by Sarah Rose
Fortune’s Chinese body servant, “a large-boned clumsy fellow,” sat threading a blunt needle with horsehair. He slipped the needle beneath the hairs at the nape of Fortune’s head, yanking the stitches taut with every pull. He was sewing a long braid, black and coarse, formerly the pride of some peasant, into Fortune’s own hair. The queue, as it was called, hung from his neck to his waist as if it were his own.
Fortune sat stiffly but nervously, for although he had been in China for several weeks, his true journey was only just beginning. His progress toward the little boat had been efficient and swift: After speeding through Hong Kong—which on his last trip he had dismissed as a “barren island, with only a few huts upon it,” and now described as a remarkable British outpost of “palaces, and gardens too”—he journeyed by steamer to Shanghai, a city bustling with newfound foreign trade. In the British concession area there, on the banks of Shanghai’s Huangpu River, Fortune took up a brief but productive residence in the palatial home of Thomas Beale, of the renowned trading company of Messrs. Dent, Beale & Co., an old friend and intellectual benefactor to many British travelers in the East. Beale gave Fortune a free hand with his firm’s compradors, the trusted Chinese fixers who in the ports regularly matched the needs of Western merchants to the capacities of China. As the boomtown city opened to Western investment and settlement, these translators and profiteers served as envoys who could smooth relations with China’s business elite. While in Shanghai, Fortune hired two servants, collected provisions, ordered and directed the assembly of glazed Wardian cases, and planned for a trip that was in reality beyond the scope of precise planning. With little useful reliable information on the Chinese interior, Fortune hoped to determine where the best tea was grown and how to get there with the assistance of those who were familiar with the areas, and he had found it in his choice of servants.
These servants were his entrée into China; they would share the task of collecting the tea as well as, he hoped, of keeping him alive. He had hired two men from the most celebrated green tea districts in the vicinity of China’s famed Yellow Mountain. They would act as his interpreters, cooks, botanical collectors, body-guards, porters, and, most important, guides. The men divided up the traveling jobs roughly between those requiring intellectual skill and those requiring brute force. Fortune’s hairdresser, “the coolie,” whom his written account never mentions by any other name, was the human ox paid to move luggage from shore to boat and back and carry the heavy glazed cases on botanical collecting trips.
Wang, an educated man in his early twenties, was the more refined of the pair. He was raised on a tea hill near China’s finest green tea region, Sung Lo Mountain in Anhui Province. For generations Wang’s family had grown and picked tea, sending favored sons off to the cities of Hangzhou and Shanghai to make their name in trade. China’s population had doubled in the previous century, and there was too little farmland to support large families. Wang, like many provincial emigrants to Shanghai, was a natural middleman, crafty, seeking a cut from every transaction, and making a living in the gray economy of the newly opened foreign concessions. For Fortune, Wang would prove his value as a professional trip manager. He knew all the roads between Shanghai and the tea districts. As a born businessman he negotiated contracts with porters and boatmen. And as was common in China, he managed to keep a fraction of each transaction for himself, a practice known to Englishmen in China as the “squeeze.”
Of the two men, Wang had the advantage in Fortune’s eyes of being able to make himself easily understood, which the coolie could not. Wang spoke a language used in the ports that had been developed in the hundred or so years of the tea trade; it was a pidgin composed of English and Chinese, with a smattering of Hindi and Portuguese. Pidgin was at once comical and necessary to the white men who traveled and did business in China. While some words have made their way into the common English lexicon—for instance, “chop-chop” (quickly)—entire sentences often sounded as ridiculous as a nursery language: “Long time my no have see you.” “What thing wantchee?” With communication proving so difficult, it is little wonder that foreigners and the Chinese held each other in such low esteem. Wang spoke pidgin, which Fortune understood, but the coolie was in effect mute to his master because the low-born servant had not learned the basic foreign tongue. In addition, Fortune’s own middling Chinese, which he had learned from wealthy men in port cities, was almost incomprehensible to him.
On this mission for the East India Company, Fortune was going deeper into the country than any Briton had ever dared, beyond the reach of British influence. While in the foreign concessions of Shanghai, he operated effectively under the protective umbrella of British law, a quirk of the treaty that had ended the First Opium War. All Europeans inside the trade zone enjoyed special status; they obeyed the laws of their home countries, not those of China. The rule of the emperor could not touch them there.
On this journey far outside the treaty port, Fortune needed body servants more than he had during his first trip, because China was now a more dangerous place. The increased European presence on the coasts was fiercely resented by the local Chinese, and in the south angry peasants had begun attacking foreigners, holding them hostage in factories and hospitals, and sometimes killing them without reason. Rebels were taking over the countryside. The weakening court in Peking, humiliated after its defeat in the foreign war, had lost its control over local mandarins who tyrannized cities and villages with excessive taxes that rose faster than any peasant could conceivably pay.
As the West moved into Shanghai, the Chinese moved out—taking everyone and everything with them, even their ancestors, as Fortune noted: “Their chief care was to remove, with their other effects, the bodies of their deceased friends which are commonly interred on private property near their houses. Hence it was not uncommon to see several coffins being borne by coolies or friends westward. In many instances when the coffins were uncovered they were found totally decayed, and it was impossible to remove them. When this was the case, a Chinese might be seen holding a book in his hand, which contained a list of the bones, and directing others in their search after these last remnants of mortality.”
