For All the Tea in China

by Sarah Rose

  Wang’s story was a familiar one throughout China in the nineteenth century. By 1850, the nation had a population of 400 million; for every person alive in 1650 there were three in 1850. As a result of the population boom, villages and towns grew closer together, farms became smaller, and woodlands were mowed down and converted to farmland. With the increasing pressure on land resources, irrigation, fertilizer, and the introduction of New World crops such as corn were used to open up previously marginal farmland. The local ecology suffered; famines, mud slides, and floods became more common. There was competition for basic human resources, yet with manpower so abundant, wages remained low.

  The population boom also led to a dearth of marriageable women as female infanticide swept through China. Girls married away from the family house and needed dowries, so they were considered sources of debt. Male children brought honor to a family as well as wives to manage the house and children to carry on the clan name, but the scarcity of marriageable local women and the surfeit of labor offered little incentive for men to remain in their home village. They accordingly migrated to the cities, where they joined gangs or became boatmen or sedan-chair carriers. Wang’s area, in particular, was known for producing pawnbrokers. With the new population boom, the established social order was transformed: Men became emigrants while women tried to boost the household economy in any way they could, such as spinning and weaving textiles or, in the Sung Lo region, making and selling their own tea.

  The Wangs believed in the Confucian tradition in which there was a hierarchy of occupations: the highest, belonging to scholars and poets, preserved beauty and celebrated order; peasants came second, the cogs in the national machine, growing the food and materials that enabled a complex country like China to function; merchants were ranked at the bottom of the collective heap, earning a living off the hard labor of others but producing nothing of note themselves. While there was great honor in being a peasant, especially a literate one, being unable to support your children was a serious loss of face—and to have their sons working in far-off cities reflected badly on the Sung Lo families.

  On the evening of that first rainy day, an odd-looking pair, the giant coolie and the obliging dwarf who had followed Fortune off the boat, arrived bearing the luggage. As they placed the heavy chests and baskets on the stone floor of the entry chamber, a small cloud of dust rose up. The coolie was anxious to describe how he had nearly met his end at the hands of the boatmen Wang had mistreated; he had been forced to take refuge for the night in a temple, the only sanctuary he could find. He reenacted his pursuit in a bizarre pantomime, which Wang did not feel compelled to translate. Fortune watched with amusement, calculating that if the coolie had managed to escape with all the luggage safe and intact, then surely things were not quite as bad as they had been made out to be.

  Although his retinue was back at full strength, Fortune had no choice but to wait for the weather to clear. For four days the weather on the mountain remained inclement, which led the Wangs to sleep late and go to bed early, preferring the warmth of their beds to the damp cold of morning. Rain gave hardworking peasants a chance to rest, and it was more than welcome after a long summer and a busy tea harvest. The numerous Wang children were overcome with cabin fever and grew ever more curious about the strange man with his round eyes, long nose, tall bearing, and exotic possessions. Fortune had seldom been confined indoors with his own children for as long as he had with the Wang offspring.

  Finally the rain ceased, and, rising to a clear day, Fortune was struck by the beauty of the view from the Wangs’ house. According to the Chinese principles of feng shui, the luckiest location for a house has a mountain at the back and an open view to the front—easy enough to find in the hilly country of Sung Lo. Like the Wangs’ house, most Chinese homes followed the general architectural principles of feng shui (which literally translates as “wind and water”), which hold that there are physical laws based on elemental principles to encourage the flow of qi (pronounced chi), or energy. Houses and rooms should face south; Chinese dwellings dating back to the twelfth century BC have been found that are aligned along the north-south axis, with a primary entrance facing south. The building must be symmetrical, but with an odd number of bays. Symmetry was revered because it allowed for the presence of a central courtyard, as both a symbol of the center of the home and a place in which to display shrines to the ancestors. A southern outlook was thought to confer an abundance of yang, or masculine energy, so the Wang house not only took advantage of the abundance of sunlight and warmth but bestowed upon the family the bounty of auspicious, life-seeking energy. Odd numbers, too, were considered to be yang, whereas an even number of rooms would have introduced too much yin—or female energy—into the house.

