by Sarah Rose
In future when cases are sent from China, the following instructions ought to be attended to:
A careful Mallee ought to accompany the cases [from Calcutta] and before leaving the Botanical Gardens he ought to be provided with a screwdriver and taught how to unscrew the frames of the cases so as to enable him to water the plants occasionally that in every second day and again rescrew the frames. . . .
On arrival of the cases at Allahabad they ought to be dispatched to Saharamfore [sic] in a government wagon appropriated to the purpose and well covered to protect them from the heat of the sun and under charge of a careful person.
If anyone had ever bothered to follow them, Jameson’s instructions for the boxes would have guaranteed that all plants would be dead on arrival.
He likewise offered new and eccentric instructions for the care of future seed shipments:With reference to seeds. On receipt of the seeds in Calcutta parcels or boxes ought immediately to be sent to the Botanical Garden to the Superintendent who ought to receive instructions to open them and to inspect them and forward one half in parcels by letter to Saharamfore, the other half might be sown in flower pots or cases and kept at the Garden until they germinate and the growing plants then forwarded under charge of a careful person by the steamer to Allahabad.
Jameson declared there was a historical precedent for this. The only other China tea in India, those bushes grown out of Canton seeds from an earlier shipment, had come to the subcontinent in the same fashion.
By sowing seeds on receiving them from China, from Doctor Gordon, Dr Wallich was entailed to supply the [Himalayan] plantations with the first tea plants and from these and their produce the plantations now thriving have been formed. By adopting this plan there would be two chances in form of a successful issue as if the seeds did not germinate in the plantations owing to being so long out of the ground, they might do so in Calcutta.
It seems likely that Fortune’s seeds were probably doomed by the time they arrived in India and that Jameson’s suggestions were of no consequence either way. Planting seeds immediately on receipt in Calcutta was a reasonable theory on how to save them, based on past evidence, but probably incorrect. Gordon’s earliest shipment of seeds had been picked in Canton, so the time between harvesting and sailing was negligible—a matter of weeks or a few months at most. Fortune’s seeds, however, had been picked on the Wangs’ land in Xiuning County; traveled months by river and canal boat to Shanghai; were repacked there over the course of several weeks; were shipped to Hong Kong and unloaded there and then reloaded for India; were diverted to Ceylon and thence to Calcutta—all over a period of at least six months. If the seeds were to thrive in India, Fortune would need to find a better method of shipment than simply packing them in bags of sand and hoping for the best. From now on seeds would have to be treated more scientifically.
Confident of his own understanding of what had gone wrong, Jameson played the system, putting the blame for the failure on someone else. Clearly Falconer could not have inspected the cases on their arrival in Calcutta, nor had he adequately provided for their safe dispatch to Allahabad. It was Falconer’s poor gardening skills that were to blame, according to Jameson, since “I may here remark that the arrangements made by the Commissioners of Allahabad for the cases received were of such a nature as to have caused entire success had the plants reached that place in anything like good order.”
Falconer simply responded by forwarding Jameson a scientific article on Wardian cases and how they worked. He copied it to Jameson’s superiors in the North-West Provinces, to the Revenue Department of India at Calcutta, and to Royle at East India House in London. Even Fortune received forwarded copies of the Jameson/Falconer correspondence. Practically every man in the chain of command bore witness to the conflict between the two rival gardeners in India.
11
Ningbo to Bohea, the Great Tea Road, May and June 1849
In May the riverbanks of China were aflame with new growth. Buds ripened on the boughs—apple, cherry, and hawthorn blossoms heralding the awakening of the natural world to the sun. With the arrival of spring Fortune had a major new project under way. He had hired another small junk to sail out of the coastal city of Ningbo, a lesser treaty port, for the black tea hills of Fujian. Now he was nearing his ultimate prize.
