by Sarah Rose
In pursuit of a more exotic trophy, in 1856 the Sixth Duke of Devonshire paid a hundred guineas (about $12,000 today) for the first imported example of the Philippine orchid Phalaenopsis amabilis. The duke nearly squandered his fortune on his passion for flowers. Striking and delicate with its snow-white oblong petals and yellow lips, the amabilis orchid was beloved by Society members and hugely profitable to its discoverer.
Since China had been closed to Westerners for centuries, it remained largely a blank on plant-hunting maps, a place once marked “Here be dragons.” China considered itself the center of the world, but the Middle Kingdom was in fact almost entirely removed from the global stage, albeit Chinese civilization was more than five thousand years old. With little real knowledge of China, the West projected onto it a million fantasies of paradise, danger, and exoticism. All the yearning reflected in England’s desire for gardens was fulfilled and even magnified by its perception of China as the untouched Shangri-la of horticulture.
Had Europeans been permitted a closer look at China, they would have found a country riven by internal unrest and governed by hated foreigners. The Manchus had crossed the Great Wall from the north and for two hundred years had ruled the ethnic Han Chinese from the capital of Peking (now Beijing), demanding fealty and taxes. Secret societies abounded in the south, sworn to combat the alien emperors of the Manchurian Qing Dynasty. The countryside was full of thieves and highway-men, and the seaways were plagued by pirates. Famines blighted the lives of the rural peasantry, as did corrupt officials, members of the Confucian-educated scholar class known as mandarins, while squalor overwhelmed the cities.
The British had some knowledge of China’s affairs through trading contact—the East India Company had been doing business in Canton for almost two centuries—but the interior of China was for the most part terra incognita. Two things England did know, however: There were bound to be marvelous plants in China, and the economic future of Great Britain might benefit greatly from them.
The emperor of China took pains to prevent interlopers from exploring his territory and capitalizing on its resources. In the wake of the First Opium War, the Treaty of Nanking had granted Britain rights to trade in Fuzhou and four other treaty ports, walled coastal cities previously forbidden to outsiders. But suspicion of the British and their intentions remained widespread, with white men officially prohibited from traveling beyond the newly constructed foreign concessions in the port cities. And if Chinese laws could not keep foreigners inside the city walls, the realities of life in China might: It presented a hostile environment to Britons unaccustomed to the humidity, insects, vermin, disease, and terrible sanitation of even the most civilized outposts. No sane man would wish to live or die in China.
In the autumn of 1842, news of the peace between China and England reached the halls of the Royal Horticultural Society, which provided it an unprecedented opportunity to send an expedition into deepest China. The discovery and exploitation of botanical materials were now widely recognized as a British priority, and Robert Fortune was the first person given leave by the Foreign Office to travel to China at the end of hostilities.
Fortune was chosen for the China expedition despite lacking the usual gentleman’s background that would fit him for such a prestigious Society assignment. He was paid wages of only £100 a year (about £5,000 in today’s money, or $10,000), a paltry sum on which to raise a family and one that would not be increased during his entire three-year tenure. When he dared to try to negotiate for a better stipend, the Society sharply rebuked him, with a reminder that “the mere pecuniary returns of your mission ought to be but a secondary consideration” next to “the distinction and status which you could not have attained any other way.”
Given his social standing and lack of property, Fortune was not judged by the Society as being entitled to any of their perquisites, including such niceties as a rifle, pistols, bullets, and gunpowder. His mission was to study and expropriate the rare plants of the Orient—a task that did not, they maintained, require weaponry. It was not for the plants, Fortune argued, but for his own safety that he needed this protection. While his fellow professional botanists were sympathetic, the fact remained that when gentlemen plant hunters needed guns, they had the independent means with which to purchase them.
The Society members eventually agreed that their investment in the China expedition would be forfeited or at least greatly reduced if Fortune were killed before its completion. While they again refused to raise his salary, they did reluctantly provide him with some weapons.
