For All the Tea in China

by Sarah Rose

  Before Fortune, botanists had failed in their attempts to decode the formula for tea. His first collecting trip to China in 1843, for the Royal Horticultural Society, had taken him to the fringes of tea territory as part of his general collecting mandate. At that time he had made an important discovery: Green tea and black tea came from the same plant.

  The Linnaean Society had hitherto declared unequivocally that green and black tea were siblings or cousins, closely related but under no circumstances twins. The great Linnaeus, a century before, working from dried samples brought back from China by earlier explorers, concluded that the two were distinct taxa: Thea viridis and Thea bohea. Thea viridis, or green tea, was said to have alternating brown branches and alternating leaves: bright green ovals that were short-stalked, convex, serrated, shiny on both sides, and downy beneath, and with a corolla, or flower, of five to nine unequally sized white petals. Thea bohea, black tea, was described as looking nearly the same—only smaller and somewhat darker.

  On his first trip Fortune expected to find identifiable black tea plants in gardens known to produce black tea. Yet he discovered that the tea plants there looked just like the green tea plants in the green tea gardens. Over the course of that first three-year visit, when procuring several tea samples and thoroughly investigating them, he had concluded that any difference between green tea and black was the result of processing alone. His botanical colleagues were slow to agree, requiring more proof.

  Black tea is fermented; green tea is not. To make black tea, the leaves are allowed to sit in the sun for an entire day to oxidize and wilt—essentially to spoil a little. After the first twelve hours of stewing, black tea is turned, the liquor is stirred around, and the mixture is left to cure for another twelve hours. This longer curing process develops black tea’s tannins, its strong bitter flavor, and its dark color. Although it is called fermenting, the process of making black tea is technically misnamed. Nothing ferments in a chemical sense; there are no microorganisms breaking down sugars into alcohol and gas. Black tea is, rather, cured or ripened. But the language of wine colors the language of all beverages, and so the label of “fermentation” has stuck to black tea. (Indeed, if tea does ferment and fungus grows, a carcinogenic substance is produced.)

  Given that to that point no European botanist had seen tea growing or evaluated it in its living state, the Linnaean Society’s confusion on the subject is understandable. Fortune’s documentary evidence ultimately changed tea’s Linnaean classification. It would soon be known categorically as Thea sinensis, literally tea from China. (Later still it would be reclassified as part of the Camellia family, Camellia sinensis.)

  As he made his way through the green tea factory, Fortune took note of something both peculiar and more than a little alarming on the hands of the tea manufacturers. It was the kind of observation that, once reported, would be an invaluable boon to the burgeoning Indian tea experiment, with the power to boost the sales of Indian tea over Chinese. While staring at the workers busy in the final stages of processing, he noticed that their fingers were “quite blue.”

  Among the blenders and tasters of the London auction it was generally assumed that the Chinese engaged in all manner of duplicity, inserting twigs and sawdust into their teas to bulk up the loose leaves. It was said that the Chinese were brewing their own breakfast tea, saving the soggy leaves to dry in the sun, and then reselling the recycled product as fresh tea for the gullible “white devils.” There was no trust in the trade, no faith in the goodwill of the Chinese manufacturers.

  But the blue substance on the fingers of the Chinese workmen seemed to Fortune a matter of legitimate concern. What could be the source of this? He and others had long suspected that the Chinese were chemically dyeing tea for the benefit of the foreign market. He was now in a position to prove or disprove the charge.

