by Sarah Rose
Mothers pressed packages of food on their sons. The men bowed their heads in respect to their fathers, who had seen lifetimes of hardship and looked upon the loss of a son as simply one more in an endless chain. Wives, when the men were lucky enough to have them, wept openly. Children clung to the legs of departing fathers. The young tea makers bent down to kiss babies in arms whom they would not see for many years to come. Finally the men pulled themselves away and walked up the gangway to the tender that would bring them to H.M.S. Island Queen, a wooden side-wheeled steamer bound for Hong Kong.
Fortune was oddly unmoved by the grief of his travel companions. He found the departure instead “an amusing scene,” given that the tea makers were such unsophisticated “inland Chinamen,” afraid of the new and the different and very much less worldly than the Chinese in the ports who were fully conversant with foreigners. However miserable these men were to be “taking leave of their friends and their native country,” Fortune could see nothing in their situation to pity.
At the mouth of the Huangpu River, in the deepwater port, the Island Queen lay at anchor waiting for the manufacturers, the tea-making equipment, Wardian cases, and Fortune. The ship would depart for Hong Kong the following morning.
Fortune walked up the gangway after his new workforce. He was leaving the mainland for what might, as far as he knew, be the last time. He had completed his last task for the East India Company: finding and engaging Chinese experts who were willing to follow him to India. He had amply stocked the tea gardens of the Himalayas with new plants and seed stock. He had sent cases full of plants home to the English sale rooms and to Kew, and he had packed up a further consignment of porcelain, silk, trinkets, and other curiosities to sell at auction when he arrived.
Fortune had also acquired all the necessary equipment that would be needed in India to establish a tea trade: the ovens, woks, and wide spatulas to fire the tea with as well as the farm equipment specially developed to cultivate it. For this task he had dispatched Wang and Sing Hoo to the various mountain districts to hunt down “a large assortment of implements for the manufacture of tea.” And finally he secured a collection of the perfumed plants that Chinese manufacturers used for scenting teas when they were packed, such as jasmine and bergamot. Samples of these scenting agents were packed and shipped with him and the tea makers to India, with the names labeled in Latin as well as in Chinese, and a loose Chinese transliteration beside them. Fortune felt satisfied that he had done his job well. “Everything had succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations.”
Fortune then said his good-byes. He made the rounds of the international community in Shanghai, collecting good wishes and returning borrowed items. There was no sadness in these farewells; the diplomats and traders of the Far East were accustomed to parting from friends. “Nothing therefore remained for me to do except . . . proceed on my voyage to India.”
It had been a great deal more difficult dealing with people than with plants. Fortune had hired true experts from the deep tea country to instruct the Indian malis in the proper planting and processing of the new crop. Finding willing employees had not been easy in the atmosphere of danger and distrust following the outcome of the First Opium War. Men from the Chinese interior were particularly wary of foreigners, having heard chilling tales of their barbarism. Fortune made the task even harder for himself by refusing to hire anybody but the sons of tea growers, men who carried with them the knowledge of generations. “Had I wanted men from any of the towns on the coast, they might have been procured with the greatest of ease. . . . But I wanted men from districts far inland, who were well acquainted with the process of preparing the teas.”
Absconding with plants was one thing; absconding with men another altogether. “The Chinese authorities have always watched with the most jealous eye any attempts made to export the tea plant; and any endeavour to procure good tea makers would assuredly be foiled or greatly delayed by specious difficulties,” advised an official in Calcutta. Fortune, heeding the warning, did not recruit the men himself. If he were caught enticing Chinese natives away from their homeland, he would most certainly be put to death for kidnapping, which would probably spark an international incident.
Within a few months of setting out from Shanghai, Dent’s compradors had come through with true experts for Fortune, masters of their art who would also be prepared to teach it. The compradors assembled six tea men from the same districts in which Fortune had been tea hunting over the previous three years. The men were young, obedient, and willing, and each had signed on for a three-year term in India. The men “looked up to me with the most perfect confidence as their director and friend. While I had always treated them kindly myself, I had taken measures to have them kindly treated by others,” Fortune wrote.