He stood at the prow watching coolies working quayside in the warm salt breeze. He was again journeying deep into China. From the mouth of the Yangtze he would travel southwest, headed for the fabled Wuyi Mountains, source of the finest black teas. Although black tea and green tea were products of the same plant, as he had established, the two varieties were never grown in the same place. Fortune sought to obtain black tea stock from its most celebrated region.
He was concerned that there were no reliable reports on which route would take him there in time for the second flush of tea picking: “I felt rather low-spirited; I could not conceal from my mind that the journey I had undertaken was a long one and perhaps full of danger. My road lay through countries almost unknown. . . . But the die was cast, and, committing myself to the care of Him who can preserve us alike in all places, I resolved to encounter the difficulties and dangers of the road with a good heart,” he recorded.
His fretful winter pondering the fortunes of his green tea consignment was behind him. He still had no news as to the fate of the Ward’s cases and would have none for at least another season. As far as he knew, his green tea plants had arrived safely in the Himalayas, and all was well.
The trip to the black tea mountains was Fortune’s most daring yet. He was going deeper into China than any Westerner had ever gone, as far as he knew, traveling over treacherous terrain. He planned to journey for three months by boat, sedan chair, and foot—a trip of over two hundred miles, most of it by land, all of it uncharted, and almost entirely uphill. In the Bohea hills, also known as the Wuyi Mountains, he was seeking the tea most suited to British tastes—the blackest, gentlest oolongs. (The growing demand for black tea in England was due in no small part to a glut of sugar from the West Indies and the Caribbean. Black tea takes sugar; green tea does not. When Fortune discovered that green tea was poisoned with dye, British tastes turned even more toward black tea.)
There were no black tea gardens as of yet in India, only green. No one there really knew how to manufacture black tea, and in any case the transplanted Chinese gardeners did not have access to black tea stock. If Fortune had returned to Europe without introducing black tea plants from the best black tea districts, he would have neglected his full mandate from the East India Company.
Wang and the coolie would not be accompanying Fortune on this trip. Initially he had thought about sending them on the mission to Bohea without him, daunted by the idea of traveling through unmapped parts of rural China at a time when rebellions were sweeping the countryside. Fortune was confident that they could deputize for him; Wang and the coolie were reasonably well trained as plant hunters and knew what Fortune was seeking when he went prospecting. But he had reached the end of his tether on the previous trip, worn down by their constant conniving and scheming. He could not bring himself to abandon the hunt, nor did he feel he could entirely trust them. He would have no way of knowing whether his servants had indeed gone all the way to the Wuyi Mountains to collect the plants or whether they had stopped short at inferior black tea gardens. He also assumed that when Wang and the coolie weren’t plant hunting, they were likely to be squandering their time—and the company’s money—on a prolonged inland vacation. Fortune, ever the enterprising traveler, was going himself. “There may also have been a lingering desire to cross the Bohea hills and to visit the far-famed Woo-e-Shan,” he wrote.
Wang, however, was not without his uses. Fortune still considered the trip to Sung Lo and Wang’s family land an unqualified success. For backup and additional reassurance, though, he had decided that collecting a second batch of green tea seeds, ready for the following year’s planting, would assuage the last of his qualms. The cost of
doing so was negligible, after all—only the price of Wang’s time and travels—so he ordered the translator to return home and resume collecting green tea seeds.
Fortune now required a new servant to accompany him on the long journey, so he hired, after many inquiries through Dent’s comprador, a knowledgeable body servant, a portly man named Sing Hoo. With his proud and dignified bearing, Sing Hoo was “powerful and spirited” and had once been in the service of a high-ranking mandarin affiliated with the imperial family at Peking. His elevated status was clearly visible in his straight shoulders and in the proud stretch of his neck. Hoo came equipped with the insignia of his former office, a small triangular flag that bore the arms of the Imperial Court, which, he said, was a gift from his former master and amounted to a sort of passe-partout throughout the country. To anyone owing fealty to the emperor, this flag signaled that the travelers were under the court’s protection. “I confess I was rather sceptical as to the power of this flag, but allowed him to have his own way,” Fortune recalled. The servant carried the flag everywhere, rolled up and at the ready.
