For All the Tea in China

by Sarah Rose

  With his barbering completed and outfitted in his new wardrobe, Fortune naturally wondered: Would the disguise work? He was confident that China was so enormous and far removed from the rest of the world that the peasants among whom he would be traveling could scarcely make sense of the sheer size of their own country. With no external reference points for comparison, it would be unlikely that they could determine just how foreign Fortune actually was. He hoped the fact that his facial features were not Chinese or that he was nearly a foot taller than every man around him would not be considered too suspicious in a nation already ruled by foreigners. His height could in any case be explained away: It was well known that the people from the other side of the Great Wall were very tall and extremely brutish, and since all Chinese subjects had queues, Fortune’s wearing one would mark him as a subject of the emperor.

  The light turned gray around them as the sun sank from view. From shadowed alley doorways a handful of prostitutes began moving toward the canal to set money on fire. It was hell money, burned as a way of transferring it from the physical world to the spirit one; it was offered as an appeasement to deities and ancestors before getting down to the night’s business. The coolie cast a wistful eye in their direction.

  Fortune felt the braid bounce off his back, dancing lightly between his shoulder blades. He was “a pretty fair Chinaman,” he thought, and he reminded himself that from this moment forward he would have to speak only in Chinese, unpracticed as it was after his three-year absence. He would have to use chopsticks and remember to kowtow rather than shake the hand of a man of higher rank. He would introduce himself with his Chinese name, Sing Wa, Bright Flower.

  After packing his razor and scissors, the coolie nodded to his foreign master and walked aft to the Sea Goddess’s altar, where he lit an incense stick to ask the deity’s blessing on their journey.

  Wang, visibly nervous as the boat pulled out into the canal and the journey began in earnest, asked Fortune what would happen if someone asked where they were from. How were they to answer?

  Fortune smiled and replied, Wo hui gaosu tamen, wo shi waishengren cong changcheng geng yuan de yi xie shengdi lai de. (I am Chinese, from a distant province beyond the Great Wall.)

  5

  Zhejiang Province near Hangzhou, October 1848

  For the past millennium the Chinese have loved the city of Hangzhou, which stands about 120 miles inland from Shanghai. Built around a lake, with green mountains rimming its skyline and a mist working broad strokes across the water, it is a city for poets. Also a center of serenity, it is liberally endowed with temples and gardens. More than simply a picturesque site, however, it is one of the precious few beautiful places remaining in modern China. The surrounding province was then and remains today the wealthiest in the country. In 1848 its people, from house servants to merchants, were dressed in lush, brightly colored silk robes as they thronged the busy streets, feasting on cakes or trading luxuries such as pearls and jade. Its shops were full and its merchants were fat, which was no mean feat in a nation that suffered from repeated famines and shortages. Where most Chinese cities were filthy and overrun with vermin, by Fortune’s report Hangzhou was notably well tended. “Beyond dispute the finest and the noblest [city] in the world,” Marco Polo wrote upon laying eyes on it. The Confucian poets were equally enthralled: “Above, there is heaven, but on earth there is Hangzhou.”

  More than anything else Hangzhou was a city whose life centered on tea: trading it or sampling the choice blends served in the teahouses. It was exactly the kind of atmosphere Fortune would have enjoyed: an ancient gardened place where rich people had the time to not work but to think, to plan big ideas, to enjoy a long cup of hot tea, and to talk about the magic of nature. Were Fortune merely a tourist, he might have lingered here, but he planned to avoid Hangzhou entirely because it was too dangerous to pass through it. A bottleneck for trade, it was situated directly on the main silk and tea routes where merchants from the coastal trading ports might easily recognize a white man in disguise. Or at the very least they would notice Fortune as someone who was an anomaly among the local Chinese.

  He therefore commanded Wang to arrange for sedan chairs to bear them around Hangzhou. Once they were safely beyond the outskirts of the city, he was to book them passage on a cargo boat headed up the great Yangtze valley, toward Wang’s own home in rural Anhui Province, where green tea grew on every sloped hill.

  Wang, however, had other plans: The quickest route to the tea country was to go directly through Hangzhou. The difference in the price of Fortune’s passage, the margin between “around” and “through,” was more than enough to provide some illicit tea and tobacco for Wang and perhaps even a “flower girl” or two. A little extra squeeze off the top of Fortune’s travel budget would buy the coolie’s silence.