  He watched each step of the processing carefully, saying nothing, making notes, and occasionally asking Wang to put a question to a manager or worker. At one end of the factory the supervisor stood over a white porcelain mortar. In the bowl was a deep blue powder, made finer and finer with each grind of the pestle. The superintendent was in fact preparing iron ferrocyanide, a substance also known as Prussian blue, a pigment used in paints. When cyanide is ingested, it binds to iron inside cells, interfering with the absorption of certain enzymes and compromising a cell’s ability to produce energy. Cyanide affects the tissues most needed for aerobic respiration, the heart and lungs. In high doses cyanide can bring on seizures, coma, and then cardiac arrest, killing quickly. At lower doses cyanide leads to weakness, giddiness, confusion, and light-headedness. Exposure to even low levels of cyanide over long periods of time can lead to permanent paralysis. Fortunately for the tea drinkers of Britain, Prussian blue is a complex molecule, so it is almost impossible to release the cyanide ion from it and the poison passes harmlessly through the body.

  Elsewhere in the factory, however, over the charcoal fires where the tea was roasted, Fortune discovered a man cooking a bright yellow powder into a paste. The smell was terrible, like that of rotten eggs. The yellow substance was gypsum, or calcium sulfate dehydrate, a common component of plaster. Gypsum produces hydrogen sulfide gas as it breaks down. While the gas is produced naturally by the body in low doses, in high doses it acts as a broad-spectrum poison, affecting many of the body’s systems simultaneously, particularly the nervous system. At lower concentrations gypsum acts as an irritant; it reddens the eyes, inflames the throat, and causes nausea, shortness of breath, and fluid in the lungs. Consumed over the long term it might produce fatigue, memory loss, headaches, irritability, and dizziness. It can even induce miscarriage in women, and failure to thrive in infants and children.

  Fortune estimated that more than half a pound of plaster and Prussian blue was included in every hundred pounds of tea being prepared. The average Londoner was believed to consume as much as one pound of tea per year, which meant that Chinese tea was effectively poisoning British consumers. The additives were not included maliciously, however, for the Chinese simply believed that foreigners wanted their green tea to look green.

  “No wonder the Chinese consider the natives of the West to be a race of barbarians,” Fortune remarked.

  But why, he asked, were they making green tea so extremely green, since it looked so much better without the addition of poison and since the Chinese themselves would never dream of drinking it colored?

  “Foreigners seemed to prefer having a mixture of Prussian blue and gypsum with their tea, to make it look uniform and pretty, and as these ingredients were cheap enough, the Chinese [have] no objection to [supplying] them as such teas always fetch . . . a higher price!”

  Fortune surreptitiously collected some of the poisonous dyes from the factory, bundling them up in his wax-dipped cloth sacks and stowing them away in the generous folds of his mandarin costume. As a scientist he wanted samples to analyze, but most of all he wanted to send additional ones back to England.

  These substances would be prominently displayed in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. In the glittering Crystal Palace, Britain displayed to the world all its industrial, scientific, and economic might, including the green tea dyes. This public exhibition marked the moment when tea, the national drink of Britain, came out of the shadows of myth and mystery and into the light of Western science and understanding. Fortune unmasked unwitting Chinese criminality and provided an irrefutable argument for British-manufactured tea.

  7

  House of Wang, Anhui Province, November 1848

  Although the day’s light was fading, Fortune could see twisted pines penetrating a sea of cloud, ornamenting the sharp outlines of the hills beneath. The landscape might have been made for the gestural strokes of a scroll painter’s brush. It was no wonder, Fortune thought, that so much of China’s appreciation for tea was echoed in its arts, painting, pottery, and poetry, for who would not wish to reproduce, savor, and preserve forever such intense beauty?

  The Wang
residence was a mere two miles from the foot of the steep slopes of Sung Lo Mountain, and its proximity to such famous tea grounds may explain why Fortune had kept Wang as his principal guide, despite his grasping ways and proclivity for trouble. He came from people for whom tea-growing was a native art. Returning to the tea peaks from the coast was a ritual that Wang’s ancestors had performed for centuries.

  Wang strode through the heavy wooden doors of his childhood home steps ahead of Fortune. He entered without carrying any baggage—prince of the palace, happy to be home, eager to announce the arrival of the distinguished foreign mandarin, and, not coincidentally, Wang’s own recent stroke of good luck. Given the remoteness and poverty of the area, and the corresponding lack of public inns, Fortune had agreed to make his residence at the Wangs’ home.