As it turned out, their choice of Fortune to lead the expedition was a triumph. He faithfully reported back to them all the details of his botanical finds, shipping to England as many living examples of the new and wonderful plants of China as he could. He took cuttings, made grafts, kept careful notes, and wrote detailed letters for the botanists of the world, many of whom received the fruits of his discoveries as part of a program of global imperial plant exchange. By the end of his first trip to China, Fortune was considered a success within the circles of scientific exploration, the first of his shipments having been received, propagated, and duly celebrated.
It helped that he had a collector’s eye for the rare and the beautiful, as well as for potential market value. He plumbed the reaches of China’s natural wonders, keeping his eye trained on the flowers that, while perhaps not of immense significance to science, might nonetheless fetch a high price under the gavel. Over the course of three years Fortune discovered the winter-blooming jasmine; the bleeding heart, a floral image of brokenheartedness to play to Victorian romanticism; the Chinese fan palm, a gift of colonial exotica to Queen Victoria on her thirty-second birthday; the white wisteria; the corsage gardenia (Gardenia fortunei); and the lilac daphne (Daphne fortunei). Fortune found the fabled double yellow tea rose (commonly known as Fortune’s Double Yellow or The Gold of Ophir) in a mandarin’s garden, climbing walls to a height of 15 feet. One discovery in particular—the kumquat, Citrus fortunei , or commonly Fortunella, the miniature citrus fruit with edible skin—would make him immortal. Although Fortune did not own the property rights to any of his botanical finds, he would travel home with many other salable curiosities and trinkets, rare gems, pottery, and pieces of jade.
Beyond his scrupulously observed field notes, Fortune kept a diary of his exploits and of his encounters with the exotic people and customs of China. He wrote about his servants and interpreters, officials, merchants, herbalists, artists, fishermen, gardeners, monks, prostitutes, street peddlers, women, and children. Like other travelers of the Victorian era, upon his return in 1847 he published this document in the form of a travelogue. Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China is liberally sprinkled with the geographical and botanical descriptions one might find in any horticultural study, but it also contains its author’s jaunty and unstinting reminiscences of meeting fellow British expatriates in the treaty ports, of the temples and priests, and of the dangers of bandits.
Fortune’s trip began in Hong Kong, Britain’s newest colonial possession, during the typhoon season of 1843. He declared the island to be “in lamentable condition,” suffering from the bad air, or mal aria, which laid waste its European inhabitants. “Viewed as a place of trade, I fear Hong Kong will be a failure,” he wrote none too prophetically. Sailing up the coast toward the northern-most trading port at Shanghai, Fortune was nearly shipwrecked in a typhoon. “Some idea may be formed of the storm when I mention that a large fish weighing at least 30 pounds was thrown out of the sea onto the skylight upon the poop, the frame of which was dashed to pieces and the fish fell through and landed upon the cabin table.” While plant hunting on mainland hillsides, Fortune was pickpocketed, chased, and beaten by thieves, who threw a brick at his head. “I was stunned for a few seconds and leaned against a wall to breathe and recover myself. . . . The rascals again surrounded me and relieved me of several articles,” he wrote.
Fortune also visited opium-trading de
ns and held forth on the perils of addiction. “I have often seen the drug used and I can assert in the great majority of cases it is not immoderately indulged in. At the same time, I am well aware that, like the use of ardent spirits in our own country, it is frequently carried to a most lamentable excess.”
He was particularly eager to obtain plant material from the gardens of mandarins, which often held some of the best specimens available. In order to access the gardens of Suzhou, a forbidden city, he donned a disguise. “I was, of course, travelling in the Chinese costume; my head was shaved, I had a splendid wig and tail, of which some Chinaman in former days must have been extremely vain; and upon the whole I believe I made a very fair Chinaman.” The masquerade fooled the gatekeepers, and Fortune observed, “How surprised they would have been had it been whispered that an Englishman was standing amongst them.”