  Wang, as ordered, negotiated with sedan-chair porters to bear Fortune along the long flat road. The “chair” was little more than a box resting between two bamboo poles, held at either end by coolies. “No one took the slightest notice of me, a circumstance which gave me a good deal of confidence,” Fortune said of his journey toward Hangzhou.

  The road leading to the city stretched ahead for miles, surrounded by forests of mulberry trees, the workshops in which China’s famed silkworms spun their soft magic. “I saw little else than mulberry trees,” he wrote. He sat comfortably in his sedan chair and, as the long day of travel drew on, was “expecting at any moment to get out into the open country.” But with every mile the porters advanced, crossroads became more frequent, buildings sprang up, and fields disappeared. “I was greatly surprised to find that I was getting more and more into a dense town.” The porters soon carried Fortune through the gates set in Hangzhou’s thick gray walls and straight into the center of the city, next to the splendid West Lake.

  “Had it been known that a foreigner was in the very heart of the city of Hang-chow-foo, a mob would soon have collected and the consequences might have been serious,” a terrified Fortune later wrote. He immediately upbraided Wang, using the insults of a low sailor, the only form of Chinese swearing he was likely to have known. He was unaccustomed to being disobeyed and probably feared that if he did not come down on his men sternly now, he would face a series of such misdeeds. With every step farther inland, the consequences might be ever more grave.

  But Fortune’s recriminations had little effect, for a master’s scolding his servants publicly only served to build their self-esteem, or “face,” as even a reproach was a tacit declaration that the servant was important enough to merit the notice of a wealthy mandarin. In China, “face,” or mianxi, was a concept that a Westerner like Fortune did not instinctively understand, describing as it does the prestige and reputation one gains from every human interaction. Relationships in China were defined by the reciprocal obligations between people, whether of the same or a different status, and every individual existed within a network of influence, a matrix of duties and social connections, or guanxi. The family came first, then the extended social neighborhood. “Face” expressed a person’s position within his or her network and was the mechanism by which the Chinese assessed their obligations: which orders to obey, which favors to grant, and which supplications and apologies to make. A son might perform humble acts for his father, or an employee might bow before his master or a student before his teacher, but in turn the father would have a set of defined responsibilities to the child, the master to the slave, and the teacher to the student.

  However subtly they were expressed, mianxi and guanxi were inescapable facts of life in China; then as now they forged the social fabric of the nation. Social connections determined the measure of justice received and discrimination suffered. While no Chinese person was free from these relationships, many peasants had very little face and therefore little access to justice, wealth, or freedom. When social obligations were met, someone gained face and an increase in status; when a person failed those to whom he was socially connected and thereby obligated,
he suffered a loss of face (diumian) and a downturn in his social standing. When Wang was shouted at by Fortune for failing to follow orders, it demonstrated to the world that he had responsibilities to an important man. Wang lost face with Fortune, while simultaneously gaining it in the wider neighborhood of Hangzhou.

  Face was a very Confucian concept. The great philosopher, whose ideas gained influence during the Han dynasty, 206 BC- AD 220, described a world where familial connections and obligations to ancestors were the highest good and the greatest aim of an individual. A single person was nothing if he did not bring honor to the world from which he came.

  A foreigner in China had no network of relationships of prescribed duties and no social capital, and therefore lacked any obvious signifiers of face. Many foreigners handled their outsider status adroitly. They engaged in relationships with the Chinese immediately, offering gifts and favors to officials and higher-ups; they recognized that a servant did not just serve but was owed things other than monetary reward, such as honor and respect. Fortune, however, seems to have paid little attention to the finer points of Chinese social interaction. He treated the Chinese as he would any employee: demanding excellence, refusing to hear excuses, and chastising failure. Wang and Fortune would travel together on and off for years, and the servant valiantly tried to negotiate the workings of guanxi on his master’s behalf. Wang effectively created Fortune’s identity as a mandarin by forging a fictitious network of prestigious connections for him, elevating his master’s face (and, not incidentally, elevating his own status by association). He also bribed and negotiated on Fortune’s behalf, not just for favors but for face.