  His parents embraced Wang with joy. His mother doted on him and asked if he had already eaten his rice, while his father beamed with pride. They were also appropriately surprised and impressed by the novelty and stature of the mandarin to whom their son was attached, protesting earnestly that their home was not worthy of such an honor. Looking around, Fortune had to agree, if only silently. The door through which he had just entered featured hardware so crude and primitive that any blacksmith in England would have been ashamed to call it a latch or hinge. Strips of faded red paper hung limply over the lintel, to bring blessings on the family and protect the house from evil.

  At first glance Fortune could see little opportunity for comfort within the Wang household. The house itself was rickety and almost physically impossible: a dwelling perched so precariously on the side of a cliff that it stood as a monument to the persistence of the laborers who had built it there. Fortune had seen many drab dwellings on his travels but had not as yet dared to enter a peasant’s home. The beaten earth walls were thick and painted white, in stark contrast to the blackened roof timbers. The roofline was lavishly decorated and ornately carved: Upturned corner tiles had the outlines of animals pressed into the clay to frighten dangerous spirits away—it was believed there were demons everywhere. The house had small windows covered with rough lattice-wood screens to keep out the birds but not the vermin (and most certainly not the flies).

  The Wang home was too small to provide separate quarters for men and women, an accommodation that Fortune must have come to expect from his visits to the gardens of great men where he had collected some of his finest specimens on his previous trip to China. In the 1,000 or so square feet of the Wang household, the respective territory of the sexes was as clearly defined as if they had been physically separated. The men occupied the public space, a sizable room with sacks of rice piled in one corner. The occasional chicken wandered through, and a few select pieces of furniture—a wedding chest, a cane kitchen cabinet, and a bentwood chair—bore testament to better days. Off this were other, smaller rooms where the women lived, babies were nursed, food was prepared, and cloth was woven.

  Yet Fortune was determined not to be outdone in showing the usual courtesies, and almost immediately he seemed to be among the best of friends. Wang Senior was a farmer and, like many Chinese, at the mercy of the country’s growing pains, the boom-and-bust cycle of an agrarian economy undergoing a population explosion. He had known prosperity, only to be brought low by famine and hard times. Heedless of his poverty, the elder Wang was generous to Fortune, the foreigner. Soon a great dinner was set out with the best that the family could offer, and the fattiest cut of pork, the first taste of the stew, was offered to their distinguished guest. After dinner they retired to their cramped chambers, with Fortune intending to make an early start on the trek up Sung Lo Mountain to commence collecting seeds.

  In the morning, however, rain was falling in torrents, and it was clear that they would have to stay indoors. It was then that Fortune became acutely aware that the home he was staying in held not one but four separate families—various branches of the larger extended clan, each with its own children, kitchen, and stove. The hours leading up to mealtimes proved especially torturous for Fortune. With four kitchen fires blazing and no chimneys whatsoever, the foul smoke and smell of burning pork fat filled the structure, wafting into every nook and cranny, dirtying anything that was clean. Fortune’s eyes stung and watered terribly, but to his amazement the other dwellers in the Wang home took this and the myriad other discomforts of cohabiting and collectivism in their stride. He supposed they simply knew no other way of life.

  Despite being a farmer, and an impoverished one at that, the elder Wang was a literate man. China has always enjoyed a high level of peasant literacy—it had a movable type printing press almost four thousand years before Gutenberg printed his first Bible. The elder Wang had trained to be a scholar and poet, as many young men of the region were despite their meager circumstances. When families in the neighborhood became successful merchants, they endowed a local school or Confucian academy in their village. Their sons were coached to compete in the national civil service exams, so as to join the highest levels of the government and become jinshi, or scholars. Sung Lo was well known for producing jinshi; in the sixteenth century it was noted that there was one poet for every three merchants in the region. At night, after supper, while the dark and continuing downpour kept the full household indoors, Wang Senior kept alive the ways of his elders by reading Chinese fables to his extended family while they huddled together to keep warm. That single act in itself was a happy sight to Fortune, who up to that point had found little in his servant’s pastoral household to please him.

