For All the Tea in China

by Sarah Rose

  Fortune dressed the “least Chinese-looking Chinamen” from the crew in his remaining Western finery. In frock coats, trousers, and heeled shoes, the men began to look like Victorian travelers. He instructed them to take up sticks that might look like rifles at long range, and several brandished the short levers used for hoisting the sails.

  However convincingly the crew may have appeared British, with pirates at close range they remained petrified. When a cannon volley began, every man fled under the decks, leaving Fortune alone.

  The second pirate ship began to fire: more shrapnel, more terror, more cries. But before the brigands had time to reload, Fortune was on his feet.

  He let loose the contents of his rifle—two shots, fore and aft—and then fired his revolvers, killing the helmsman and again leaving the vessel to heel under the wind.

  On the horizon the remainder of the pirate fleet began to turn about.

  Fortune’s crew emerged from below, shouting in victory and screaming taunts at the retreating pirates.

  “Come back and fight like men!” they called.

  The crew picked up the stones littering the decks and pitched them into the water after their retreating enemy.

  “A stranger who had not seen these gentry before would have supposed them the bravest men in existence,” Fortune later commented. “Fortunately the pirates did not think it proper to accept the challenge.”

  He wrote, “With the captain, pilot, crew and passengers, I was now one of the greatest and best men in existence. They actually came and knelt before me, as to some superior being.”

  His seagoing escapade, and the attention it attracted upon publication of his book, helped cement his reputation as a seasoned China hand, revered among the locals in a way that no tradesman, military man, or missionary could ever be. When Fortune returned to China on his next expedition, much more than the fate of a few orchids would be at stake: He would change the fate of nations.

  2

  East India House, City of London, January 12, 1848

  East India House occupied a prestigious site on Leadenhall Street in the center of the City of London. The building’s grand façade had Ionic columns supporting a triangular tympanum decorated with emblems of global commerce: At the corners, a figure representing Europe was seated on a horse, and the figure of Asia sat astride a camel; between Europe and Asia rode King George in flowing Roman dress. The mad king, who famously lost the reins of thirteen profitable colonies in the Americas, brandished a sword in defense of international trade. Although the architectural pediment faced north, every man who walked beneath it into the bustling East India Company offices below faced due east, toward the Orient, the center of profit for the venerable company.

  Amid the hubbub of the trading house, whose day-to-day activities included the recopying of letters, the distribution of favors, perquisites, and privileges in assemblies that lasted from dawn to dusk, and the serving of breakfast, a wooden chest arrived from India. It was carried through paneled hallways sumptuously adorned with portraits, statues, and memorabilia and beyond a vast library and a museum filled with models, coins, medals, fossils, stuffed birds, sculptures, and reliefs. Shouldered by porters from the dockyards, the chest passed before a clockwork tiger, which, when wound up, would “eat” a wooden British soldier—once the property of an Indian sultan before his defeat at the hands of the company.

  Large but light, the chest was delivered to a young clerk, who pried off its tin-lined lid, releasing a fragrant herbal aroma. From the contents of the chest he began to prepare several small packages. With a scale before him and brass weights lined up by size, he measured out uniform quantities from the box, carefully depositing each into a wax-dipped cloth bag. He was readying parcels of loose tea to be delivered to the best tea distributors in London.

  The task of tea allocation was not among the clerk’s typical duties, which were those of any secretary: writing out triplicates of every document, letter, and bill of lading that reached the offices of the company from the Orient. To a man making a decent wage of £300 a year for work that was neither taxing nor glamorous, this task of doling out some packets of tea would nevertheless be among the most significant actions he would perform in his lifelong career. It was no exaggeration to say that his employer’s survival hinged on whether the tea he was dispatching made a favorable impression on its distinguished recipients.

  Officially titled the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, although sometimes referred to as John Company or the Honourable Company, the clerk’s employer was a global corporation that had weathered nearly three hundred glorious and mostly profitable years in trade with the East. In that time it colonized much of the world and in the process became its first and largest multinational company. For very good reason it was called the “Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe.”

  When Queen Elizabeth granted her royal charter to the East India Company in 1600, she gave it all trading rights in the East Indies, a mandate as broad and valuable as any public concern has held. For the first hundred years of its existence it largely bought spices and fabrics in the Orient and sold them in London. To fund the expeditions eastward, the company sold shares, and stockholders received a dividend on profits. The operation was enormously successful for England, and the company prospered.

  As profits and opportunities grew, however, trade with the East became more and more complicated. John Company became the de facto government of many of the lands in which it did business: It could acquire territory, mint money, command armies, sign treaties, make war and peace, and develop its own judicial and taxation systems. It became a peer to empires and states and, as such, an entirely new entity in the global economy.

