by Sarah Rose
It was through drug-based commercial enterprises such as the tea and opium trades that Britain became the greatest of all hegemonic empires. The British campaign to sell opium in China was tremendously profitable. It brought in £750,000 in 1840 (about $3.8 billion today) and rose to £9.1 million by 1879 (about $22 billion). Britain’s all-conquering naval fleet was able to be constantly improved with newly minted capital from the sugar, tea, and opium trades. Without opium the India trade would not have flourished, and without India Britain’s post-Napoleonic global ascendancy could well have collapsed.
As Fortune’s party settled down for the night, he could still hear the resentful clucking and cursing of his laborers. He returned to his bunk, but sleep was beyond him. Through the rotting floorboards, opium smoke wafted into the room, thick and heavy, clinging to the floor, swirling over his luggage, mixing with the smells of mold and damp, infusing the space with the sickly sweet scent of burnt sugar. Although overpowering, the smell was oddly seductive. As Graham Greene later said, it “was like the first sight of a beautiful woman with whom one realizes that a relationship is possible.”
In the dining room below, a group of men, including Fortune’s chair bearers, reclined on a large bedlike sofa, called a kang, with a lit lamp at the center of the room. One of the bearers leaned over the kang toward the fire to warm a ball of opium, which gurgled and boiled as the flame lapped at the sticky liquid. With a long spoon he stuffed the marble-sized ball of opium, now a hot, sticky mass, into his pipe and then inhaled in deep drafts. There was a loud pop, the sizzle of solids metastasizing into smoke. “The stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of juices in the stem would well nigh turn the stomach of a statue,” wrote Mark Twain. The user leaned back again on his pillow, holding his breath, and then exhaled in a delirium of poppies and painlessness.
“What madmen might do under the circumstances—for madmen they were while under the influence of the drug—I could not possibly foresee,” Fortune wrote. He stayed awake the rest of the night, playing out the possibilities in his head, enumerating all the ways he could die, much like the intricate tales of death and destruction that Hoo wove during their long days of travel. “This kept me awake for several hours.”
After the altercation with the chair bearers, Sing Hoo slept with his clothes on, facing the door and waking at the slightest creak or disturbance in the night silence. Finally the opium smokers’ voices died down in the room below. Seduced by the poppy, they had “gone off at last into the land of dreams.”
At first light Fortune was up and his gear packed. He would push on and put all the high drama of the night behind him. He called for Sing Hoo to get a move on, to round up the others and get started. But the inn was entirely empty, with neither coolies nor innkeepers to help him with the load. Everyone had absconded under cover of night, never to do business again with the likes of Sing Hoo or his master, the strange mandarin. Fortune had mistaken opium smoking for outright mutiny. He was now in a faraway town without his retinue and with an angry and shamed servant his only companion.
There was nothing to do but seek help. Fortune ordered Sing Hoo to go to the nearest village to engage more men. He warned his servant not to take advantage of any new bearers, and Sing Hoo set out as directed, still stinging from Fortune’s rebuke.
As the morning passed, Fortune was eager to put some distance between himself and yet another scene of insecurity and danger. He feared that the mob from the previous night was not only complaining to all and sundry about the terrible mandarin and his awful servant, but was now plotting retribution. But there was no sign of any new chair bearers or, for that matter, of Sing Hoo.
Finally, in the late afternoon, Sing Hoo returned to Fortune, alone and defeated. No one would work for him, not at any price. Sing Hoo’s miserably low status sank even further.
But Fortune was having none of Sing Hoo’s self-pity or obsequious apologizing. He announced that they would most certainly not be staying another night in the inn while the servant tried to rescue his reputation. They would leave immediately and travel in whatever daylight remained. Sing Hoo, who considered himself a high-ranking servant, would have to carry the entire load himself, like a miserable lower-class coolie. Fortune ordered Sing Hoo to strap the luggage together into one parcel using rope and bamboo. He would do the heavy lifting alone until they were far enough away for no one to have heard of the evening’s fracas.
As the two men set out from the miserable opium inn, it started raining and was soon pouring down in torrents. Still, Fortune insisted they walk on through the flooding streets. They became soaked instantly, feeling entirely sorry for themselves and completely furious with each other. They trudged on through the mud until the inn was behind them, a distant memory on another hill.
When they were a mile beyond the city walls, the bamboo with which Sing Hoo was carrying the load slung over his shoulders suddenly snapped in two. Everything Fortune owned—luggage, specimens, and every single tea plant—was plunged into ankle-deep mud. Baskets opened up, seeds spilled out, and all of Sing Hoo’s grass cloth, which he had bargained so hard for, lay strewn in the filth.
Sing Hoo and Fortune were in the vast Chinese wilderness, surrounded by farmland, alone and very wet. No one could see or hear them; there was no one to bear witness to their frustration. Instead of being angry, Fortune pitied his sodden, exhausted servant. “I had not the heart to reproach him. . . . In the mud and water he looked perfectly miserable.”