The compradors had also secured Fortune two men who were expert in the making of tightly sealed lead boxes for the shipment of tea. Proper packing would help preserve quality and remedy what was becoming a rather dismal “deficiency of fragrance” problem in Indian tea. “By the London Brokers the black teas sent home have all been declared to belong, as stated, to the class of fancy teas, and to be more or less faulty in aroma,” reminded one dispatch. “This could scarcely be otherwise expected.”
Fortune himself had met the tea experts he would be escorting to India only days before their departure. He took no direct part in their recruitment, and his notes on how this was achieved remain vague. He simply dispatched agents, hired through Beale’s compradors, to the Chinese countryside and let them do their work. These compradors—men who worked for the European trading firms as purchasers, negotiating with the emperor’s trade envoys—were known quantities to Fortune; he had used them for the past three years of plant hunting and in his previous three years for the Royal Horticultural Society. He felt he could depend on them to find suitable experts and negotiate a fair price.
In imperial China’s millennia-long history, the country had never officially recognized emigration. Every Chinese citizen was considered both the subject and the property of the emperor in Peking, and consequently going abroad was viewed as a theft from the Son of Heaven. For centuries China had forbidden its people access to the ocean, even to fish. It was among the most important duties of local officials to stop emigration. The ban on foreign travel was both a functional and a foundational part of Chinese culture. The Qing court feared invasion and so prohibited any contact with foreigners. Laws prevented political contacts with outsiders; there would be no free marketplace of ideas. The law in fact reflected traditional Confucian values, which held that to abandon parents, connections, and ancestors was a shameful act.
Despite the Chinese government’s prohibition on emigration, a vast and thriving trade in sending Chinese workers abroad had developed during the late Qing empire. As the African slave trade wound down in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the coolie trade replaced it on the global exchange in cheap labor. When the traffic in African slaves officially ended for Britain in 1833, the empire was unable to find workers for its sugar colonies. The cost of abolition was high for Britain and showed up on the balance sheets of its merchant ships; simply stated, bodies were needed to fill a production gap. By midcentury, the discovery of gold in Australia and California had lured thousands of Chinese who could no longer eke out a living on the land as famines and floods devastated China. In the first few years of the American gold rush, some twenty-five thousand Chinese coolies would emigrate across the Pacific to California. By 1870, two million Chinese had found their way across the globe.
All too often, though, the only difference between an African slave and a Chinese coolie was that the Chinese possessed a contract.
“For Sale: A Chinese girl with two daughters, one of 12-13 years and the other of 5-6, useful for whatever you may desire. Also one mule,” read a typical handbill at the time.
Coolies were enticed into coolie-ticket contracts by brokers using all manner of duplicity. Some were seduced by fantastic stories
of the promised land to which they were heading, embellished with promises of free clothing, food, lodging, travel, and a fortune to be made. Some coolies signed on to repay their gambling debts. Others were sold by their families in the aftermath of clan wars, abducted as pirate bounty, or kidnapped in the middle of the night by crimps—thieves who dealt in human flesh. (The term “shanghaied” comes from the fact that many coolies were drugged, stolen, and shipped off to the flesh markets of Shanghai to be traded as chattel.) All coolie immigrants were put into holding pens called barracoons; they would wait there, locked up for months, until a full shipload was ready for dispatch to the New World.
The ship quarters for coolies were nearly as cramped as those on the African slave ships. A coolie’s queue was cut off as a sign of his obedience to his new master, symbolically severing the ties of fealty to the emperor. His clothing was burned on arrival in Shanghai—he was charged for the cost of replacements—and he was then scrubbed with straw brooms to eradicate any lice and vermin he might have brought with him from his home. Once aboard ship the men stayed belowdecks and were seldom allowed—and were often incapable of coming—topside to breathe fresh air for the many months of travel required to reach the New World. The coolie ships were consequently hotbeds of dysentery, disease, and death.
