For All the Tea in China

by Sarah Rose

  A thousand years later the last of these tea bushes in the remote mountains of Fujian Province are guarded by armed men. They are no less precious now than they were when Fortune was wandering the tea hills. Locals say that the young leaves still glow red through the summer, and their dangling fruit still looks like garnets in the sun. The Da Hong Pao bushes are watered directly by the heavens, by pure rain filtered through the hard rock of the mythical dragons’ skeletons. Each season the ancient bushes will put out about one pound of tea shoots. The first and second flush of the Da Hong Pao, the most powerful and sweetest crops, sell on the private market as the most expensive tea per pound in the world. At several thousands of dollars per ounce, Da Hong Pao is many times more valuable than gold.

  Fortunately, nature provided tea farmers with a way of making Da Hong Pao available to the masses. Tea is easily cloned; any branch, cut and replanted, layered under soil, and left to sprout will soon develop a network of roots. The process of cloning plants is called agamogenesis, reproduction without gametes—that is, asexual reproduction. Cloning is a more expensive method of propagation than planting seeds, but it will produce direct genetic replicas of the parent plant. The technique has been used for thousands of years in farming to preserve treasured cultivars and rare strains. Genetic clones of the Da Hong Pao bushes have been likewise planted throughout Wuyi Shan.

  Fortune was tireless in his collecting, bringing home many hundreds of seedlings from the hills of Wuyi Shan, offspring of the Da Hong Pao. He collected thousands of branches and layered them in soil inside the cases to produce clones, and he also hired small children to help him collect tea seeds, finding that a little money “went a long way with the little urchins.” From the monks he purchased saplings one or two seasons old to sit beside the cloning branches in the glazed terraria of the Wardian cases.

  He was also an avid collector of tea myths: It was said that Da Hong Pao tea, so inaccessible in the crevices of the high mountains, was at its best when not picked by humans. Fortune heard another tale involving monkeys: At harvest time peasants threw rocks at the monkeys who careened through the branches of Bohea’s cliffs. The monkeys retaliated and returned fire at their assailants with anything they could reach—and in Wuyi Shan every other object is a tea plant. The monkeys accordingly threw handfuls of leaves and shoots, while monks would stand at the base of the mountains with baskets spread wide, waiting to catch the tea. Monkey paws are, of course, the perfect size for the delicate task of plucking only the top two leaves and a bud. “Monkey-picked” tea was prized for its purity. So, too, Fortune noted, was tea picked by virgins’ hands. After a few hearty, well-brewed cups of Wuyi Shan oolong, the monks nodded in agreement: “Virgin tea is best.”

  Fortune walked out with the monks in the mornings, tracking the rhythms of the gardeners and the priests as they made their tea perambulations. He took note of their small-scale processing and drying, and of the regional differences between black tea and green tea. He picked with them, shadowed them, and followed their rituals, his notebook in hand.

  As Fortune prepared to leave the tea hills, the monk who had served as his host offered him a parting gift: several rare plants and flowers. The botanist did not record which varieties were given to him, but it seemed to him as if the monk knew exactly what his guest was looking for. He chose specimens that Fortune had not previously collected or even known about. Delighted and embarrassed, the wordless botanist was happy to accept the plants. Each seedling was in perfect condition for transplanting, an ideal memento of the Wuyi hills. Fortune commented that the monk’s gift “increased my store [of new plants] very considerably,” and he was deeply touched by the gesture.

  However, his espionage could hardly be sustained for an extended period of time, no matter how skilled a spy he proved to be. The trouble—as was the case with so many of the disasters that befell him—was Fortune’s servant, Sing Hoo. As Fortune grew in confidence during his fruitful stay, so, too, did Sing Hoo. As the mouthpiece and sole negotiator for his master, Hoo began to take some liberties. His explanations of Fortune’s origins grew increasingly elaborate. Rather than helping him maintain a low profile, Sing Hoo raised it and then embellished it in order to bask in the reflected glory of his master’s perceived stature. According to Hoo, Fortune was no longer just a mandarin from a distant province whose biographical details were rather mysterious. Now he had become a very great man, a rich man with many wives, a venerated warrior and respected leader, from Tartary in Central Asia. He was a descendant of Genghis Khan. Fortune was a man whom all should approach with humility and “anxiety,” since he had the confidence of the emperor. Fortune’s newly invented personal history became more than a little uncomfortable for him, but he accepted the increased admiration of his fellows “with the utmost politeness.”

