by Sarah Rose
“What a fine tree this of yours is!” he told the gardener who stood nearby. “We have never seen it in the countries near the sea where we come from. Pray give us some of its seeds.” (While the cypress would ultimately be raised in Britain, it was a tender tree that did not take well to Kew and was therefore never a sought-after item at auctions.)
China had already proven its value in enhancing Britain’s gardens—value that Fortune himself had played no small part in establishing. Housing the richest collection of temperate flora in the world, China is the source of many of the plants that are now familiar elements in our landscapes. Its ornamental floral descendants grace our springtimes with bold yellow forsythias and splashy rhododendrons, azaleas, and camellias; our summers with roses, peonies, gardenias, clematis, apricots, and peaches; our autumns with chrysanthemums; and our winters with citrus—oranges, grapefruit, and lemons.
For his herbarium Fortune also collected a catalog of pressed plants that he dried and maintained for the benefit of his fellow botanists. He trained his servants carefully in this work: constantly changing sheets of blotting paper and keeping a careful eye out for mold, insects, and other things that might foul a collection. “It is possible for an intelligent native to do a certain amount of the changing of the drying paper,” wrote an expert on plant hunting in China, “but the arranging of the plants in the press on the first occasion may make or mar the beauty of the specimens.” Fortune also collected specimens for the Wardian cases, carefully shaking dirt from roots, placing samples in boxed soil, watering them, and then sealing the glass, in the hope that the tender uprooted plant would take to its new environment and survive long enough to make it to Shanghai and then to England.
Beyond the active work of digging, pressing, replanting, and shipping, Fortune took care to honor his obligation to history by keeping a scrupulously meticulous notebook. The vast treasure trove of his memoirs from China contains reams of minute botanical detail that testify to his skill as a collector, not to mention as a businessman. Of the fifteen thousand plant species in China, nearly half of which were endemic, Fortune sampled and cataloged so many ornamentals that there was almost nothing left for future plant hunters to exploit. Those who did follow Fortune in China would have to head west, toward Yunnan and up into the Himalayas, to find their own terra incognita.
As the boat continued upstream, the other passengers’ behavior toward Fortune began to change subtly: His fellow travelers no longer addressed him by his Chinese name, Sing Wa. In fact, Fortune noticed that they were no longer addressing him at all. Instead, his shipmates stole glances at him, muttering just outside the range of his hearing, and generally sought to avoid him. He seemed to have become an object of general intrigue, even more so than the dwarf.
Their attention made him uncomfortable just when he had begun enjoying his disguise. Fortune had come to believe that he was losing his foreignness, that his British persona was something he could shed like a change of clothing. He had become convinced that there was nothing innate about his outsider status. Although he was not yet completely comfortable with using chopsticks under the watchful eyes of Chinese travelers, he had been growing more so. At mealtimes he sensibly kept his distance from other diners, who sat drawing on long tobacco pipes while drinking distilled grain alcohol, growing louder and more belligerent with every toast. He noticed that he was beginning to understand others as they mumbled drunkenly, the foreign syllables shaping themselves into words and the words into meaningful sentences. He did not join in general conversation, but his ear was becoming attuned to the local language. Now, however, it suddenly seemed to him that the other passengers had seen through his ruse.
Perplexed, he finally called Wang aside to ask what had brought about this change in his shipmates’ attitude.
Wang explained that the coolie had once again blown Fortune’s cover, that in a flurry of resentment and angling for “face” he had unmasked his master.
“That coolie, he too much a fool-o; he have talkie that you no belong to this country; you more better sendie he go away, suppose you no wantye too much bobbly.” He’s making trouble, Wang insisted in pidgin. He has put you in danger. Get rid of him.
Fortune, who remained ignorant of the finer shadings of face, did not appreciate how the betrayal might have benefited the coolie within the social context of the boat, where he craved the status he could not get from his master. In the end, however, giving up Fortune’s secret did the coolie little good, for the crew now seemed to consider that the broken confidence was a punishable offense that left him in their power. Fortune himself was furious with his servant, and the hapless coolie grew more surly and miserable with each day.
When the ship moored at night, its wooden hull creaking as it bobbed gently in the water, a guard was typically posted to patrol. “The boatmen informed me that this part of the country abounded in thieves and robbers, and that they must not all go to bed at night, otherwise something would be stolen from the boat before morning,” Fortune recalled. But on the humid and moonless night following Wang’s contretemps with the captain, no one kept watch.
“Wake up!” Wang whispered, shaking Fortune awake. Qichuang! The boatmen had all gone into town while the passengers slept onboard. Wang believed there was a conspiracy afoot against Fortune. The night watchman had been dismissed, and the boatmen were planning to kill them all. He had heard rumors of such a plot from other passengers or whispers between the crew members.