Sing Hoo was from Fujian Province, where the Wuyi Mountains were situated, which meant he spoke Fukienese, the local dialect. Although China had a standard and official court language, each province had its own dialect that was almost unintelligible to outsiders. Fortune’s halting Chinese would most likely have been a pidgin version of Shanghaihua—the formal tongue of Shanghai—for he would have learned it from the men he hired there. He might have spoken a touch of Cantonese, or Guandonghua, also, like so many of the British merchants and government men who were posted in China, but mostly he communicated in pidgin. In the mountainous areas of remote Fujian he would have been hopelessly lost linguistically. Sing Hoo was his new mouthpiece.
Fortune’s previous fear of exposure as an outsider was allayed on this journey. The worrying skirmishes on his earlier green tea trips had been instigated in large part by his servants; his Chinese was awkward but by now passable; he was competent with chopsticks; and his clothing marked him as a man of the realm. More confident now, Fortune thought it entirely possible that no one would detect him at all—he was going so far from the coast that it was probable no one in the region had ever seen an Occidental face.
Not that this journey was without its dangers. Besides the rumors of peasant rebellions, Fortune was as yet uncertain about Sing Hoo: “The guide I had with me was not fully to be depended upon.” But he was at the very least a welcome change from Wang and the coolie’s outright hooliganism. If officials were being slaughtered and the poor were seeking retribution for their suffering, as they were said to be in the hills of Fujian, Fortune’s silken costume identifying him as a ranking mandarin would scarcely provide much protection. Command of the local tongue and the triangular flag of the Imperial Court might well provide all the help he would get.
After imperiously ordering the men on the junk to store his master’s belongings correctly, Sing Hoo informed Fortune that it was time for the journey to begin; Fortune must become a different “outward man” and clothe himself in full Chinese dress. Fortune’s braid still hung down his back. He removed his Western clothing—his hard-soled shoes and buttoned-up jacket—and donned the wide, flowing garments of a Chinese official.
“I doubt whether my nearest friends would have known me,” he wrote. “I scarcely recognised myself.”
“You will do very well,” Sing Hoo told him.
Fortune, Sing Hoo, and all their gear floated lazily upriver, the boatmen calling to one another as they poled around the bends. They sailed past walled cities whose ramparts dated back thousands of years to the times of plague and savagery in Middle Europe. (In China those same times saw the rise of highly advanced civilizations, social organization, and achievement.) They traveled along an ancient network of canals that stretched across China like a spider’s web, connecting the vast area of the Center Country with everywhere else of importance.
Within a few days the men came upon a traffic jam in the canal, a bottleneck at a junction point where fifty junks were floating helplessly alongside one another. Fortune’s junk queued for its turn on a windlass that would raise it onto a ramp leading to a higher canal. Stevedores on the shore were fixing ropes from the windlass to each boat’s prow, winching it up inch by inch. The delay was only an hour or so—not overly long, given the average waiting time in China—and all the boatmen on the river, who were never in a hurry to begin with, spent the time sunbathing and spitting, playing mah-jong, and enjoying their time off and the spring sun.
All except for one fellow, that is, who sailed astern of the queue. He huffed and spat and swore, growing increasingly impatient. The angry boatman maneuvered his boat toward Fortune’s junk, knocking others aside, shouting, and threatening any captain who would not get out of the way. Most of the boatmen ignored him, allowing the interloper to have his way, but when he reached Fortune’s craft, the junk’s captain shouted, “You cannot pass this boat,” perhaps more in an attempt to placate Fortune than to provoke a fight. He jammed the nose of the junk against the canal wall, closing the gap so that the irate sailor could not pass.
Sing Hoo now also stepped into the fray, determined not to let any man outface his master.
“Oh, but I will pass you!” the obstreperous captain rudely insisted.
“Do you know,” Sing Hoo shouted back, “that there is a mandarin in this boat? You had better take care what you are about!”