  The Sung Lo Mountains were nearly barren except for the tea plants that clung to their peaks. Although it was famous as the birthplace of green tea and the home of its finest leaves, the region had not been extensively exploited. The production at the time of Fortune’s visit was mainly for the use of the growers themselves and the priests whose temples dotted the rugged hillsides.

  Fortune quickly prepared to head for the Sung Lo slopes to undertake in earnest the collecting of tea seeds. Although they rose in the distance ahead of him, he might well have been guided by his nose as well as his eyes. It was said of the area that “even without seeing [the mountain], you can smell the tea scent a mile away.” Tea is an enormously fragrant plant; its mineral herbal scent permeates the air. It is not surprising that people felt compelled to liberate that aroma, to release its potent sap and spirit. Tea has been called the “essence of mountains” in Chinese poetry, a particularly apposite description in that every ounce of the Sung Lo peak, from loam to limestone, is concentrated within the tea bushes.

  As always, Fortune found the hillsides welcoming. His chest expanded in the brisk November air. He bent low to pick off the green seed-filled fruit pods, which looked like little pincushions covered in leathery skin. The bushes were dormant, no longer growing at the fast clip of summer and pushing out new tea shoots. But this was a good time to collect seeds.

  The elder Wang followed Fortune every morning, interrupting his meditative walks. However much Fortune wished to pick his seeds and dig his seedlings with a minimum of interference, he could not evade the old man. Fortune did not seek such friendship, but the elder Wang was his self-appointed shadow.

  For a week Fortune’s days settled into a routine of hard work punctuated by beautiful vistas, new discoveries, and the seemingly continuous negotiations required by the very informal economy of the Wang household. Fortune would rise early, head with Wang and the coolie to the Sung Lo ridge, and gather all the tea seeds they could find. In these magnificent surroundings the work was less exhausting than exhilarating, at least for Fortune. In the evening they returned to the Wang residence and resumed the hard bargaining that seemed to preoccupy and perhaps entertain the residents of Sung Lo.

  The coolie, by now convinced that Wang had badly abused him in the course of the disputes with the boatmen, had marked him as a coward—which was reasonable enough, Fortune thought. The coolie therefore insisted that Wang should compensate him for his troubles in the amount of four dollars. Wang, who was on his home ground, thought it safe to ignore this demand. The coolie then intimated that he would get some of his own countrymen to force Wang to pay the amount due, a threat Wang dismissed. When the coolie returned later, unaccompanied, Fortune took him aside and told him firmly that the matter was at an end and that if the coolie pressed his claim any further, Fortune would withhold his pay. This and a small loan to the coolie, which Fortune could never hope to see repaid, seemed to put the matter to rest.

  Fortune himself also found it useful to engage in some bargaining. A week or so before reaching Sung Lo, he encountered a barberry, or Berberis, a woody shrub with large, glossy, spiny leaves the likes of which were unknown to him but which seemed especially handsome in its bright autumnal colors. It looked as if it wo
uld be a good border plant and generally well suited to the European garden. Unfortunately, the one specimen Fortune saw was too large to transplant, and apparently there were no progeny nearby. So, having plucked a leaf of it and marked its location, Fortune initially charged Wang with locating a similar shrub in his home district. When Wang took no interest in this task, it occurred to Fortune that some of the extended Wang family might be enlisted instead.

  He showed his sample leaf to a small assembly of Wang’s relatives and promised payment to anyone who could bring him a similar plant of transportable size. Much to his delight, within a few minutes one of the assembly returned bearing an entire branch. Fortune compared it to the specimen leaf, confirmed it was a barberry, and asked that the whole shrub be brought to him. This provoked a spirited conversation among the family members. The plant was of medicinal use, they explained, and the owner would not willingly part with it—not for any price. “Sell me this one, and you will be able to buy a dozen others with the money,” Fortune implored.

