For All the Tea in China

by Sarah Rose

  As the clerk closed the bags of tea, he sealed them with the wax stamp of the East India Company. Each was sent to one of the esteemed tea brokers of London, the blenders, tasters, and traders whose noses and palates determined the price of a commodity and the fate of nations: Messrs. R. Gibbs & Co., Peek Brothers & Co., Miller & Lowcock, and the revered House of Twinings.

  The Court of Directors was “requesting to be favoured with their respective opinion of the quality and value of some specimens of tea grown and manufactured in the District of Kumaon, together with any practical suggestions for its improvement which may occur to them.”

  At last messengers arrived to pick up the deliveries.

  The Court of Directors waited patiently for a response.

  When the reports came, they were good—extremely good.

  Twinings, Gibbs, Peek, and Miller & Lowcock wrote that the Himalayan tea was as fine in quality as the finest of the China teas. The leaves were perfection: beautiful to look at, picked at the right time, light on the tongue, delicate in the cup, and brewed up a rich liquor with a golden hue. The tea would compete admirably at auction; they would stake their reputation on it.

  There were caveats, however. As the experts noted, the Himalayan tea was “lacking in fragrance,” that is, it did not have the floral nose of the finest China teas. Some of this was a matter of stock. While the Himalayan teas in the sample had been raised from Chinese seed, it was not the finest seed from the best regions, but ordinary varieties smuggled out of Canton in the south of China, the only place that Englishmen were then allowed. Tea from Canton was known to be of extremely low quality compared to that of other Chinese tea regions.

  Beyond the quality of the tea stock itself, none of the Himalayan tea’s other noted faults was inherent; instead, some of the tasters’ complaints were attributable to poor processing and manufacture. If the Himalayan tea lacked the perfumed notes of China teas, it was because the latter were packed between other materials, such as jasmine, bergamot, lemon, or verbena, to scent the brew. In addition, the Leadenhall Street tea had been poorly prepared for shipment in boxes that were not airtight. The sea air had doubtless tainted the sample, deadening its flavor.

  The company’s prototype tea may not have had the ultimate refinement, but if the methods and practices of the world’s finest Chinese tea manufacturers could be imported to the plantations in India and if true native Chinese experts could train the Himalayan growers in the processes of tea manufacture, then the deficiencies of Himalayan tea could be profitably redressed.

  In 1846 (the season in which Hardinge’s tea was grown) the company’s experimental tea gardens in the Himalayas totaled little more than six hundred acres, but the court had plans for rapid expansion. The government of India had over one hundred thousand acres ready for cultivation. From such acreage the company could expect to bring in a profit of almost 4 million rupees a year ($100 million today). But to achieve that level of return in only six years—the time it takes a tea plant to mature to picking stage—it would need hundreds of thousands of Chinese seeds from the finest of China’s green and black tea regions immediately.

  For the Himalayan tea experiment, the company shopping list was short but precise: It sought China’s materials, her best seeds, and China’s tea knowledge, in the form of Chinese tea makers and tea manufacturing implements.

  The company was well aware that getting tea out of China would be a difficult undertaking and impossible to achieve through normal diplomatic channels. As Her Majesty’s consul in Shanghai, Rutherford Alcock, warned Viscount Hardinge, “It will suggest itself no doubt to your Excellency that the Chinese are likely to regard any demand on my part for tea seeds or plants with great jealousy, and that the attempts in conjunction with efforts to obtain seeds, to induce Chinese skilled in the cultivation and manufacture of tea to leave their country and proceed to India for the purpose of instructing people, must inevitably fail.” In other words, if the East India Company wanted tea for India, it would have to steal it.

  Tea met all the definitions of intellectual property: It was a product of high commercial value; it was manufactured using a formula and process unique to China, which China protected fiercely; and it gave China a vast advantage over its competitors.