Not surprisingly, under such conditions coolie mutinies were routine. In 1852, the Robert Browne sailed from Amoy for San Francisco with as many as 475 coolies on board. Once at sea and confined to the hold, the men were forced to sign contracts of labor; those who refused to cooperate were flogged. When the group’s health began to deteriorate, the crew simply threw the sick and dying overboard. Nine days out of port, a mutiny erupted. The captain, two officers, four crew members, and ten Chinese died in the fracas. Days later, the ship put in at the Yaeyama Islands of Okinawa. The coolies were put ashore or escaped—there are several versions of the story, some of which were recounted under torture—and the Robert Browne returned to China empty, ready for another load of wretched human cargo. The coolies stranded in Okinawa later found their way to Canton, where they told their stories to missionaries and sympathetic diplomats.
Both the Americans and British in Canton as well as the Chinese investigated the circumstances of the mutiny for two years. Should the mutineers be hanged? Did the crew members deserve such terrible deaths? No resolution was ever reached. The Chinese were sympathetic to the mutineers; some suggested seeking the remaining crew who had “kidnapped” them and beheading them. Popular sentiment was stirred up against the coolie trade in China, and locals agitated for a revolt, which would send the foreigners a message that impressments such as this would no longer be tolerated.
The British were naturally incensed that their citizens, the captain and crew of the Robert Browne, had met such a horrible fate at the hands of the Chinese. Britain wanted justice for the crew, but the Chinese bureaucrats could not allow an official investigation that would pronounce judgment on the coolie trade, for to regulate the trade would be to recognize it. And so, as with prostitution, neither the Chinese nor the British could publicly acknowledge that such a trade existed at all. With this head-in-the-sand logic, the practice continued entirely unlegislated for another twenty-five years. Officially there was no such thing as a trade in coolies; therefore, it could not be a problem.
It was in the context of this brutal and tumultuous atmosphere that Dent & Beale’s compradors went hunting for tea experts. These well-heeled middlemen of the coast spoke in pidgin, were loyal to the Westerners, and had been affiliated with the big merchant houses since their apprentice days. More important, the compradors maintained a rich network of contacts in the countryside. They could go where foreigners such as Fortune did not dare. They could purchase tea, porcelain, silk, and people—all at a good price. The compradors were the essential middlemen who made the China trade run smoothly, and they had been making a good living at it for centuries. Whether they were exporting coolies or tea experts made little difference to them.
Fortune was nervous about the way the business would be conducted, though. It would be improper for the company to be openly associated with anything as unsavory as the coolie trade, so all the contracts and dealings had to be conducted with the utmost formality and protocol. Using a comprador was a necessary risk; it kept the dealings one level removed from the British government, which continually worried about how such espionage would be received by the Chinese. “Being, too, a private individual, anything done by him to procure good men and tea seeds for exportation to India would not attract the attention of the Chinese authorities,” wrote the government in Calcutta. Working on Fortune’s behalf, the comprador was instructed not to cajole, caress, lie, trade for pirate booty, or buy an indentured tea expert. He could not conjure a story about a better life in a distant place to peasants already cast off their lands. The comprador had to be honest. He must also be secretive, lest factory owners learn of his plan and report him to local mandarins. The comprador would then be killed, and as a well-known employee of Dent & Beale’s trading house, he would tarnish by association the name of one of the greatest firms in the Far East.
But Fortune was even more anxious about importing “experts” to India who might prove to be really no experts at all. The comprador’s recruitment mission was thus doubly delicate. To entice him away from family and friends in China, the sums offered to a tea manufacturer had to be very great. Fortune’s candidates were offered a salary upwards of 33 rupees, or about $15 a month ($415 per month in today’s money) for a three-year term in India. Fortune’s men were intended to be of a “better class” than the previously imported manufacturers and would be paid accordingly, “for it cannot be supposed that men thoroughly skilled in the cultivation and manufacture of an article to which so much importance is attached as tea and also of which the Chinese to a man believe themselves to be the exclusive possessors can be procured to live abroad for the small consideration of [less than] 33 rupees per mensem.” The first two months’ wages were paid to each man in advance as well as a stipend for “diet money” for the three months of travel to the Indian gardens.