“They have now gone into town to get some of their friends to assist them,” Wang insisted. “They are only waiting until they think we are fast asleep.”
Fortune rose from his mat to look through the porthole toward the shore and saw a distant string of lanterns that seemed to be moving toward them. If he had indeed been identified as a foreigner, hundreds of miles from a sanctioned treaty port in violation of the strictures of the Treaty of Nanking, the local authorities would never intervene on his behalf.
“Get up! Get up! Quick, quick!” Wang said. Chop-chop!
Fortune remained in his cabin with “all the composure I could command” as the lanterns drew nearer and what was now clearly the crew approached the boat. He took his place by the cabin door, anticipating the worst. In his account he makes no mention of where his guns were—or whether he was even armed that night. “My two Chinamen appeared in a state of great alarm and kept as close to me as they possibly could,” he recalled.
The first member of the band entered the cabin and found Fortune and his servants awaiting him. The boatman looked sheepish, as if he had not expected to find his quarry awake.
The intruder broke into an ingratiating grin, then shrugged and said nothing at all. He turned his back on Fortune and left. He wanted nothing.
Other passengers were awake by now, but Fortune could not make sense of what was happening.
“Now you see that?” Wang insisted. “You would not believe me when I told you that they intended to seize and drown us, but had we not been awake and fully prepared, it would have been all over with us.”
Fortune, in fact, had no idea how great the threat had been or even whether he was in any danger at all. What had happened, after all? A man had opened a door and then walked away. Would events have transpired differently if he had been asleep?
The captain of the vessel returned later that night, acting as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps nothing had. After the general commotion onboard, Fortune found he could not rest. “Cold and sleepy,” he listened to the nearby clank and squeak of waterwheels that powered the primitive mills by the river. For a man who prided himself on his powers of observation, it was unnerving not to understand what had transpired or know whether or not he had faced a legitimate threat. Fortune was coming to understand just how much he depended on his companions: He could not trust them, but he had no alternative.
6
A Green Tea Factory, Yangtze River, October 1848
With Wang walking five paces ahead
to announce his arrival, Fortune, dressed in his mandarin garb, entered the gates of a green tea factory.
Wang began to supplicate frantically. Would the master of the factory allow an inspection from a visitor, an honored and wise official who had traveled from a far province to see how such glorious tea was made?
The factory superintendent nodded politely and led them into a large building with peeling gray stucco walls. Beyond it lay courtyards, open work spaces, and storerooms. It was warm and dry, full of workers manufacturing the last of the season’s crop, and the woody smell of green tea hung in the air. This factory was a place of established ceremony, where tea was prepared for export through the large tea distributors in Canton and the burgeoning tea trade in Shanghai.
Although the concept of tea is simple—dry leaf infused in hot water—the manufacture of it is not intuitive at all. Tea is a highly processed product. At the time of Fortune’s visit the recipe for tea had remained unchanged for two thousand years, and Europe had been addicted to it for at least two hundred of them. But few in Britain’s dominions had any firsthand or even secondhand information about the production of tea before it went into the pot. Fortune’s horticultural contemporaries in London and the directors of the East India Company all believed that tea would yield its secrets if it were held up to the clear light and scrutiny of Western science. Among Fortune’s tasks in China, and certainly as critical as providing Indian tea gardens with quality nursery stock, was to learn the procedure for manufacturing tea. From the picking to the brewing there was a great deal of factory work involved: drying, firing, rolling, and, for black tea, fermenting. Fortune had explicit instructions from the East India Company to discover everything he could: “Besides the collection of tea plants and seeds from the best localities for transmission to India, it will be your duty to avail yourself of every opportunity of acquiring information as to the cultivation of the tea plant and the manufacture of tea as practised by the Chinese and on all other points with which it may be desirable that those entrusted with the superintendence of the tea nurseries in India should be made acquainted.” But the recipe for the tea was a closely guarded state secret.
In the entry to the tea factory, hanging on the wall, were inspiring calligraphic words of praise, a selection from Lu Yu’s great work on tea, the classic Cha Ching.
The best quality tea must have
The creases like the leather boots of Tartar horsemen,
Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock,
Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine,
Gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr,
And be wet and soft like
Earth newly swept by rain.
Proceeding into the otherwise empty courtyard, Fortune found fresh tea set to dry on large woven rattan plates, each the size of a kitchen table. The sun beat down on the containers, “cooking” the tea. No one walked past; no one touched or moved the delicate tea leaves as they dried. Fortune learned that for green tea the leaves were left exposed to the sun for one to two hours.