  The East India Company gave birth to the fortunes of the Pitt family, the military reputation of the Duke of Wellington, and the empire of Hastings. One company governor, Elihu Yale, funded a college of some apparent renown. The clublike offices on Leadenhall Street employed such fine minds as John Stuart Mill and Charles Lamb. With a staff of nearly 350 in the London office, it was the single largest private employer in Britain. The company hired as many soldiers as did the Crown and thus doubled the number of available jobs in the military, while increasing civil service positions by 50 percent. The company extended a gentlemanly capitalism to England’s otherwise propertyless leisure class, largely from southern England and public school educated. “Some of the best working blood of England is in India,” commented one company man.

  Managed in London by its Court of Directors, the East India Company was organized very much along the same lines as modern corporations. Businesses previously had been owned by the same people who managed them. But the shareholders of East India Company had no say in its day-to-day operations. A professional managerial class arose in England, and becoming a member of it became synonymous with middle-class success. The company’s international ambitions were so extensive and its structure so complex that it developed elaborate international banking and inventory systems to track goods, services, and debts across oceans. Managers were empowered to make high-volume transactions in several markets simultaneously, using whatever technology and information was available—from the letter to the telegraph to the hunch.

  Like today’s international businesses, the company would do anything to get ahead of the game, and it was generally believed that tea was the commodity that would keep the company pre-eminent. Tea was first introduced into England in the 1660s as part of the dowry of Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza when she married Charles II. Tea proved to be an ideal cargo for the East Indiaman merchant boats in that it was lightweight, packed easily, and could withstand the vagaries of many months spent in an ocean crossing. An exotic luxury, tea rapidly became a favorite way among the upper classes to signify civility and taste in the chilly, wet climate of Britain. From there it rapidly percolated downward through society so that by the mid-eighteenth century tea had become the most popular drink through
out Britain, outselling even beer.

  Previously just another trading commodity for the Honourable Company, tea had now become a staple of British life. To be English was to drink tea: Wives put tea on the breakfast table, and the bankers of the empire understood that it was tea that made the Far East trade go round. It was a significant profit center for the government, a multibillion-pound industry, accounting for as much as 10 percent of the total British economy as measured by tax revenues to the exchequer. And the East India Company had its stamp on every single case shipped into England.

  The dominance of the company was threatened, however, when in the early nineteenth century Parliament made a series of moves to withdraw its license to trade with Asia. Initially the company’s royal charter had given it a total monopoly on trade with the Orient at a time when no one really understood the implications of such a grant. Monopolies, by definition, squelch competition and innovation. Not only did rival firms object to the high barriers to trading in foreign ports, but a growing populism in England extended to the business practices of the empire. As the men of Britain became increasingly enfranchised politically, why couldn’t every British trading firm have the same rights to trade in the Far East? In 1813, Westminster withdrew the company’s monopoly on trade in India; it was left to rule the subcontinent as the de facto government but was ordered to allow other corporations to do business in Indian ports with Indian-made goods. Despite this check on company power, it collected tax revenues in India equal to half of the total tax revenues of Britain and remained financially healthy. It also retained its most valuable trade monopoly in China.

  China had once been a source of pure profit to the company. The company had the run of Cathay, and every chest of tea, silk, or porcelain out of Canton traveled on East Indiaman ships so that money practically minted itself. The margins on tea were particularly high, and its value by the turn of the nineteenth century equaled that of all other Chinese goods combined. But free trade advocates, including Adam Smith, continued to rail against the company’s dominance in the China trade. An 1834 act of Parliament finally stripped John Company of its long-sanctioned monopoly over China. Free trade sentiment and mercantilist tendencies stirring in England ensured that there was fierce jostling for a share in the lucrative tea business. New, smaller trading firms were soon docking in Canton, offloading opium, onloading tea for England, and, with their faster ships, sailing between continents in record time. The triple-masted East Indiaman looked old, bloated, and slow in comparison, much like the East India Company itself. It seemed as if the company’s days of unrivaled supremacy in the East were numbered.

  After the loss of its last trade monopoly, China became mostly a headache for the company, due to a series of lingering unsolved problems. The empire of Great Britain owed its entire acquaintance with tea, not to mention its continuing supply of it, to the empire of China. The Chinese picked tea, roasted it, blended it, and then sold it to England at a lucrative markup. China was in complete control of the drink that had dominated British taste for two centuries. Dependence on another country for a vital product was a blow to imperial Britain’s sense of self-sufficiency. It was especially galling to be so reliant on a nation that was so often churlish and disobliging, and that would raise prices on inferior goods whenever it pleased.

