east China, collecting tea plants far into the interior, in territory forbidden to Europeans. After a first attempt failed when his cuttings died before they could be loaded onto British ships, he adopted a new technology: Wardian cases, miniature greenhouses that could keep plants insulated from the dangers of travel. Now able to safely transport tea, Fortune continued his work further inland. By the year’s end, he had gathered 20,000 live tea plants for dispatch to India.
But tea was no good without the tools and people to grow it. Fortune managed to convince several dozen tea farmers to join him in his supposed remote northern province, and bring their tools and knowledge with him. Unbeknownst to them, they were taken to Himalayan India to establish a new plantation.
The expedition was an enormous success. Fortune’s crew managed to ship almost all of the plants safely to Assam. Though after all that effort many of the original plants failed to take, those that did were sufficient to create a more palatable blend of tea. Crucially, his transplanted workers showed British growers how to cultivate, harvest and prepare tea plants. The EIC now had a viable source of tea, independent of China. Though to connoisseurs the new Indian teas were bitter and dark, they were thought delicious by the British public – particularly when the astringent edge was taken off with milk and that other imperial staple, cane sugar.
Thanks to Fortune’s great tea heist, a consumer divide opened up. Where Asian drinkers had long preferred lighter teas, made only with water, the British came to expect tea to be dark, and made with milk and sugar. (Americans initially drank green tea from Japan, also with milk and sugar, before abandoning it for coffee). Ironically, this kind of tea would be re-imported to China via Hong Kong, where ‘milk tea’, made with evaporated milk, became a staple. (Likewise, ‘bubble tea’, a sickly-sweet tapioca milkshake with a hint of tea invented in Taiwan, is now wildly popular on the mainland, to the dismay of purists).
Once the Assam plantations became viable, Chinese tea exports collapsed. Tea had represented the majority of Chinese exports to the west, and the reduction in imports was a nearly fatal blow to the economy. Devastated by opium, and now with its main export in free-fall and foreigners running loose in their own ‘treaty ports’ where Chinese law did not apply to them, China had truly reached a nadir. To this day, Fortune is seen in China as one of the great villains of the ‘Century of Humiliation’ – the man who, almost single-handedly, kneecapped the Qing dynasty economy. By contrast, Lin Zexu is a hero, with a statue outside of the Opium War Museum. Together, these two men – who never met – are a reminder of how entire economies can rise and fall based on the humblest of plants.
The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not necessarily of the RSAA.