The sun-baked leaves were then taken to a furnace room and tossed into an enormous pan—what amounted to a very large iron wok. Men stood working before a row of coal furnaces, tossing the contents of their pans in an open hearth. The crisp leaves were vigorously stirred, kept constantly in motion, and became moist as the fierce heat drew their sap toward the surface. Stir-frying the leaves in this way breaks down their cell walls, just as vegetables soften over high heat.
The cooked leaves were then emptied onto a table where four or five workers moved piles of them back and forth over bamboo rollers. They were rolled continuously to bring their essential oils to the surface and then wrung out, their green juice pooling on the tables. “I cannot give a better idea of this operation than comparing it to a baker working and rolling his dough,” Fortune recalled.
Tightly curled by this stage, the tea leaves were not even a quarter the size they had been when picked. A tea picker plucks perhaps a pound a day, and the leaves are constantly reduced through processing so that the fruits of a day’s labor, which filled a basket carried on a tea picker’s back, becomes a mere handful of leaves—the makings of a few ounces or a few cups of brewed tea. After rolling, the tea was sent back to the drying pans for a second round of firing, losing even more volume at every contact with the hot sides of the iron wok.
With leaves plucked, dried, cooked, rolled, and cooked again, all that was left to do was sort through the processed tea. Workers sat at a long table separating the choicest, most tightly wound leaves—which would be used in the teas of the highest quality, the flowery pekoes—from the lesser-quality congou and from the dust, the lowest quality of all.
The quality of tea is partly determined by how much of the stem and rougher lower leaves are included in the blend. The highest-quality teas, which in China might have names like Dragon Well, or in India FTGFOP1 (Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe First Grade), are made from the topmost two leaves and the bud at the end of each tea branch. The top shoots taste delicate and mild, and are only slightly astringent; therefore the most pleasant and refreshing.
The distinctive quality of tea comes from essential oils that leach flavor and caffeine into a cup of hot water. These chemical compounds are not necessary for the primary survival of the tea plant’s cells; they are what is known as secondary compounds. Secondary chemicals help plants in many different respects, such as defending them against pests, infections, and fungus, and aiding them in their fight for survival and reproduction. Tea, like other green plants, has several defense systems against predators: Caffeine, for instance, is a natural insecticide. Almost all of tea’s thick waxy leaves, apart from the topmost shoots, are bitter and leathery and difficult to bite through. Tea also has hard, fibrous stalks to discourage animal incursion. Clumsy pickers can compromise the quality of tea by including a leaf farther down the stem and even some of the stem itself; this will make for a harsher, more tannic brew, and in China it will be qualified by names suggesting crudeness, such as dust.
The workers sat at long low tables to pick through the leaves and sort out any pieces of stem. They also looked for any insects that might have tainted the batch, as well as small stones and pieces of grit from the factory floor. Even with a measure of quality control, tea was not a clean product in any sense, which is one of the reasons that Chinese tea drinkers traditionally discard the first cup from any pot. “The first cup is for your enemies,” the saying goes among connoisseurs.
Culinary historians know nothing about who first put leaf to water. But where human knowledge has failed, human imagination has inserted itself. Many Chinese believe that tea was discovered by the mythical emperor Shennong, inventor of Chinese medicine and of farming. The story goes that one day the emperor was reclining in the leafy shade of a camellia bush when a shiny leaf dropped into his cup of boiled water. Ripples of light green liquor soon began to emerge from the thin, feathery leaf. Shennong was familiar with the healing properties of plants and could identify as many as seventy poisonous plants in a daylong hike. Convinced that the camellia tisane was not dangerous, he took a sip of it and found that it tasted refreshing: aromatic, slightly bitter, stimulating, and restorative.
Ascribing the discovery of tea to a revered former leader is a characteristically Confucian gesture—it puts power in the hands of the ancestors and links the present day to the mythic past. But Buddhists in China have their own creation story for tea, featuring Siddhartha Gautama (Gautama Buddha). As a traveling ascetic, legend tells us, the young monk Siddhartha was wandering on a mountain, perfecting his practice, and praying without ceasing. The weary supplicant sat down by a tree to meditate, to contemplate the One and the many faces of redemption, and promptly fell asleep. When he awoke, he was furious at his own physical weakness; his body had betrayed him, his eyes were leaden, and drowsiness had interfered with his quest for Nirvana.
In a fit of rage and determined that nothing would again impede his path to Tru
th and Enlightenment, he ripped out his eyelashes and cast them to the wind, and in all the places they fell sprang forth a fragrant and flowering bush: the tea plant. Indeed, the fine, silvery down on the undersides of the highest-quality tea leaves resembles delicate eyelashes. Buddha, all great and compassionate, bequeathed to his followers a draft that would keep them aware and awake, invigorated and focused, an intoxicant in the service of devotion.