  The notion of intellectual property and trade secrets had been articulated only a few years earlier when a Massachusetts judge ruled in an 1845 patent case that “only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests as much a man’s own . . . as the wheat he cultivates or the flocks he rears.” In the dawn of 1848, the East India Company was planning a project that was nothing short of industrial espionage. If the company’s scheme was successful, the largest multinational corporation in the world, the East India Company, would enact the greatest theft of trade secrets in the history of mankind.

  3

  Chelsea Physic Garden, May 7, 1848

  On a spring day in 1848, Robert Fortune strolled through the Chelsea Physic Garden, a verdant patch of land by the Thames, admiring some of his own handiwork. The earth was just warming to life: Tulips were out in full flower, and lily of the valley dipped gracefully toward the ground. The bulb beds planted in the chilly previous autumn were coming into bloom, as was a tree peony, one of his most treasured discoveries in the Far East.

  Three years earlier, upon his triumphal return from China, Fortune had been appointed curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden—something of a vindication of the Royal Horticultural Society’s assessment of the value of the mission to his future career.

  Now thirty-five, he had seen his life change very much for the better. Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China had been published a year earlier to rave reviews. He and his family currently enjoyed an enviable position that had a degree of social prominence and comfort to which he could not otherwise have aspired. His position at the Physic Garden paid £100 per annum (roughly $10,000 in today’s dollars), no more than he had earned in China, but in addition to his salary he received the use of a charming brick house on the garden’s grounds for his family and servants (though the house had no indoor plumbing or sanitation), an allocation of coal, and the right to cultivate his own vegetable garden.

  The curatorship of the Physic Garden provided him with both a showcase for his talents and the opportunity to establish himself as one of the premier horticulturalists in Britain. The Physic, established in 1673 by the Company of Apothecaries, was England’s second oldest botanic garden. Today it is a bucolic oasis of only four acres, situated in the posh area near Sloane Square, not far from the center of London. Hidden from the street behind high redbrick walls, it serves as a living museum of the exotic and medicinal plants of the world. In Fortune’s day it was a living display of the many novelties and mysteries of the Victorian plant world as well as a laboratory for the study of materia medica: herbal and vegetable remedies, balms, powders, syrups, tinctures, salves, and ointments. The Garden of Simples, as it was originally known, was instrumental in the development of horticulture, producing The Gardener’s and Florist’s Dictionary, or a Complete System of Horticulture, which was the definitive manual on gardening technique and cultivation for gardeners around the world for over a century. Alongside Kew Gardens, just a short journey down the Thames, the Physic Garden played a major role in the growth of the profitable and strategically important plant-based industries that helped drive the economy of the British Empire.

  The concepts of plant exchange and empire had, in fact, evolved in tandem. Botanists accompanied Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation on the Endeavour in 1768. Cook went on to discover Australia while onboard scholars mapped the transit of the planet Venus, collected samples, and painted pictures of the strange-looking plants of the Southern Hemisphere.

  Joseph Banks, a millionaire horticulturalist, was among those who sailed with Cook. As a man of influence, Banks campaigned to put a naturalist aboard all future expeditions of England’s world
-winning naval fleet. Both Banks and Cook published accounts of their trip; unlike Fortune’s, their copious notes did not record their subjective impressions but instead contained precise and descriptive catalogs of their findings. These empire builders brought concrete knowledge from faraway locations, and with the acquisition of that knowledge England gained a growing confidence that it could possess, command, and profit from the entire world.

  Plant exchange was a major source of income for the British Empire, which then consisted of old colonies, such as the West Indies, and the recently unified colonies of the Indian subcontinent, along with island outposts in the oceans between. Botanists such as Fortune were charged with suggesting how newly discovered plants in foreign dominions could be exploited for the Western market, how cash crops could be improved through selection and hybridization, where on the globe to cultivate a particular plant to achieve maximum yields from cheap colonial labor, and how to process a plant for market distribution.