On the face of it, it seemed an entirely foolish venture for a lone European to travel to the interior of China—a fact that was not lost on Fortune’s servants. When Wang tried to negotiate Fortune’s passage with the junk captains in Shanghai, the sailors refused. Boatmen were regularly beaten and tortured for trafficking the waterways with illegal cargo. “On this account it was impossible to engage a boat as a foreigner and I desired my servant to hire it in his own name, and merely state that two other persons were to accompany him.” It was a shrewd plan, and Wang returned with a contract officially signed, stamped with a “chop,” or character-bearing seal. But as the traveling crew loaded the ship, the coolie, either from ignorance or malice, revealed to the captain Fortune’s identity. Fortune feared the boatmen would no longer consent to having him on board, especially after they had been tricked, but Wang assured his master that the trip could proceed as planned “if only you will consent to add a trifle more to the fare.”
Fortune was patient as the coolie attended to his new coif. A small blue and white tea bowl sat nearby on a dusty crate, and swirling its sediment of leaves, Fortune spilled the cooling liquid out onto the dirty deck. Floors were the place to toss garbage in China, it seemed, and he was consciously trying to behave in the Chinese manner to make his disguise credible. And so, in the Chinese way, he had warmed the porcelain bowl by rinsing it with the hot water. Green tea was not Fortune’s preference, absent the civilized comforts of milk and sugar, but he was coming to appreciate the custom of drinking it plain and unadulterated.
Fortune was a constant curiosity when traveling as a Westerner. To the Chinese, the Scotsman looked grotesque. He was tall, his nose was much longer than a nose need be, and his eyes were too round; although round eyes were generally considered a sign of intelligence, Fortune, with his halting
Chinese, would have sounded like a child to them. Even the simple act of eating brought him unwanted attention. “He eats and drinks like ourselves,” observed one member of a crowd, watching him on his first trip, Fortune recalled. “ ‘Look,’ said two or three behind me who had been examining the back part of my head rather attentively, ‘look here, the stranger has no tail’; then the whole crowd, women and children included, had to come round to me to see if it was really a fact that I had no tail.”
Not surprisingly, his servants insisted that they would join him only if he took steps to disguise himself upon leaving Shanghai. “They were quite willing to accompany me, only stipulating that I should discard my English costume and adopt the dress of the country. I knew this was indispensable if I wished to accomplish the object in view and readily acceded to the terms.”
The style of the day required that all ethnic Chinese men shave the front of their heads as an act of fealty to the emperor. The tonsure of nearly 200 million people was a potent symbol of the invading Manchurian court’s power over the individual. The Qing emperors used the edict as a way of controlling the population, of transforming a multiethnic, heterodox society into a conforming one. Refusing to be shaven was considered an act of sedition.
Having finished attaching the queue, the coolie now took his rusty razor to the front of Fortune’s head and began to create a new, higher hairline for him. “He did not shave, he actually scraped my poor head until the tears came running down my cheeks and I cried out with pain,” Fortune wrote. “I suppose I must be the first person upon whom he had ever operated, and I am charitable enough to wish most sincerely I may be the last.”
On that first day of his journey, Fortune reviewed the itinerary and the rationale for his offensive. The job would require several years in China to complete. To jump-start production in the East India Company’s tea gardens, it was critical that he bring back several thousand tea plants, many thousand more seeds, plus the highly specialized techniques of Chinese tea growing and manufacturing. He would somehow have to persuade workers from the finest factories to leave their homes and accompany him to India.
Before Fortune could identify the perfect tea recipe, however, he needed to obtain the basic ingredients themselves: the finest classes of tea that China had to offer, both green and black. To this end he decided to make at least two separate tea-hunting trips—one each for green tea and black tea, for the two were never grown together in the same region. Green tea and black tea required different growing conditions, Fortune believed. The best green tea was in the north, whereas the best black came from mountains in southern China.
Fortune chose to make the first of his trips to the green tea districts of Zhejiang and Anhui provinces. His second would not take place for at least another season, when he would go to the fabled black tea districts of the Bohea or Wuyi Mountains in Fujian Province, traveling as far as two hundred miles inland.
While black tea was the bigger prize for Fortune and the East India Company, given its popularity in the West, it was also more difficult to obtain. It was grown high among the fingerlike mountain karsts, where the thin air and chilly nights produced the richest oolongs, pekoes, and souchongs, the finest black teas in the world. It was at least a three-month trek south from Shanghai to the border areas between Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, a trip that did include the option of remaining out of public view on a riverboat while in transit. No foreigner, save the occasional French missionary, had been to the remote area since the days of Marco Polo.
The logistics of obtaining green tea were relatively uncomplicated by comparison. The districts producing the finest greens were easy to reach, requiring only a few weeks’ sail on the great Yangtze River and its tributaries. He had made similar if shorter ventures on his previous trip, traveling by boat until he reached a distant hillside and then wandering with Wardian cases until he had harvested his seeds and dug his fill of specimens.