14
Shanghai, Autumn 1849
Back in the relative comfort of Shanghai, a guest in the cozy compound of Messrs. Dent, Beale & Co., Fortune sat down at a writing desk. He had received a package from the government in Calcutta. All the hard months of travel, his entire sense of success or failure in China, would hinge on the information contained in this communication.
Fortune eagerly broke open the seal on the envelope and pulled out page after page of official documents, seemingly an entire bookful of them. There was a mass of information: reports from company botanists and officials detailing the fate of his first shipment of green tea out of China. It was all neatly filed in reverse chronological order, clearly and painstakingly copied by hand.
The company had provided a summary of the information contained in these documents. It was news he was desperate to have, and yet the content beggared belief: Nearly all the tea plants had arrived dead in India. One year of Fortune’s work, all the company’s investment, had been completely wasted. It was as if he had not been in China at all that first year.
He put his head in his hands and tried hard to make sense of the news.
Then he began reading from the beginning of the file.
The plants had been sent out the previous winter, but by March there had been a delay, a detour and transshipment through Ceylon. Yet when his tea had reached Calcutta at the end of March, all still seemed to be going well. “Dr Falconer reports receipt of cases of plants containing 13,000 young plants. . . . The greater part of the plants were reported to have arrived in Calcutta in a healthy and thriving condition,” a report stated.
Fortune continued to turn the pages of the documents charting the fate of his seedlings. They had gone upriver on the steamer to Allahabad, but they were delayed there, too, for the Ganges was low; they stayed there nearly a month. Had the cases been in good condition, delays would not have been such a problem, even after the month’s wait in Ceylon, but it was clear from the letters that by Allahabad they were not in good order: “Many of the panes of glass in the cases, too, were broken,” the missive reported. Fortune read on, his stomach turning. If someone had had the foresight to reseal the boxes, their contents might have lived. Or had a competent gardener replanted the seedlings into pots right then and there and tended the tea like houseplants on their way upriver, they might have made the trip successfully. Alas, his plants had likely been left on the loading dock of a company warehouse or factory, ignored until the rains brought the water level
up and the boats could pass.
Fortune’s jaw drew tighter. He could only shake his head as he made his way through the Revenue Department reports: From Allahabad the cases had been loaded onto an oxcart for the mountain gardens of Saharanpur, the company’s experimental plantation in the Himalayas, where they arrived in mid-May.
“The first batch consisting of six boxes of plants reached Seharampore [sic] on the 14th of May in bad condition not more than 30 or 40 plants having leaves on them, but they have begun to show signs of improvement. The second batch of 5 boxes arrived in better condition on the 9th [June] having on the whole 41 plants in good condition in the 5 boxes.”
After sending thousands upon thousands of young plants, Fortune could count only eighty healthy survivors in the mountains of India. It was a statistically meaningless number, a failure rate beyond all reckoning, the worst possible outcome.
The accounting of his first year looked very grim:
And the seeds? By early July some seven packets had arrived.
“The result has been an entire failure, not one seed having germinated. I lately removed a number of seeds from the beds to ascertain their condition and invariably found them to be rotten,” Jameson wrote.
In the pages of correspondence that followed, Fortune read what seemed to be bureaucratic blame shifting. Calcutta officials lobbed accusations against the gardening men in the hinterlands. The men in the provinces insisted that no one knew tea the way they knew tea—certainly not other botanists in Calcutta—and that their word was final on all subjects pertaining to tea. In the end, Fortune’s first plants may have been doomed by collective corporate incompetence.
In his own notes he eschewed the self-aggrandizing revisionism that characterized official communication in British India. Fortune wrote drily and simply that he had not succeeded and that attempting to move plants to a new home and develop an entire industry out of transplants was a very difficult thing indeed.
In the autumn of 1848 I sent large quantities of tea seeds to India. Some were packed in loose canvas bags, others were mixed with dry earth and put into boxes, and others again were put up in very small packages in order to be quickly forwarded by post; but none of these methods were [sic] attended with much success. Tea-seeds retain their vitality for a very short period if they are out of the ground. It is the same with oaks and chestnuts, and hence the great difficulty of introducing these valuable seeds into distant countries by seeds.
The time had come for further botanical experimentation.
Although Fortune’s entire green tea haul had been rendered useless, it seems he had no fear that the company would recall him from China. Instead he remained sanguine, focused, and not the least bit apologetic. Nor did he indulge in any self-reproach whatsoever but instead concerned himself purely with solutions. He was confident enough in his basic gardening skills to know he could obtain better results.
He had in mind a new method of seed transportation, one that would force seeds to germinate inside the Wardian cases. He had concluded that the problem with the previous shipment was that he had exceptionalized the seeds, dividing the life cycle of the plant into two distinct moments, the living saplings and the inert seeds, and shipped them to India as entirely separate cargo. But the Wardian case was the safest place for all manner of plant life, no matter what its stage of development. Fortune remembered that when Ward had made his original discovery, he had looked into a sealed glass jar and seen seeds sprouting several years after the jar had been shut. Plants weren’t frozen in time in a Wardian case; they lived and grew. Seeds should not be isolated from a living environment and shipped in hemp sacks like rice; they, too, would thrive in a terrarium.