Three Years also charted Fortune’s evolution as a man gradually coming to terms with what he viewed as an enigmatic society. At first he approached China with all the arrogance of a colonialist, dismissing it as a country full of “wretched Chinese hovels, cotton fields, and tombs.” Like many foreigners, he saw himself as a missionary for the Western way of life, mocking any Chinese notions of superiority. European expatriates should, he believed, serve as examples to the Chinese, since any “peeps at our comforts and refinements may have a tendency to raise the ‘barbarian race’ a step or two higher in the eyes of the ‘enlightened’ Chinese.” Yet after three years his opinion had been tempered, for he could not have successfully completed his mission without coming into close contact with everyday Chinese, and in so doing the country inevitably began to assume a human face for him.
The barriers to penetrating China were enormous and ranged from the linguistic and the social to the strictly official. In light of his outsider status Fortune was almost entirely dependent on Chinese peasants, boatmen, coolies, guides, and porters. He found many who were willing to help him sidestep national and cultural boundaries—for a price. The contact he had with ordinary Chinese people, which few Westerners had previously experienced, led him to hope for unity and reconciliation between the two nations. “Nothing,” he wrote, “can give the Chinese a higher idea of our civilisation and attainments than our love for flowers, or tend more to create a feeling between us and them.”
Three Years was both a critical and a popular triumph. A reviewer for The Times of London, the paper of record, wrote as follows:When readers have recovered from the intoxication produced by the exciting drink of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we seriously recommend them . . . to “try Fortune’s mild Bohea.” There is no adulteration in the article. It is pure—almost to a fault, and has to be taken, as the Chinese themselves drink tea, without the admixture of milk and sugar, for luscious ornament and superfluous additions our singleminded author has none. Concerning the flavour there can be no mistake. One trial will prove the excellence of the commodity, and he that sips once will be soothed and sip again.
The book was avidly consumed by an audience of armchair botanists and starry-eyed colonialists, but also by those who simply enjoyed a gripping tale. Fortune rendered his experiences in the traditional form of the Victorian bildungsroman: Living by his wits and full of improvisation, the young man from the provinces made his name in the unlikeliest of ways and was celebrated upon his return to London.
But if one vignette in particular stood out and established Fortune in the popular imagination as a hero, it was the tale that began with him in his fevered state, lying in a cabin belowdecks on the treacherous Min River.
Fortune’s flat-bottomed ship made a turn north from the rocky mouth of the river out into the South China Sea. The small wooden craft sailed on an early morning wind, her rattan sail full, patched together like a quilt and pouching out between bamboo stays.
The cabin door burst open, and the breathless captain and pilot began to shout in Fukienese, the dialect of the coast.
“Pirates!” they warned. Haidao!
On deck it was a scene of chaos, as the captain had begun ripping up floorboards in order to stash his valuables while crew members likewise sought places to hide the few pieces of copper money they had managed to set aside in a life of hard sea labor. Fortune took out his telescope and could see five ships on the horizon, unmarked, flying no imperial flags. They could only be pirate ships.
As the first enemy craft bore down on them, its crew, some fifty or so strong, gathered along the gangway and began “hooting and yelling like demons.”
“Their fearful yells seem to be ringing in my ears even now, after this lapse of time, and when I am on the other side of the globe,” Fortune later wrote.
Turning back to the crew of his own ship, he noticed they had been subtly transformed. The men had made themselves look like beggars, as if they had been at sea for forty years or more; they were now wearing only the suggestion of clothes—torn rags and shreds of rice sacks. With enemies about to board, there was nothing to be gained by appearing prosperous.
Piracy was the scourge of China. Trade with the West brought in untold foreign wealth, leaving the coasts a battleground between the mandarins, who sought to impose official control over shipping, and a mutinous water world of thieves. If life in a pirate gang was a frenzy of sodomy, gang rape, torture, and cannibalism, it was also a way to make a living outside the rigid structure of Qing society. There was little profit in taking a boat as small as Fortune’s, as it would yield only a few captives to sell as slaves and a negligible vessel to commandeer or sink—but there was also very little risk. The pirate ship could easily outgun, outman, out-maneuver, and generally outclass Fortune’s cumbersome cargo junk.
His crew now began hauling up baskets of stones from the hold, emptying the rocks across the span of the deck. In peace-time these stones functioned as ballast; in war they were the most rudimentary of weapons. However, as Fortune noted, “All the pirate junks carried guns, and consequently a whole deck load of stones could be of very little use.”