  The Wang home bore ample evidence of scholarship, such as the calligraphic poems hanging on scraps of paper on the walls. In China calligraphy is considered an art and is revered by men of standing and education. Because the Chinese language is pictorial, it lends itself to beautified visual renditions. The brush, the ink stick, paper, and ink slabs, known as the Four Treasures of the Scholar’s Studio, were all obtained from local forests. Each brush stroke was thought to reflect the character and sentiments of the writer, his psychological state of mind at the time he was contemplating the poetry he inscribed. To be a good calligrapher required training and respect for tradition, and so it complemented the Wang family values of discipline and repect.

  Fortune could also see something familiar in the family’s existence when he compared with his own modest roots. He noted that “the Chinese cottages, amongst the tea hills, are simple and rude in their construction, and remind one of what we used to see in Scotland in former years, when the cow and pig lived and fed in the same house with the peasant. Scottish cottages, however, even in those days, were always better furnished and more comfortable than those of the Chinese at the present time.” And where Scotland had whisky, in Xiuning County there was tea. Like Scotch, tea was produced where other crops would not thrive. And as with Scotland’s finest malts, it was in these poor cottages that the best teas with the most curious names were found.

  In the hierarchy of Chinese life, tea was ranked as one of the seven necessities, along with firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar. For the Wang family to participate in the manufacture of life’s basic needs was an honor; they saw themselves as meeting the needs of the broader world order. Although tea was a necessity, it was also considered a luxury. It took time to enjoy tea and money to buy it—if you weren’t growing your own. It was the greatest joy of the official classes to sit and drink tea while writing poetry. The Wangs and millions of families like them made such civilized pleasures possible.

  While the steep mountainsides of Sung Lo were ideal tea grounds with their thick mists, well-drained soil, and indirect sun, those same conditions made growing other crops a human chore. “The district is [set] among 10,000 mountains. Its land is difficult and not flat. Its earth is tough and unchanging. . . . Though the people are industrious and use all their strength, the harvest is only enough to provide for half [the population],” wrote a local mandarin in an 1815 county gazetteer. “Where there is land lacking, those who support [themselves] by tea-gro
wing are seventy to eighty per cent. From this they clothe and feed themselves and pay their land and labour taxes,” records state. The Wangs worked the land both privately and collectively, tilling a public field to pay for taxes and tribute as well as their private plot to feed their own kin. This division of responsibility was entirely Confucian: The basic family unit was coextensive with a wider social world; the men studied, the women worked, and the mandarins—China’s politician-scholars—collected taxes in the name of the emperor.

  Sung Lo’s slopes had been carved into a series of laddered fields for planting grains such as rice and barley; vegetables such as beans, sesame, squash, eggplant, turnip, onions, bamboo shoots, ginger, and garlic; and fruit and nuts such as peaches, watermelon, papaya, walnuts, and peanuts. The terraced slopes were a marvel of human muscle, a compelling demonstration of what China’s giant workforce could accomplish over generations. Even so, many from their region had left farming for trade. “Because agriculture is not sufficient to feed the people of the county, most people are engaged in commerce as their constant business. . . . They traveled to the south and the north. Some were pedlars and some set up their shops. They consider what is abundant and what is in shortage, and buy or sell out according to the trend of demand and supply,” reported the local gazetteer three hundred years earlier. The younger Wang, like so many of the young men of the district, had been forced by economic circumstances to leave the tea mountains and try to improve his fortunes in the cities on the coast. “The bitterness you are eating is what makes a man into a man” went one local folk song.