Fortune immediately initiated a Wardian case experiment: He planned to stow many hundreds of black tea seeds packed into the soil of the cases he was sending to the Calcutta Botanic Garden. This experiment was not so different from the conditions in which Ward had made his first discovery, but it would be conducted on a mass scale.
Among the specimens he was sending to India were a number of mulberry plants that had been gathered in the district where China’s best silks were spun. Fortune had traveled through the silk district on the Yangtze as he made his way in and out of tea country and believed that India, with its thriving cotton industry, might well benefit from experiments in silk production. He planted the mulberry bush in the “usual way,” as he did any other shrub of economic and scientific note, with enough space, soil, and light to be comfortably sustained on the long journey out. He watered the transplant, left the mulberry bush in the sun, and a few days later, after the soil had absorbed the water and the plant had adjusted to its confined new home, he scattered handfuls of black tea seeds—each the size of a marble—over the surface of the soil. He then added another layer of soil, about half an inch deep, over the tea seeds. Fortune had his box makers fashion crossbars for this case so that the earth would stay in place no matter what turbulence a sea swell or oxcart travel might bring. “This method will apply to all short-lived seeds,” he observed, “as well as to those of the tea plant. It is important that it should be generally known.”
Fortune’s first mulberry box, planted with seeds from the Da Hong Pao, was opened in Calcutta and hailed as a complete success. Not only did the seeds survive, but they also had fully germinated on the voyage out and arrived in a healthy condition.
Falconer, the senior botanist in Calcutta, was delighted. A scientist’s inventiveness in China had made up for a company gardener’s incompetence in Saharanpur. Nature had triumphed over human inaction and bungling. But not only that, Fortune had made a great leap forward in the global imperial project of plant transfer—which was essentially the transfer of technology. If living plants as well as fragile seeds could travel overseas, then entire industries could be transplanted—not one plant at a time but one entire profitable species at a time. Fortune expanded the global exportation of knowledge and technology in a 4-foot-by- 6-foot glass box. For an imperial power such as Britain, with a planet full of subject colonies just waiting to be tilled and planted for profit, Fortune’s discovery was nothing short of revolutionary.
“The young tea plants were sprouting around the mulberries as thick as they could come up,” Falconer wrote to the company and Fortune.
Fortune, buoyed by his success, made up another fourteen Wardian cases using his new method. Knowing that the principle at work was essentially sound, he grew decidedly less meticulous about the layering for his next experiment. With a bushel of seeds on hand, he made a mixture of one part earth to two parts seeds and tossed them all in together, like so many raisins in a pudding. Then he spread the soil at the bottom of the cases planted with rows and rows of tiny young tea plants, only a season or two old. He now had every faith in the incubatory ability of the Wardian case. He believed his black tea seeds would survive the trip to India, and so he sent many of them.
On a ship, protected by glass, the seed/soil mixture produced thousands upon thousands of germinating black tea seeds, all of which sprouted abundantly on their way to India. There were too many healthy plants for Falconer to count.
“The success attending their introduction in Ward cases has been so great, that I would recommend the attention of Government to be confined to procuring seeds and sowing them as recommended,” wrote Jameson. There was no longer any need to hunt for living plants, the tender yearlings small enough to travel but hearty enough to survive transplant; seeds could do the trick. The new method was better, “proved by the admirable condition in which Mr Fortune’s seedling cases reached us. The plants so reared reached the plantation in full vigour of growth and were but little injured on being transplanted into beds.”
Fortune’s new seed-shipping method increased the yield over shipping live seedlings tenfold—“for every young plant there will be, on the arrival of the cases at their destination in the [Himalayas], ten available seedlings.” Every tea garden in the Himalayas from that season forward would bea
r the progeny of Fortune’s tea plants, a foundation for the Indian tea industry for generations. He had radically changed the job of a plant hunter, which henceforward might more accurately be called a seed hunter.
Seed selection and breeding constitute a large part of the cultivation of finer-quality teas. The difference in quality between what Fortune provided for the Himalayas and what had been growing there already (the teas in the first shipments sent to the London tasters) was vast. While processed tea is subject to the vagaries of climate and rainfall, harvesting and shipping, the raw material is of key importance, and Fortune improved the Himalayan tea stock beyond all measure. His tea seedlings would breed and crossbreed with the stock already in the Himalayas, the inferior seeds out of Canton as well as the native Assam variety. Through the next several generations of selection and breeding, Fortune’s stock—bred for the highest Chinese tastes over generations (called the China jat)—would mix with the best qualities of the native brews, the heartiness and maltiness of Assam tea (called the India jat). The new hybrids would produce unique flavors, flowery, mellow, rich, and supple, the finest teas in the world.
15
Shanghai, February 1851
On the quayside in Shanghai unfolded a scene of pathos and heartache as eight Chinese tea experts made their farewells to the land they knew and loved and to all their extended family members. Although the mandarin from beyond the Great Wall promised there would be tea where they were going, each of the skeptical departing men believed only one place could grow tea: China, the center of the world.