  Plant hunters were highly trained, sharp-eyed men who left home and family for the lure of discovery. In the opening years of the industrial era, botanic research was a counterpart to today’s industrial research laboratories. Botanical imperialism was a way of making colonies pay their way, and plant hunters became the research and development men of the empire.

  Although science was very much at the core of Fortune’s work, he was at heart a gardener, and a gardener is an artist: His canvas is land; his medium, plants. A gardener works in a three-dimensional world, taking into account the relative heights of trees and depths of borders, the slope of a hillside, and the views to be “borrowed” or enhanced. But he works in a fourth dimension as well: time. A gardener plans for seasons: which trees will bloom in spring (forsythia, magnolia, cherry, lilac, and apple) and which will reach their peak of color in autumn (acer, euonymus, and elder). A gardener’s art also spans years—in determining which trees mature quickly and grow tall easily, such as birch, ash, and the softwood evergreens such as cedar, fir, and pine, and which grow slowly and with some effort to leave a lasting legacy, such as oak, beech, and maple, which stand for generations. Fortune was well aware that to be a great gardener demanded great patience.

  Gardening appealed to the gentler side of his character. He was a spirited man who enjoyed outdoor living and had an innate sense of what a plant needed to thrive: shade or sun, amount of water, whether to plant on a sloping hillside for drainage or in a container so as to coddle and warm the roots. He could kneel in the soil and know, from years of practice, exactly where to cut back a bush and how to gently bring on a bud. Plants thrived for him.

  On that spring day in 1848, Fortune could look upon the reawakening Chelsea Physic Garden with a sense of accomplishment. By his account the place was in disrepair when he took it over—its borders overgrown, its greenhouses in decay, its catalogs worthless. Fortune, with his knack for organization and his own aspirations, brought about a notable transformation. As he wrote to the Garden Committee of the Society of Apothecaries: “From various causes with which the Committee are doubtless acquainted, the Garden has been allowed to get into a most ruinous condition. When I took charge of it . . . I found it overrun with weeds, the Botanical arrangements in confusion, the exotic plants in the Houses in very bad health, and generally in a most unfit state for the purpose for which it was designed.”

  Fortune cleared the weeds, bought new tools, built up collections through donations and plant swaps with other gardens, and, most important, sold off £364 worth of bank and nursery stock (equivalent today to $44,000) to raise money for the erection of new greenhouses and the repair of the standing ones. His building plans were timely, for the year 1845 had seen the repeal of England’s “glass tax,” and he seized the opportunity of lower-priced glaziers to order new glass greenhouses to abut the garden’s high brick walls. These semi-glazed constructions were soon home to the most exotic new horticultural imports: delicate orchids and ornamentals, spiky bougainvilleas and potted palms, prehistoric ferns and brand-new begonias, balsa, breadfruit, bananas, and bamboos.

  The Physic Garden was still arranged in the formal seventeenth-century pattern, with plants heavily pruned and placed in geometrically aligned beds. Fortune wanted to move away from such excessive formality, though, and reorganized the medical garden along the precise and ordered lines of Linnaeus’s classification system.

  The Victorian age of exploration fed upon an enthusiasm for the natural sciences generated by the work of Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707-1778). Writing under the Latin name Carolus Linnaeus, the scientist invented a taxonomy using two names to categorize the world according to the characteristic sexual organs of plants and animals. Linnaeus’s work divided life on earth into kingdoms, kingdoms into phyla, phyla into classes, classes into orders, orders into families, families into genera, and genera into species. A species’ name alone provides a great deal of information about it: If an organism is in the mammalia class, it has hair and secretes milk; if two species belong to the same order, they are more closely related than a third that is merely in the same class. When a naturalist discovered, say, a new species of beetle on a trip to the Amazon, he would now pose standard questions involving its body type and method of reproduction in order to give his discovery a name. Linnaeus’s simple distinctions brought hierarchy and organization to the natural world in a way that had previously eluded scientists.

