Tea Trade: A Thief’s Fortune
Hello, my name is Wang Yan and I’m a reporter with NewsChina. With our weekly podcast, we aim to provide insight into the trends and happenings in modern China through a historical lens.
Today we meet the man whose clandestine trip to steal China’s closely guarded secrets of tea production ultimately ended the monopoly of an empire.
Demand for trade gave rise to the great geographical exploration and the first wave of globalization. However, disputes and conflicts in cross-border trade soon followed. The tea trade not only played a crucial role in many historic events, it also shaped the development of modern civilization.
Tea trade between China and Britain began in the 17th century. In fact, although the Netherlands and Indonesia remained dominant players, the British had purchased tea from Canton, today’s Guangzhou in south China’s Guangdong Province, as early as 1637. In the 18th century, direct tea trade between China and Britain developed, culminating in the monopoly on Chinese tea by the British East India Company.
Because China was more politically powerful than the European colonies in the Americas, Africa, India and other regions, coupled with the far distances, Europeans had difficulty setting up colonies there. Instead, they established trade relations with the reigning dynasty, the Qing. But as a closed agricultural empire, China did not have a high demand for Western industrial products. Europeans could only trade the gold and silver it plundered from the Americas for porcelain, silk, and tea.
Britain’s high demand for Chinese tea and China’s rejection of British industrial products resulted in a huge trade deficit. In the 18th century, tea was already the major source of silver inflow to China. During the same period, demand for tea in British colonies in North America was also on the rise. Because of the British East India Company’s monopoly, tea smuggling became rampant and prices for Chinese tea skyrocketed.
For Britain, demand for tea grew so much that it ran short of gold and silver to exchange. Then, in 1833, the British East India Company lost its monopoly in India. To stave off bankruptcy, they came up with measures to compete with China’s tea business – increase tariffs, transplant Chinese tea trees and copy tea-production techniques.
Then, Britain flipped this trade deficit through opium, which quickly took effect but severely damaged Sino-British relations, triggering China’s Anti-Opium Campaign in 1839. Facing Britain’s trade offensive, Qing Emperor Daoguang, who reigned until 1850, countered with the economic strategy “fighting against foreigners with tea”.
This was not a novel approach. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), emperors had used it to deal with invading nomads. The Qing saw the British as just another group of invaders. Both Emperor Daoguang and Lin Zexu, the official leading the Anti-Opium Campaign, believed that cutting off Britain from tea would force it to compromise.
In April 1839, when Lin ordered the confiscation of opium from British dealers in Humen, Guangdong Province, only five crates of opium were turned in the first day. On the second day, when Lin proposed the exchange policy of opium for tea, the number of crates surged to 1,150. The Anti-Opium Campaign had been a success thanks to tea.
Although the British established tea plantations in northeast India’s Assam in 1830, the quality of tea produced in India was poorer than that in China. Therefore, the British East India Company engaged Scottish botanist Robert Fortune (1812-1880), director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, to make a clandestine trip into China to steal the closely guarded secrets of growing and producing tea.
In 1848, Fortune arrived in Shanghai via Hong Kong and hired a Chinese assistant surnamed Wang. He disguised himself in Mandarin robes and a long braided cue made of horsehair, the officially sanctioned hairstyle for men during the Qing. Fortune made his way to Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province, where they visited a green tea plantation and learned production techniques.
Afterwards, they arrived at Wang’s hometown in southern Anhui Province, where Fortune acquired a batch of tea trees and seeds. In January 1849, Fortune sent the first batch of tea seedlings and seeds to India. Because of the delay in transportation and inappropriate transplantation, only 80 out of the 15,000 tea seedlings survived, but none of the seeds sprouted. Fortune’s first attempt was in vain.
Undiscouraged, Fortune embarked on a second expedition. His mission was for black tea from Wuyi Mountain in southeast China’s Fujian Province, a major region of tea production. This time, disguised as an official from north China, he discovered Da Hong Pao, the highly prized oolong tea grown in the gaps of mountain boulders that give its signature mineral taste. During this trip, he also learned about the difference between black tea and green tea, and mastered skills of tea horticulture and production.
In February 1851, Fortune and eight master tea growers departed from Shanghai for Calcutta with 16 huge glass cabinets filled with tea seeds collected from Zhejiang, Anhui and Fujian, as well as tea production equipment and tools.
In the following decade, world-class black teas were cultivated in Darjeeling from the trees and seeds Fortune stole. China’s monopoly on tea was broken. After returning to Britain, Fortune published A Journey to the Tea Countries of China, a memoir embellishing his espionage in China.
The British not only established tea companies and plantations in Assam and Darjeeling, but also touted tea produced in India as “pure” in contrast to the “poisonous” and “insidiously invasive” tea produced in China.
British scholars even turned tea into a “purification” movement for intellectual colonization and British-Indian agriculture. They defined the 19th century as the inauguration of British writing the history of tea, declared tea as the epitome of “British values” and falsified the origins of tea from China to Britain.
The British government sent Fortune to steal the secrets of tea production from China and plant Chinese tea in its Indian colonies to make Britain less reliant on trade with China. His espionage and theft were tacitly encouraged at that time. However, later generations in the UK, US and other European countries gradually faced Fortune’s dubious legacy.
In her book For All the Tea in China, American author Sarah Rose dubs Fortune “a plant hunter, a gardener, a thief, a spy.” What Fortune did in China is arguably the greatest theft of trade secrets in history, on a par with stealing the recipe for Coca-Cola.
That is the end of our podcast. Thank you to our writer Lv Weitao, translator Yang Guang, and copy editor James Tiscione. We hope you enjoyed it and thank you for listening. See you next week.