Stealing Tea

I almost poo-pooed reading Sarah Rose's book For All the Tea in China because I thought I knew the general story of how England sent a man to steal tea from China. As I had heard or read about it, he dressed like he was Chinese but pretended he was from another part of the country where they spoke a different dialect in order to explain his lack of language proficiency.

I'm glad I got past my assumed knowledge and read the borrowed copy someone pressed on me. 

There's so much to it that I didn't know, including that "the man" was Robert Fortune, whose last name is part of the botanical name of any plant whose species is fortunei. Those are generally other plants he brought back on his plant-hunting trips in China: part of his (underpaid) compensation was the right to propagate and sell any plants, other than tea, that he found.

I also didn't realize he did his work on behalf of the British East India Company (of course!), rather than Britain itself, and that the company's desire to steal tea was tied up in its imbalance of trade with China. And opium was a major part of it all, of course. 

Britain/the East India Company grew opium in the Asian subcontinent and more or less forced it onto China so that Britain could buy the huge quantities of tea the British public had come to demand. And China had an agricultural and cultural monopoly on tea, which originated in its cool, misty inland mountains, far from the trading ports British ships were allowed to access.

The book gives great detail of who Fortune was, including the class difference that likely motivated him, and of his travels in China to gather tea plants and seeds, employing various Chinese "coolies" and furthering horticulture with innovations like glass Ward boxes and ways of transporting live seeds by ship. 

It makes for interesting reading, of course, but there are several sections as the book draws to a close that earn its subtitle, "How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History."

It's important to realize that the East India Company wanted to grow tea in the Himalayan mountains of India, thinking that that area's climate and geography were comparable to the part of China where tea is native. Darjeeling will sound familiar because they were correct. The company had had a monopoly on selling tea (among other things) in the West for hundreds of years by the time they sent Fortune to China, but the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution were threatening. 

First came the loss of their monopoly charter in China in 1834, and then the First Opium War (1839–1842), which resulted in a treaty that gave all British traders greater access to Chinese markets. So the East India Company had greatly decreased advantages in the market, and they wanted to change things to give them "home field advantage" in company-controlled India.

While Fortune was successful in stealing tea and the company got the plants going in the Himalayas, things didn't turn out as the company planned.

Some of the things Rose wrote that made me stop and take special note:

Drugs such as opium and tea were the first mass-produced, mass market global commodities; everything and everyone these "stimulants" touched, from the producers to distributors to customers, was altered in their wake. The global drug trade, which England and China were deeply enmeshed, produced new leaders, new governments, new companies, new farming practices, as well as new colonies, new modes of capital accumulation, and new modes of transport and communication (page 177).

Both opium and tea were light products that brought in high prices and took up little room in ships. This comes into play in interesting ways, especially the fact that too many light products required something heavy to also be loaded on the ship to provide ballast. What did the Chinese make that was heavy that could also be sold? Hmm... how about some of that blue and white porcelain? Not only was it heavy, it could make layers of padding between the tea crates and be at the bottom of the hull, since it didn't matter if it got wet. And there was this additional, extra-interesting fact:

Tea's growing consumer base encouraged the development the porcelain industry in Britain... Prior to the eighteenth century, no European factories could make a ceramic teacup capable of holding boiling water.

European clay could not meet the service demands of tea the way Chinese clay could, for in Europe clay lacked the essential ingredient of kaolin (page 232).

Chinese porcelain was fired at a higher temperature than European stoneware. Porcelain was light, sturdy and non-porous, compared to stoneware. The British figured out how to make porcelain around 1750 and used early mechanization to speed the process up. Josiah Wedgewood, I learned, was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

One of the things the East India Company needed, in addition to tea plants, was knowledge of how to harvest and process tea leaves into particular kinds of tea. Before or while Fortune was in China, they had recruited a set of Chinese men to work in the Himalayas, and at one point decided to split them up singly to different tea plantations, rather than have the all work at the same plantation. The workers were opposed to this, and also tried to organize for higher wages. Eventually, the botanist in charge of the men relents and agrees to higher pay and to keep them at least in pairs. The botanist's boss, however, chastised him for that decision, which Rose describes as:

[he was] displeased with the idea that stealing secrets from a sovereign nation also meant overpaying the Chinese minions who implemented them. In fact, the tea manufacturers' wages were never so high as to be unduly burdensome to the company. The objection to their demand was more a matter of principle in that the Chinese were paid higher-than-market wages, which offended the British sense of fair play (even as the company remained unperturbed by the fact that the British in India were paid substantially better than the Chinese) (page 203).

This attitude is, of course, consistent with the general British disdain for the Chinese as lesser beings.

The last big thing I learned from Rose's telling is what led to the demise of the British East India Company. I think I had heard/read something about this before, but not in such detail and I don't think it was in school.

In the mid-1850s the British army began replacing the single-shot Brown Bess muskets used by its soldiers with Enfield rifles, which were accurate at 10 times the range. However, they needed to be loaded with greased paper cartridges that the soldier had to bite open (hence the term, "bite the bullet) and the cheap grease the British army chose to use was a combination of beef tallow and pork lard.

If you give it half a second you'll realize the problem with asking Indian (Hindu or Muslim) troops to put their mouths on that kind of fat, but the brilliant British leaders who had been working in India for hundreds of years didn't care about it, or didn't realize.

As soldiers were exposed to the new cartridges, rumors began to spread. It was said that the Enfield rifle was part of a mass plan on the part of the company to convert Indian troops to Christianity by rendering them impure, and this forcing them to give up their caste status.... Throughout the winter and spring of 1857 news of the tainted cartridges spread.

On May 9 sepoys of the Third Bengal Light Cavalry flatly refused the order to bring the cartridges to their mouths and load their weapons. The rebels were court-martialed on the spot and sentenced to the unusually severe punishment of ten years' imprisonment under hard labor.... That night several other sepoy regiments...broke ranks and turned on their officers. The sepoys liberated the eighty-five rebels from jail, hailing them as heroes to their race. Then they burned the company's bungalow and offices. Every European was massacred on sight.

The cavalry retreated to Delhi, and for the next six months India would catch fire.

The P53 Enfield Rifle ignited a holocaust of murder, siege, brutality, and repression; women and children, Indian and British, were butchered, cities were sacked, and civilians were murdered by soldiers. The British refer to the summer of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny; Pakistanis and Indians refer to it as the First War for Independence (pages 222–223).

The company lost its charter and was nationalized the following year.

The book is a compact 245 pages, very readable, and in addition to all of this, gives a vision of mid-19th century China. After finishing it, I went back and reread Gene Luen Yang's paired graphic novels Boxers and Saints, about the Boxer Rebellion. My Chinese history is extremely lacking, but there are some things I can do to make up for it.