  While pious Linnaeus hoped that establishing the relationships between living things would bring him closer to an understanding of the Creator, his work instead founded a scientific revolution. Linnaeus fueled Europe’s burgeoning sense that all things on earth could be comprehended and mastered by the rational efforts of mankind. It was a landmark Enlightenment moment.

  Under Fortune’s new scheme for the Physic Garden, medicinal plants were displayed relative to one another in their natural orders. “What labour is more severe,” wrote Linnaeus, “what science more wearisome, than botany?” Fortune would no doubt have agreed with that sentiment, but as wearisome as the effort often was, it was infinitely rewarding to a man with a mind bent toward order and understanding. One could walk through the Physic Garden and see there a physical manifestation of the march of science and human learning in the relationships between a living organism and its neighbor. To study the beds of the garden was to see natural history codified in bloom.

  It is perhaps no wonder that in such a turbulent time as the Industrial Revolution, gardening became a national obsession in Britain. Patience and time were slowly being eroded across the country as technology brought a new immediacy to everyday life. Where a length of cloth, a blanket, or some bedding once took long evenings by firelight to create, countless yards of fabric were now spun each day in the mills of Liverpool and Manchester. Where a trip across counties was once a marathon involving several coaches, it was now a single short ride away by train. Candle-light gave way to gaslight, wind power to steam; the world grew ever more mechanized and reliable. The vicissitudes of weather were becoming things of the past, and as natural processes faded from view, they began to be fetishized. The new middle class of the industrial Victorian age regretted this estrangement from nature and, mourning its loss, was soon willing to pay a premium for a simulacrum of it.

  As curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden, Fortune had effectively ascended to the highest position available to him—and he might reasonably have feared that it would be his last. Although he enjoyed the success conferred on him by his China trip, he still faced the limitations imposed on him by his birth and class. A contemporary of Fortune’s wrote, “People without independence have no business to meddle with science. It should never be linked with lucre.” There were only a few paid positions within the nexus of loosely connected botanic gardens of the empire: Kew, St. Helena, and Calcutta. Although there were some rare and wonderful jobs in botany—working for the Royal Horticultural Society or teaching at University College or running the botanic gardens in Edinburgh and Oxford—on the w
hole such positions were few and highly competitive. The university appointments went to men with advanced educations, and they were seldom well enough endowed to be a sole means of support. Many of the naturalists who would make names for themselves, such as Charles Darwin, had enormous private incomes with which to fund their studies. Dilettante country pastors and doctors considered themselves naturalists, too, treading the local hillsides to build their collections and often assembling considerable libraries to advance their scientific inquiries. Some of the prestigious jobs in botany were passed from father to son and often to grandson, such as the directorship of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, which would remain in the hands of the Hooker family for a continuous sixty-four years.

  Whatever the professional obstacles facing him, Fortune at least had the support and companionship of his wife, Jane, née Penny, a lively Scotswoman. He could not have advanced even as far as he had without her help. The curatorship of the Physic Garden brought him a salary, a home, and a vegetable garden, and Jane tended to the latter two. While he was attending to his botanical duties and research, she sowed vegetable seeds in March, moved plants in and out with the sun throughout the spring, and transplanted seedlings after the final frosts in May. She grew the food that her family would eat. She mended old clothes and sewed new ones for a man who all too often found himself in a thicket of thorns, snagging trousers, socks, and coats.

  Jane also served as the Fortune family’s secretary and accountant. While Fortune was in China collecting plants, his salary was directed to Jane in London. She paid his debts and put money by, managed expedition accounts, and settled his bills. She was also the go-between for Fortune’s shipments of trinkets that were sent home to auctioneers. It is entirely likely that she would have kept abreast of the newest developments in botany, too, and forwarded relevant papers and magazines to Fortune’s poste restante addresses abroad. Away for years at a time, he could not afford to be uninformed of the scientific developments.