  It might have seemed to Fortune that these obligations only served to increase Wang’s profits and interfered with the efficiency of the expedition. Although Fortune had traveled in China before, he remained an easy mark for those who were entrusted with keeping his secrets. Out of necessity he relied on his servants, making a family of his travel companions: It was a network of consideration, if not care. He did not appreciate the high level of face status he conferred upon them by depending on them so heavily. Nor did he foresee how rebellious this would make them.

  After the trip through Hangzhou, Wang engaged a cargo boat to take Fortune out of the city toward the tea regions of Anhui Province, to the rich Yangtze valley. Fortune’s berth would be in the stern, next to a dwarf’s; he would receive a straw mat to sleep on (the servants slept abovedecks) and a basin of hot water with which to wash each morning (unlike Europeans, nineteenth-century Chinese bathed daily). The cost of his passage would include two meals of rice gruel and one of rice per day. Under Fortune’s sleeping mat were two coffins—presumably occupied. Such was the reverence in China for ancestors and ancestral graves that merchants from the provinces who had the misfortune to die in the coastal cities, away from their clans, were always repatriated to their home villages. It was believed that otherwise their ghosts would be confused when the time came to bestow good fortune on their relatives and that they would become angry and therefore vengeful at finding themselves buried so far from home. Heedless of this custom, Fortune assumed the containers were simply a bed and slept soundly on them.

  The river towns around Hangzhou were eerie and dilapidated, their crumbling walls overrun with weeds and shrubs. These small settlements were dens of robbers and pirates waiting to prey on the newfound wealth sailing past toward the China Sea. His boatmen regaled Fortune with stories of local terror and brigandry, which “almost made me believe myself to be in dangerous company,” he recalled. Fortune posted the coolie to keep watch over his cabin every evening, augmenting the work of the night watchman. “How long these sentries kept watch I cannot tell, but when I awoke, some time before the morning dawned, the dangers of the place seemed to be completely forgotten, except perhaps in their dreams, for I found them sound asleep. . . . No one seemed to have harmed us during our slumbers.”

  However much the boatmen might have enjoyed spinning a frightening yarn, maintaining a good relationship with the crew was an essential lifeline for the three travelers. Boatmen negotiated the river routes at their own discretion and were accustomed to doing so, for there were always hostile forces sailing on the waterways of China, whether arms and opium dealers or rebels and religious renegades. Above all other considerations was the fact that the boatmen had to be kept content lest they betray their illegal human cargo. If the sailors did not know the precise nature of Fortune’s secret, they took it for granted that every man traveling in China had one.

  While the river junk was docked in Hangzhou, waiting for a full roster of passengers before pushing off, Wang conducted some business dealings of an indeterminate nature with the head boatman. Perhaps he was scheming for a larger fraction of the cost of the passage to find its way back to his pocket—with a split for the boatman, naturally. It is possible he had arranged for a false “chop”—the receipt of purchase that served as a ticket—so that Fortune would never know the full price of his passage. Or maybe Wang had found some cargo downriver that commanded a higher price upriver and was bartering for a little extra stowage to be added to Fortune’s bill. Whatever his game, Wang owed a significant amount of money to the captain.

  He paid his debt to the boatman in silver, using a silver dollar, but on shore that night, when the captain was drinking, gambling, and otherwise enjoying himself before resuming the long journey, he put down Wang’s dollar to pay for his evening’s entertainment. The innkeeper examined the coin and told him it was counterfeit and unacceptable. Mexican silver dollar coins were rare inland, although they were the accepted currency of the international settlements on the coast—the very first world currency, in fact. (Mexico received independence from Spain in 1821, but the coins were still considered the “principal money” of the China trade throughout the century.) The foreign trade that entered the country after the Opium Wars had increased the number of silver dollars in circulation in China so that even a simple boatman would likely have been aware of silver’s high value against local currency—especially since the copper coinage of China was in the process of being radically devalued. Yet the relative scarcity of silver inland would have meant the captain might not have known how to identify a true Mexican dollar.

  Settling his debts at the gaming table in Chinese coin, the captain then returned to his ship, where Wang adamantly refused to take the dollar back. A dollar is a dollar, he insisted. The captain was equally resolute: He wanted a refund. It was late at night, Wang was drunk, and the two men continued to argue. How was the captain to be recompensed? How could Wang be certain that this was even the same dollar he had handed over that morning? When the argument grew heated, the captain finally threatened to alert the mandarin that his servant was passing false coin.