  But the man who had found it was unyielding: “My uncle, in whose garden it is growing, does not want money—he is rich enough—but he requires a little of the plant now and then when he is unwell, and therefore he will not part with it.” Fortune, sensing an attempt to hold out for a better price, changed tactics. He asked only that they show him the plant, and he promised not even to touch it. He would then bargain directly with the owner. But this also seemed to be too much to expect. Hands flew up and voices squawked in protest until Wang himself intervened, vouching for Fortune to his assembled cousins.

  The crew eventually led him to the barberry, giving Fortune the opportunity to negotiate one-on-one with the uncle. It was no use, however. The man insisted that the plant was rare and its berries were of tremendous medicinal value for curing diarrhea, fever, weak appetite, upset stomach, yeast, urinary tract infections, and a whole host of internal ills. He not only flatly refused to surrender the plant but would not even give Fortune a fresh branch for cloning. Fortune did not know whether this was strategy on the uncle’s part or whether the old man really did value the barberry as much as he claimed. If all the uncle said about its medicinal abilities was true, it only made the plant hunter want a sample all the more. Was this just a sophisticated ruse? The question was rendered moot when another of Wang’s relatives came to him furtively the following day and indicated that he could find Fortune other shrubs of the same sort for the same price. Fortune took him up on the offer, and the young man promptly returned with three fine, healthy specimens. The barberry, it seemed, was common in Sung Lo. Fortune shipped the plants to England, where they became a great favorite for use in hedges and landscape gardens.

  In the intimate space of the Wang house, money continued to change hands—Fortune’s money, although he had neither consented to nor been informed of the transactions and frequently knew very little about what was happening. The coolie, still peeved by Wang’s mishandling of the boatmen, kept trying to extort money from the young translator. Old Wang, believing that no act of hospitality should go unrewarded, argued for hard cash from Fortune’s funds in exchange for his room and board. Young Wang, who was by now busy arranging Fortune’s passage back to the coast, finalized arrangements that overcharged him by 2000 percent. The squeeze went on and on and on. “Such is the character of the Chinese,” Fortune observed drily.

  Yet Fortune had nonetheless managed to get the best of the bargain: the most valuable asset in Sung Lo. His servants and hosts might have taken a little for their trouble, but once Fortune left China, he would be taking the finest green tea plants in the world with him, crossing the seas to become prized possessions of the world’s only superpower.

  Fortune’s arrival marked the earliest point of direct contact between the celebrated green tea region and the Western world. In only a few short years his connoisseur’s reports of the superior quality of Sung Lo tea would lead to its finding its way into export markets in Europe and America. It was branded Green Tun, and it was to become a great favorite in fashionable society. Although Sung Lo was beset by economic hardship, famine, and poverty, and a rebellion by religious zealots was soon to break out, Fortune’s appearance was a turning point for the region’s people. The young translator who had brought Fortune to the Sung Lo Mountains was leading his province into the future.

  8

  Shanghai at the Lunar New Year, January 1849

  After visiting three other celebrated green tea districts for seed collecting and after a relatively uneventful trip, Fortune arrived in Shanghai in the days just leading up to Chinese New Year (as determined by the lunar calendar) of 1849. It was the Year of the Rooster, a flamboyant period, according to the Chinese zodiac. The biggest holiday of the Chinese year, it is a time of celebration, of fireworks, of cash gifts and ancestor worship. Expatriates would look forward to it for the fireworks and festivities as well as for the chance to pick up some bargains as the locals scrambled to raise cash that was needed to pay off lingering debts, likewise a New Year’s tradition.

  Shanghai’s lively celebration of the New Year pulsed through the old city’s thick walls and eddied out into the foreign concessions. The few Britons in the area, tea and silk traders and Foreign Office men, were easily tempted into watching the dragon dances and the grave-sweeping in the local cemeteries with bewildered interest. The ancient streets were crowded with hawkers, jugglers, and circus performers. Small beggar children with seeping sores tugged at wrists and ankles and offered holiday greetings to all comers—it was good luck to give alms at New Year.

  Fortune’s first order of business was to post word of his success to the company and the waiting gardeners in India. “I have much pleasure in informing you that I have procured a large supply of seeds and young plants which I trust will get safely to India. These were procured in different parts of the country, some from a celebrated tea farm. . . .” He quickly set to work preparing his booty for shipment to India.