“Bring the junk around,” one of the crew demanded.
“Run us back to the cliffs and hide among them,” another argued.
“Fight!” cried one. Da!
“Flee!” yelled another. Zou!
The fate of a Westerner taken by pirates was often a bloody one: The brigands would possibly hold Fortune for ransom and torture him. Under duress he would be forced to write letters to the British missions, begging for impossible sums to be paid to secure his release. One English captive held in such circumstances wrote, “I saw one man nailed through his feet with large nails, then beaten with four rattans twisted together, till he vomited blood; and after remaining some time in this state, he was taken ashore and cut into pieces.” Another “was fixed upright, his bowels cut open and his heart taken out, which they afterwards soaked in spirits and ate.”
Pirates did not shrink from such cruelty, given that their own death sentences were virtually assured. The state’s punishment for piracy was nailing the perpetrators to a cross, slicing them with a sharp knife, and cutting them into 120, 72, 36, or 24 pieces. Of the lightest sentence, 24 cuts, one observer wrote:The first and second cuts remove the eyebrows; the third and fourth, the shoulders; the fifth and sixth, the breasts, the seventh and eighth, the parts between each hand and elbow; the ninth and tenth, the parts between each elbow and shoulder; the eleventh and twelfth, the flesh of each thigh; the thirteenth and fourteenth, the calf of each leg; the fifteenth pierces the heart; the sixteenth severs the head from the body; the seventeenth and eighteenth cut off the hands; the nineteenth and twentieth, the arms; the twenty-first and twenty-second, the feet; the twenty-third and twenty-fourth, the legs.
Fortune knew that he would be the choicest of the pirates’ prizes, so he mustered his depleted strength, rallied from his fever, and imposed what order he could on the pandemonium on deck. Raising his pistol, he took aim at the head of his own helmsman.
“My gun is nearer to you than those of the pirates,” he threatened,
“and if you move from the helm, depend upon it, I will shoot you.”
As he delivered his warning, the enemy ship fired a broadside cannon. The crew—every man but Fortune’s terrified pilot—fled belowdecks. The cannonball whizzed over Fortune’s head, its flight taking it directly between the sails.
The pirate ship was at least half again the size of Fortune’s, but as her guns were fixed along her gangways (the passageways along either side of the ship), the craft was forced to adjust her head-on course and turn at a sharp angle in order to fire. While the cannon volley continued, Fortune settled on his plan: He would not retaliate from a distance but would allow the pirates to believe his ship could be boarded easily. Bringing them into close range would give the advantage to Fortune’s precision weaponry over the pirates’ heavy and clumsy cannons and locally made muskets or matchlocks (the Chinese did not have rifles or pistols), which were as likely to blow up in the hands of a marksman as fire a shot.
The pirates bore down on them, guns ablaze. When they were 20 yards off, Fortune took his chance. Crawling along the deck toward the high quarterdeck at the stern, he rose abruptly and let loose with both barrels of his rifle.
In an instant the shocked crew of the attacking ship disappeared behind its bulwarks. Fortune’s shot was true, leaving one of the pirates injured and probably dead. The pirate craft was suddenly a ghost vessel: No one was steering her; her sails luffed helplessly.
Fortune’s craft, on the other hand, had its pilot and a full sail.
Pirates traveled in packs, however, and shortly afterward a second ship began to gain on them, and three more were sighted in the distance.
Fortune then hit upon an idea prompted by his rag-bedecked crewmen and his own experiences visiting the mandarin gardens of Suzhou in disguise: cultural cross-dressing in borrowed clothes. He still had several changes of Western clothing stored in his cabin below. What if he dressed up the crew as Occidentals? “It now struck me that perhaps I might be able to deceive the pirates with regard to our strength,” he wrote. The Chinese were essentially blind at sea: While all British ships carried telescopes and some even binoculars, few Chinese vessels had them. If the pirates believed there was a full European contingent and arsenal aboard, they might be less enthusiastic about running down the junk.