  At last Wang agreed to pay the captain in Chinese money instead, mumbling a protest—“That dollar was good enough”—as he threw down its equivalent in heavy strings of copper coins, which were the common medium for local exchange.

  The boatman was satisfied with the settlement at first, but when he counted his haul, he found it was short. Wang was still trying to take advantage of him.

  Wang exploded: “I gave you a dollar, and you said that was bad. I changed it and gave you copper cash, and you return them. Pray, what do you want?”

  By now Fortune and other passengers had gathered around in the cool night air, drawn by the increasing volume of the brawl. The boatman finally left the scene resentfully, clutching the cash that he insisted felt far too light. Although Fortune could not follow the angry discussion between the two men, he began to realize the liabilities of traveling with someone like Wang, and his suspicions would only grow.

  As he traveled inland, Fortune became distracted by the scenery of China’s rich agricultural regions. The fields were terraced and tawny in their harvest colors. Orchards abounded. The peaches and plums had been gathered, but apples still hung heavy on the boughs, while oranges were just now ripening. Fortune was beguiled, a f
armer’s son returning to the rural life he remembered, but at the same time he was galvanized by the prospect of being a frontiersman, setting foot on virgin ground. From the safe distance of the boat, he admired the industry of the Chinese farmers. Tucked into every patchwork display of cereal crops—wheat, rice, and corn—was one evergreen patch of tea. Every farm or household had a postage-stamp-size tea garden of its own, each a sign to Fortune that he was nearing the intended target.

  Apart from the palpable unease that remained between Wang and the captain, the river journey was a happy one for Fortune. As they advanced farther into the interior, he encountered the wildest terrain he had yet seen. Nothing contents a naturalist more than watching an unblemished scene unfurl, like a scroll, as his boat navigates the twisting course of a river. Fortune would see the occasional pagoda or temple nestled in the hills, announcing a nearby town, but mainly he saw craggy mountains, waterfalls, and the lush bamboo-covered vistas of the Far East.

  When the rapids were fast or the riverbed shallow, the boat proceeded alongside the riverbank, where a barefoot team of fifteen near-naked coolie trackers slung ropes over their shoulders and hauled the vessel along. At other points on the river the sailors poled their flat-bottomed boat around dangerous rocks midstream. In such instances it took hours to make any progress. While other travelers would take a nap or pull out the tiles and start the evening’s gambling until mealtime interrupted the languor of the day, Fortune took advantage of the slow passage to roam the adjacent hillsides and collect plant samples. Early each morning he and his two men would climb a nearby hill to take a sighting of the curve of the river ahead. If it was a day on which the boat would make little headway, Fortune would stay onshore and catch up with the vessel later in the afternoon. One can only wonder what Wang and the coolie made of their master’s kit: picks and shovels, blotting paper, notebooks, magnifying glass, specimen jars, Ward’s cases, and wicker baskets. It was their first exposure to his obsessive note taking, sample digging, and aimless wandering, all apparently with the purpose of collecting a puzzling variety of plants and shrubs, which surely would prove to be more trouble than they were worth. Fortune lived for these interludes. “The weather was delightful, the natives quiet and inoffensive, and the scenery picturesque in the highest degree. . . . My Chinamen and myself, often footsore and weary, used to sit down on the hilltop and survey and enjoy the beautiful scenery around us. The noble river, clear and shining, was seen winding amongst the hills; here it was smooth as glass, deep, and still, and there shallow, and running rapidly over its rocky bed.” Were the days so pleasant for Wang, when he spent and made no money? Or for the coolie, struggling behind with armloads of hardware and heavy glazed cases hanging off his shoulders? The hillside jaunts inspired Fortune in no small part because they might provide the means of his advancement. In his first few days out of Hangzhou, he discovered the hemp palm, Trachycarpus fortunei, which he would send off to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew upon his return to Shanghai and which would survive its first English winter in 1850. On another of these early forays he also found a remote private garden where he came upon the very picture of mournfulness, the Chinese weeping or funeral cypress, Cypressus funebris.