On his first trip to China, Fortune had learned more about tea cultivation than any other Westerner. He had visited accessible green tea gardens near the treaty port of Ningbo in the company of the British consul. Two entire chapters of Three Years’ Wanderings are devoted to what he observed there about the growing, harvesting, and processing of the tea plant. Fortune had even brought back tea plant specimens to England’s botanical gardens, greenhouse shrubs that proved to be useful for study but worthless for providing any specific information about how tea came to be made. Fortune blamed the “jealousy of the Chinese Government” for his lack of knowledge, because the emperor “prevented foreigners from visiting any of the districts where tea is cultivated.” Chinese tea merchants themselves had proved an unreliable source because they were too far down the chain of supply to be of any use to a scientist. His living tea plants in English hothouses could not even settle the ongoing debate as to whether green tea and black were actually different species. “We find our English authors contradicting each other, some asserting that the black and green teas are produced by the same variety and that the difference in colour is the result of a different mode of preparation, while others say that black teas are produced from the plant called by botanists Thea bohea, and the green from Thea viridis,” Fortune had written. A second trip to China would enable him to finally settle the debate.
Fortune hoped to be the first man to successfully plant an entire garden of tea—an entire new industry—from foreign stock. To seed India with inferior tea was hardly going to make him a hero. There was no point in sending to India a motley assortment of inferior tea plants, as previous collectors had done. Fortune was only interested in procuring the most celebrated teas in China: “It was a matter of great importance to procure them from those districts in China where the best teas were produced.”
Fortune needed to be as precise as he could about what he had collected and shipped to India. Because he was a scientist, his work was only as good as his data, so he knew he had to verify firsthand his samples’ location, ecology, and cultivation. While it occurred to him that he might manage things much more expeditiously and with less risk if he sent local operatives to do the gathering and reporting—as the company had done for generations—Fortune dismissed this option, having little confidence that Chinese agents would be dependable enough to seek the best that China had to offer. And if he did not collect them himself, well, where was the adventure in that, let alone the science?
But it was not sufficient merely to send a shipment of tea plants to India; he would also have to ascertain that the tea he sent not only arrived safely but was transplanted successfully. Three years of labor in China would be for naught if his plants did not survive the journey and thrive in their new locale. To ensure that he received word of the plants’ condition as quickly as possible, he had to enlist the cooperation of the government of the North-West Provinces in India, to which he wrote:Having been appointed by the Honourable Court of Directors of the East India Company to proceed to China for the purpose of transmitting plants and seeds of the best variety of tea . . .
It is my intention to send down to Calcutta both seeds and plants by variety of opportunities and it will be of great importance if they are carefully received and forwarded to their destination. [It will] also be very desirable to have a report made upon the condition of the plants and seeds when they arrive in India which report could be sent to me for my guidance with regard to the number which it will be necessary to collect.
I trust I will be excused in making these suggestions as the transmission of plants is always attended with some difficulty. . . .
I shall be glad to receive any instructions which you may think it necessary to give me. These [can] be addressed to the care of Messrs Dent who will forward them to me.
I have the honour to be yours . . .
Robert Fortune
“Hai-yah—very bad, very bad,” the coolie muttered in pidgin, razor held aloft in his hand while Fortune winced in pain. “Very bad” and “very good” were the only English words
the coolie understood. He took a hot towel and dabbed at Fortune’s bloody scalp. The other boatmen sat near the barber’s chair, laughing and gambling, the clack of mah-jongg tiles punctuating their conversation. “The poor Coolie was really doing the best he could,” Fortune noted magnanimously.
His second servant, Wang, had procured for Fortune appropriate clothing: a gray silk garment that buttoned down the front, with a high stand-up collar; flowing trousers with legs so wide that two men might have walked in them; sleeves that hid his large gardener’s hands; and thin slippers, which hardly seemed as if they would stay on a man’s feet, let alone protect him from the muck of a city street. Over this he wore a padded coat that was sashed and had deep pouch pockets; it would prove invaluable once he started collecting specimens. It was, all in all, an outfit that any dignified traveling Chinese merchant might wear, inviting respect without attracting undue attention.
Fortune had neglected, however, to request an accounting of precisely what had been spent on these items. Chinese copper money amounted to fractions of pennies, and so Wang had casually pocketed the change unchallenged. The coolie, noting an imbalance in the accounts, was furious, believing that jobs such as handling money—and skimming it off the top—should rightly go to him, the senior of the two, rather than the upstart Wang.
The coolie accordingly tried to complain to his master, who merely laughed off his disgruntlement. His servants’ competition for favors made him feel safer; he hoped their bickering would provide a check on any notions they might have of forging an alliance against him. Fortune had assumed that they would be docile and willing servants, and he had given very little thought to them as individual human beings. He had not taken into consideration, for example, that the coolie would endlessly seek esteem or that Wang’s impulse to “squeeze” might grow insatiable throughout the course of the journey. Wang was already playing the game of translation arbitrage: All prices were negotiated on paper, written in Chinese numerals, which Fortune did not read.