  Upon hearing that the monastery’s honored guest was a man of such esteemed status and wealth, an ancient monk came to Fortune’s quarters. Bent under the weight of his robes, the lines in his face like the characters of some ancient script, the man looked as old as the limestone peaks around him. He moved slowly and randomly as he made his way through the monastery’s corridors. Weak and simple, he was “apparently in his second childhood.”

  As the ancient monk hobbled through the doorway to Fortune’s room, he kicked off his thin slippers and immediately began the kowtow, the ritual of nine forehead-to-floor bows—a sign of submission and respect in imperial China. Knees down, hands down, head down, ochre robes splayed on the floor like flower petals. Then up again, each move a symphony of ancient joints and creaking sinews. “I raised him gently from this humiliating posture, and intimated that I did not wish to be so highly honoured,” Fortune wrote.

  It was Robert Fortune’s only occasion for self-reproach in nearly two years of stealing secrets from China. He felt for a moment a twinge of something that could only be called shame: “I nearly lost my gravity.”

  13

  Pucheng, September 1849

  After packing seeds and shrubs, Fortune was a wanderer once again, on his way from Wuyi Shan to the Fujian coast. He “bade adieu to the far-famed Woo-e-Shan, certainly the most wonderful collection of hills I had ever beheld.” He had every reason to believe that he and others would one day return to claim more tea from its majestic homeland. “In a few years hence, when China shall have been really opened to foreigners, and when the naturalist can roam unmolested amongst these hills, with no fear of fines and imprisonments to haunt his imagination, he will experience a rich treat indeed.”

  The return journey to Shanghai and civilization would be easier than the trip out. Rather than retracing his route through high ground, Fortune headed directly east toward the Fujian coast, where the mountain passes were lower and the road more certain. A straight line would take him to the seaport of Fuzhou, where he had once fought off pirates. He was following the traditional tea route, the same path the leaves of Da Hong Pao took to the world market. It was by no means a simple trip, however, for on the way to the coast he would encounter the dangers endemic to the Chinese opium trade.

  One night a loud and terrifying ruckus broke out; angry shouting and arguing pierced the stillness of Fortune’s room at an inn. Among the voices he could just make out the rasping tones of his chair bearers and the more polished Chinese of his servant. The argument grew louder and more vehement, and Fortune imagined all kinds of terrors invading the night. “I feared they were seizing my servant with the intention of robbing us, and perhaps of taking our lives.”

  Fortune finally threw on his clothes and reached for his small pistol. “Human life is not much valued in some parts of the country . . . and for aught I knew I might be in a den of thieves and robbers.”

  Sing Hoo was a man of many stories. For miles on the trail he bent Fortune’s ear with grisly tales of his travels, the more frightening and more ornate the better. He spun yarns about noblemen robbed and murdered in their sleep, of merchants mutilated and travelers beheaded. Fortune tried not t
o listen, but as the days wore on and the novelty of travel faded, he began to take a kind of reluctant delight in the intricacies of the horrors and sheer inventiveness of Sing Hoo’s imagination. But on that particular night, woken so abruptly from sleep, all Sing Hoo’s grim narratives came flooding back to haunt him. Fortune could not shake off one particular image of a man who disappeared and was found later stuffed into his own trunk. He imagined himself, headless, pretzled into a Wardian case.

  Running down a ladder and entering the inn’s central courtyard, Fortune discovered that the source of the disturbance was none other than Sing Hoo himself. There were some eight or ten men surrounding him, including the chair bearers, who were half again Sing Hoo’s size and shouting as if all the demons of Hell had been unleashed. Sing Hoo stood his ground in the middle of the scrum, his back to the wall, defending himself “like a tiger at bay.” He was determined to fight off the mob alone—and in his hand he held his only weapon, a smoking incense stick. Sing Hoo was thrusting and parrying, every now and again poking the hot scented ember close to the faces of his tormentors. “The most adventurous sometimes got a poke which sent them back cursing and swearing rather faster than they came.”