The comprador convinced his prospective experts that the alarming rumors they had heard about “buyers and sellers of pigs” did not extend to the tea trade. He assured them that as company men they would be treated well, as professionals. An entire industry depended on their knowledge, and in sharing it they would gain a tremendous amount of face. The tea experts would have not only their autonomy but also power over others: over brown people, over white people, and over entire hillsides and mountains of tea. In the new land the experts could grow tea the way they thought it ought to be grown. They would be assigned to different plantations and encouraged to compete against one another, to produce higher yields and better-quality products for which they would even receive bonuses from the government, “to encourage the Chinese to exert . . . the full development of their skill and knowledge.” Each season the manufacturer of the best tea of each description, green and black, would be publicly and monetarily rewarded.
Each man was presented with two copies of the standard contract, one in Chinese and one in English:I [Name Here], a Chinese Tea maker, hereby engage to proceed to [the Himalayan Gardens] to manufacture tea in the Government Tea plantations on a monthly salary of 15 dollars or Rs 33-2 commencing from [date] and I bind myself to serve for a period of 3 years. I further engage that I will [work] diligently as a tea cultivator or in any other manner in which I can be useful and failing any part of the engagement I shall be liable to pay a fine of one hundred dollars to my employers. I acknowledge having received from [Mr Fortune] on the part of Government an advance of two months’ wages or 30 dollars, etc, etc.
Witness signed in Chinese
The terms of this contract seemed to be generous enough for the time and the place, except for the provision of one of the clauses: that a man who earned $15 a month would pay a penalty of more than six months’ salary should he fail to perform his duti
es for any reason, including illness. As munificent as the company might have felt the contract was, the tea makers’ employment was unquestionably a form of indentured servitude. Whether or not the Chinese under contract to the company understood this aspect of their being hired is not documented, but the record does show that at least some of the early Chinese experts were displeased with the terms.
The Himalayan gardens had in fact already been employing a handful of Chinese tea experts, working for Jameson, the incompetent overseer of the government’s tea plantations. Many of these men had come from the disbanded Assam Company; others had been imported directly from China. “I myself well remember the arrival of the Chinamen . . . in June 1843,” wrote a government functionary in his diary. “Ten Chinese Tea-bakers amuse the puharree [turban-wearing] population by their strange figures and stranger propensities.” He notes that among the tea manufacturers’ peculiarities, at least in the eyes of the locals, was the Chinese love of pork. (The population of the western Himalayas was, by and large, Muslim, and pork was forbidden them.) However entertaining the locals found the Chinese, the company was greatly discouraged by their performance. Of the ten Chinese tea experts originally signed on, two had died by the time Fortune arrived in China. The rest were all from Canton, which produced a poor product by international standards. The tea makers were also, in Jameson’s estimation, disagreeable and stupid. “And so ignorant are they as to be unable to make the common Black Tea exported to Europe,” he reported in a dispatch.
When the company wanted to split up the Chinese group and disperse individuals to the many experimental gardens in the Himalayas, the manufacturers staged a coup, refusing to be separated. The Chinese tea makers also used this occasion to demand higher wages.
Jameson refused: “I communicated to them the orders of Government but all have refused to go unless their wages are increased and state that if Government insists on them going that they beg to tender their resignations.” This was characteristic of his dealings with the Chinese: They seemed simply to have forgotten that there was no way for them to resign or alter their contracts in any way without also sacrificing six months’ wages. The remaining Chinese manufacturers sought an increase of 7 rupees per month (roughly $90 in today’s money). “And with this increase they offer to enter on another engagement for three years.”