  To East India House, it had long seemed preposterous that any country, let alone one of “backwards Orientals,” could so thoroughly ignore trade initiatives from a nation whose mighty navy, at the time, dominated the world. Yet isolationist China had managed successfully to keep Great Britain at arm’s length, even though Britain purchased one out of every five chests of tea it manufactured. Despite a century of diplomatic approaches, the Chinese had yielded absolutely no secrets about the manufacture of tea. How it was grown, by whom, and in what conditions remained a mystery to the West. Even the very names for tea were enigmatic: Lark’s Tongue, Dragon’s Well, Jade Girl Peak, Looking Glass Rock, Water Tortoise Stones, Rock of Three Monks. Were these green teas or blacks? How could one label them for the market with such descriptions? How could the company be sure the teas would taste the same from year to year? Its Court of Directors had long since grown tired of dealing with grasping middlemen and did not want to share any part of their profits with the infuriating Chinese.

  Tea was the symbol of the one major country on earth that still resisted Britain’s empire.

  If the tea trade had been the greatest boon for the East India Company in its prime, by the mid-nineteenth century the company was reeling; its tea trade was in decline while simultaneously its last, best hope for survival. In India the company presided over a series of human catastrophes: a famine that killed more than ten million and heavy death tolls from warfare between states, corruption, expansionism, drug dealing, and ethnic cleansing. Governing a subcontinent was also an expensive business. To safeguard its territory the company mounted military campaigns in Afghanistan and the Punjab, with scant resources to pay for them. New colonies were supposed to create new markets for British-manufactured goods, but there was little demand from Asian peasantry for British woolens.

  The company clerk kept his hand steady as he measured out the chest of Indian tea in the dark-paneled confines of East India House. This was Himalayan tea, which was never before seen in England. It had been sent from Calcutta on the orders of Viscount Hardinge himself as part of a plan to save the company.

  Hardinge had battled Napoleon at the sides of both Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington. He missed Waterloo by a mere two days after losing his hand at the Battle of Ligny. The viscount was such a favorite of Wellington’s that he was nevertheless presented with the gift of Napoleon’s sword. Hardinge went from the military to a life in politics, serving as a member of Parliament and later at cabinet level as Secretary for War, in both Whig and Conservative administrations. At the tiller he was an able hand—even if he only had one—and the Honourable Company counted itself lucky to have such a trusted soldier helming India as governor-general from 1844 to 1848. When he suggested that this Indian tea ought to be sent to London’s tasters and blenders, the finest practitioners in the entire world, the Court of Directors of the East India Company hastily and heartily agreed.

  Himalayan tea was not the first tea produced on Indian soil. The company had been growing tea there for at least ten years, propagated out of native Indian tea plants in Assam Province. Indian tea was initially discovered in Assam by company medical corps surgeons as early as 1815 but was not formally acknowledged as such until 1831. Indian tea grew well in its sea-level home soil near Burma, where the natives chewed rather than drank it. In the following years the company invested millions in the experimental cultivation of native tea, to see if it could be grown in Indian gardens for the domestic market. To an extent the plan worked. The company discovered it could produce a leaf that looked like the tea leaves of China; it could also train natives to pick and prepare tea. But the company could never make Assam tea taste good—or at least not as good as China tea, the finest in the world and the only one that mattered to a thirsty English market.

  Assam tea had a strong bite to it and a hot, sooty taste. Even today Assam is seldom graded fine at auction and is appreciated only by those who desire a strong nose and a certain maltiness to their brew. It also doesn’t grow particularly well, yielding a poor return per acre. Now as then, Assam tea is largely used in blends when the prevailing notes of dainty florals require a slight heft. Within a few years of commencing their tea experiment, the company realized that Assam would never fetch the high prices of its rival and would certainly never overtake China tea in the world marketplace, and so it begrudgingly divested itself of its tea assets there.

  Himalayan tea was the company’s next big hope, enthused Hardinge in a letter to the Court of Directors dated September 20, 1847.

  I consider it highly probable that in the course of a few years, the cultivation of [Himalayan] tea is likely to prove a highly valuable source of revenue for the s
tate. No apparent difficulties exist to the spread of Tea cultivation in the Hills to an almost unlimited extent and I have every confidence that at no remote period Tea will be produced in sufficient amount not only to meet the probably large demand in India but also in quantity and sufficient fineness in quality to enable it to compete with the Tea of China in European markets and to render England in some degree independent of a foreign Country for its supplies of this necessary of life.

  The Himalayas possessed the same growing conditions as China’s best tea regions. They were subtropical, on roughly the same latitude as Cairo, but high and cool, so the tea would be slow-growing and retain its pungency. There was also unlimited space on Himalayan hillsides for tea production—the natives seemed neither to want nor to make use of the mountains, for food or profit. Under Hardinge’s orders, the company made elaborate plans for experimental plantations of a minimum of five hundred acres each, which would allow for economies of scale, capital investment, and the European efficiency that Chinese tea production lacked. British laws and British investors would oversee the sale and merchandising of Himalayan tea; there would be no middlemen, no double-dealing, no Chinese-style obfuscation. Labor in India was at least as cheap as in China, both countries having a surfeit of manpower. The quality would eventually improve, and the prices would drop so that leaves that were picked for a penny could be sold for £3 in London. Growing tea would be like printing money.