  Fortune found the scene hilarious—Sing Hoo among the jackals—even while recognizing that his own safety was in danger and that the scene was “quite sufficient to alarm a bolder man.” But he had been in China long enough by now to see the comedy of one stout man holding his own against ten, of his lone servant defending himself with a joss stick.

  Fortune strode into the middle of the throng. The men quickly surrounded him. Reaching into his pocket, he brandished the small pistol for everyone to see. With a superior weapon before them, the men were immediately chastened and stood down.

  Fortune was gambling—the pistol did not work. The moist climate of summer had rusted the loading mechanism shut. The chamber was empty and would remain so for the rest of the trip. He had wagered, however, that everyone would recognize the gun as a symbol of his power, while no one would be able to discover its uselessness.

  “My chair bearers and Coolie, who had always treated me with every respect, immediately fell back in the rear, grumbling at the same time.” He listened to their complaints. It seemed that the crowd was demanding from Hoo some cash they had been promised and had never received. Fortune’s servant was at it again, on the take, making a squeeze, raking a little more off the top than the percentage Fortune allowed. He, as always, was the one who would pay the price for Sing Hoo’s sins.

  “Had I been an uninterested spectator, I might have enjoyed a hearty laugh at the scene before me; but I was in the midst of a strange country and hostile people, and, being the weaker party, I felt really alarmed.”

  Drawing himself up into his haughtiest mandarin stance, Fortune bellowed at Sing Hoo. Whatever the trouble was, whoever had started the argument, it was Hoo’s fault, and he should be ashamed. How dare he jeopardize Fortune’s trip with petty larceny? In a climate of thieves, why bring down the wrath of the locals upon them? The aggrieved coolies were all hardworking, honest men, by Fortune’s reckoning; they had dealt fairly with him and had carried him for miles on end through the torturous vertical terrain. Fortune had no qualms about taking their side in this matter and publicly said as much.

  The money in question amounted to some three hundred Chinese cash, or about one English shilling, a sum for which Fortune could never have imagined risking his life. It felt as if he were breaking up a squabble between schoolchildren, but he was in genuine danger. So, with ten local witnesses watching, he flatly ordered Sing Hoo to pay the debt without delay. By publicly humiliating Sing Hoo, he placated the eight coolies and the onlookers for the time being.

  Fortune was staying in a simple travelers’ rest house, but he was in the company of thieves. Some “were evidently opium-smokers, from the sallow colour of their cheeks, probably gamblers, and altogether such characters as one would rather avoid than be on intimate terms with.” Wherever there was opium, criminal interests could not be far away. Users lived on the fringes of society and often had a penchant for skulduggery and crime. Fortune’s temporary home was, in fact, a so-called flower smoke den, or huayan guan, a seedy pleasure palace where men enjoyed poetry, women, and opium, in no particular order. Another common name for such inns was “husband and wife dens,” but as a Chinese scholar noted, “In reality they seduce the sons of good families. They are a place for secret adultery.” The inn was one of many houses of ill repute along the route to the coast, for since the end of the First Opium War and the resulting institutionalization of the opium trade, Shanghai had become the center of drug commerce in the Far East, and addicts from throughout the country made pilgrimages to the coast to assemble a fix.