  Fortune took up residence in the foreign quarter, again at the home of the trading company Dent, Beale & Co., one of the three leading houses in the Far East. Its revered senior partner, Thomas Beale, “merchant prince and opium mogul,” had spent fifty years in the China trade, never returning to Britain. He had already made and lost several fortunes in Cathay. “He was himself one of the old school in its fullest signification: stately in person, somewhat formal, with distinguished manners,” wrote a contemporary. Among Fortune’s most crucial connections in China was his affiliation with Thomas Dent and his firm. Dent, Beale & Co. owned a compound in the British area, north of noisy Old Shanghai and south of the fetid Souzhou creek, on what had been a towpath for trackers moving boats on the Huangpu River. The compound featured a new and largely empty factory and enough land to provide a garden big enough to accommodate both Fortune’s treasures and the amateur projects of the British expatriate gardeners in Dent’s circle.

  Dent & Co.’s legacy to the international community was an ongoing interest in China’s horticulture. For his own amusement Beale kept a garden in Macau, growing the “choicest and rarest” carnations, chrysanthemums, poppies, and all manner of Chinese ornamentals, in addition to a small flock of peacocks and monkeys. Dent & Co.’s local Shanghai gardeners were plant hunting in places where no white man could ever go—and the firm was happy to share its rare cuttings with other European plant aficionados residing in the East.

  It is unclear who, outside of the consuls in Hong Kong and Shanghai, was aware of the true nature of Fortune’s mission, but if Dent did take any notice of Fortune’s tea haul, there was no reason to expect that he was involved in anything other than a botanical study of tea for East India House and the tea traders at Mincing Lane. Dent’s main concern was, naturally, maintaining its mercantile success in the Far East. If tea manufacture moved to India, however, the China merchants would lose their most profitable commodity. By helping Fortune, Dent & Co. was inadvertently sowing the seeds of the China trade’s destruction.


  Fortune had full use of the grounds at Dent’s factory in Shanghai to replant and care for his tea seeds and seedlings. The plot occupied the land around some warehouses in an area reclaimed from the rich, silty banks of the Huangpu River, a tributary at the mouth of the Yangtze. This garden itself was not a Chinese-style tableau, intended for leisurely walks and contemplation, but a functional and European one. Its neat rows of seedlings and transplants kept a stock of materia medica at hand and provided the British merchants with food that was recognizable.

  Fortune also had access to Dent’s Chinese gardener, a knowledgeable man who was armed with all the answers and reasons for whatever gardening choices he made. Beale once told a visitor that “the only way to please a Chinese gardener was to let him do as he pleased,” especially when it came to methods “they took much pride in.” To interfere with a Chinese gardener at work, Beale understood, was to make him lose face. Nonetheless, Fortune kept his portion of the garden—vast tracts of tea seedlings stretching off into the distance—according to British methods.

  With Dent & Co.’s generous support, Fortune’s collection survived transplantation from the wild, but its next relocation would be the most dangerous. Indeed, no plant had yet survived a trip the likes of which he planned for his specimens, sailing from Shanghai to Hong Kong and from there to Calcutta and the hill plantations of the Himalayas. They would contend with heat and sea and salt but also river travel, mountain travel, and monsoons.

  Fortune’s general anxiety was exacerbated by the biting cold of the Chinese winter. Typically, Dent’s garden was a drowsy place where the laborers did not work too hard, especially in the days leading up to the New Year festivities. But Fortune insisted that the gardeners get under way with the critical task of preparing the tea plants for transport. He himself appeared in the garden every morning in gloves and hat, industriously replanting his cuttings and clones, and packaging and labeling seeds and saplings. He was shipping some thirteen thousand young plants to the Himalayas as well as ten thousand tea seeds, about five gallons’ worth—not much by volume or even by weight but representing weeks of arduous fieldwork in Wang’s sodden tea gardens. As a precaution he divided his hoard, meting out separate packages to be distributed among four separate ships so that if one cargo met with calamity, the others would be unaffected.