“I don’t care for mandarins,” shouted the angry captain, spitting out a sentiment shared by many but spoken by few. “I must get on.”
“Oh, very well,” Sing Hoo replied calmly, “we shall see.” The servant went down into the cabin, took his talisman from his luggage, and unfolded the triangular yellow flag. He walked out again into the sunshine, smiling to himself, and hoisted the banner on the mast.
“There,” taunted Hoo. “Will you pass us now?”
Fortune was dumbfounded when the captain stood down, apologizing profusely and becoming “all at once as meek as a lamb.” From then on he did nothing but sit quietly on the stern of his boat, eyes cast down and waiting his turn like everyone else in the canal.
Fortune smiled; perhaps he would find safety in this countryside after all. Perhaps the path ahead would be strewn with more luck than he had imagined. Sing Hoo’s flag had marked him as an important mandarin, a lau ye, a “sir.”
Fortune penetrated deeper into China, sailing from town to town in Zhejiang and then journeying on by sedan chair and mountain footpath through Jiangxi Province. As he passed through ruined villages, beggars reached up to him, holding out skeletal hands for a few pieces of copper cash or anything that might be useful in barter. Fortune was touched by the supplicants’ poverty but horrified by their scabrous faces and missing limbs. It did not escape his notice that the peasants of China were suffering blow after blow, season upon season, so many bitter lessons at the hands of their vengeful or indifferent gods.
The trip to black tea country was a slow climb that would take almost three months to complete. It was a beautiful time of year: “The lowlands were now much broader—the hills appeared to fall back, and a beautiful rich valley was disclosed to view. Groups of pine-trees were observed scattered over the country. They marked the last resting places of the dead, and had a pleasing and pretty effect.” The Chinese would often plant trees over graves as a sign of respect for their ancestors. As the rich rolling hills of the Yangtze valley gave way to China’s coastal mountains, Fortune’s mission took him to areas as striking as they were unnerving.
At first glance the vistas were lovely, dotted with swallows on the wing, but on closer examination China’s landscape was unforgiving. The luxuriant vegetation swarmed over ancient buildings, forcing its way through dilapidated shacks. The same climate that made roses burst into flower in early summer was merciless on man-made structures. Each peasant hut looked tenuous and feeble on its patch of land, as if ready to be reclaimed at any minute by the e
arth. The region was lashed by high winds and was hit hard that year by flooding. What had once been among China’s richest areas had been ravaged by a series of natural disasters, and famine was forcing entire clans off their land. Extreme weather had always limited the amount of arable land available to the growing Chinese nation, but the relative peace of the Qing reign meant that the population had doubled in size in the previous century. In 1849 there were more Chinese than ever farming fewer fields, while successive rains and droughts only undermined their efforts.
From his palanquin Fortune saw tea coolies carrying crates strung on poles across their shoulders as they marched in line down a mountain path, like colonies of ants on the move. The tea caravans and the profusion of beggars in the area did not seem to have any relation to each other, yet the beggars had gathered there precisely because the tea route, like the fabled silk route, was one of the most valuable avenues of trade in imperial China. Tea commerce was then worth almost $26 million a year in revenues (equivalent to about $650 million today).
It was an uneasy time to be so far off the beaten track. The blow inflicted by the First Opium War on the people of China was now being felt inland. The nation’s humiliation at the hands of the West led to inflation as the beleaguered peasants paid taxes in a currency radically devalued by war debts. The foreign powers insisted on favorable trading terms, chipping away at whatever competitive advantages the working peasantry of China had ever had for their goods and labors, especially for their tea. There was palpable anger against corrupt officials who provided, at best, perfunctory aid to the suffering agricultural regions, and against the government in Peking, made up of foreign Manchus. When he could not repay a debt, one of Fortune’s boatmen had his sail repossessed, which meant he could not proceed upriver and had to dispatch all his passengers and cargo at a loss. The boatman, in despair, threatened to drown himself.