  Opium is derived from Papaver somniferum, the poppy of slumber, an annual that grows in the mountainous regions of Central Asia, much of which was at the time in the hands of the British Empire. The opium poppy has white or purple flowers, reaches a height of 3 or 4 feet, and has a solid cylindrical stem that bends and droops under the weight of a bud but stands erect when the flower is in full bloom. In the center of the poppy is a large globe-shaped seed capsule that is covered by a papery skin. When this seed pod is sliced open, it exudes a sticky sap that is collected, drained, dried, and then kneaded into small balls or cakes. The principal active ingredient in opium is morphine, an alkaloid that deadens pain, produces euphoria, induces sleep and apathy, reduces fever, and relaxes muscle spasms. For thousands of years, from the time of Homer, opium has been used as a recreational and medicinal drug. It can be smoked, drunk, eaten, injected, or rubbed on the skin. In addition to morphine, opium also contains codeine, another pain-killing alkaloid.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century millions of Chinese—it was estimated to have been one in every three adults—were opium addicts. The affliction was so widespread that the once prosperous economy of the country effectively went bankrupt for nearly twenty years. By Fortune’s day imports of opium were rising 20 percent a year; forty-eight thousand chests were imported from India in 1845, costing $34 million ($962 million today), and rose to sixty thousand chests in 1847 on revenues of $42 million ($1.1 billion today).

  Then as now, the population of China was largely made up of peasants, and it was they who were most likely to become opium addicts. On its first introduction to China, in the Ming Dynasty, opium was seen as a court luxury that came from abroad. The Dutch began to bring opium to China out of Jakarta about the same time Europe was discovering tea, also via the Dutch. (Then, as now, the Dutch made terrific drug peddlers.) An early scholar of Chinese medicine wrote that opium “tastes bitter, produces excessive heat and is poisonous. It is mainly used to aid masculinity, strengthen sperm and regain vigour. It enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies. Frequent use helps to cure the chronic diarrhoea that causes the loss of energy. . . . Its price equals that of gold.” Once opium became popular at court, primarily as an aphrodisiac, it was taken up by the aristocrats, scholars, and officials of the middle class. By the mid-nineteenth century its pleasures had found their way to the lower classes, where coolies, chair bearers, and boatmen—the people Fortune encountered daily—all benumbed their hard lives with a drug that produced a sense of calm and ease. As opium use became increasingly widespread, China’s officials denounced the taverns and brothels where it was used by the working masses of China.

  The consequences of opium smoking, which was considered a luxurious indulgence among the upper classes, led to vast social ills in the lower orders. Wrote a traveler: “Smokers while asleep are like corpses, lean and haggard as demons. Opium smoking throws whole families into ruin, dissipates every kind of property, and ruins man himself. . . . It wastes flesh and blood until the skin hangs down in bags and their bones are naked as billets of wood. When the smoker has pawned everything in his possession, he will pawn his wife and sell his daughters.”

  Opium made for a weak and lethargic workforce, a populatio
n that consumed more resources than it produced. In particular it made a mockery of the emperor’s army, and a number of contemporary reports decried its use among the military: “Many Cantonese and Fujianese soldiers smoke opium; there are even more among the officers. They are cowards and they have spoiled our operation. They are really despicable.” With an army in thrall to opium, could there be any wonder that the Qing Dynasty would soon lose its hold on power—or that the Taiping rebels would be so victorious? Another scholar complained, “Although there are more than 10,000 [soldiers], seven out of ten are Guangdong natives. They are cowardly and not used to marching in the mountains. Plus most coastal soldiers are opium smokers.”

  Drugs such as opium and tea were the first mass-produced, mass-marketed global commodities; everything and everyone these “stimulants” touched, from the producers to distributors to consumers, were altered in their wake. The global drug trade, in which England and China were deeply enmeshed, produced new leaders, new governments, new companies, new farming practices, as well as new colonies, new modes of capital accumulation, and new modes of transport and communication.

  From an economic and imperial standpoint, opium was miraculous. It found new markets and customers almost effortlessly and took up little room on the merchant fleets colonizing the world in the first wave of globalization. From its earliest days opium was a mode of currency that made the Far East trade run fast and trim: It was lightweight, easy to pack, and fetched a high price.

  Opium, like other drugs such as tea and coffee, and like sugar, was good for the empire. Where the English had been trading for their breakfast tea with silver and racking up a crushing balance of payments problem, the growing opium trade quickly reversed the imbalance in England’s favor. China’s silver payments to Great Britain were $75 million between 1801 and 1826 (about $1.3 billion today), but the outflow increased to $134 million between 1827 and 1849 (about $2.9 billion), all as the result of the opium trade.