by Sarah Rose
If China was ripe for foreign incursion and a fertile hunting ground for botanist spies, it was equally a nation primed for threats from within. Unknown to Fortune, an insurgency was fomenting along his route. A charismatic rebel leader in the south, Hong Xiuquan, had seized the imaginations of China’s impoverished and bedraggled peasantry. As a young provincial in Canton, Hong had tried to gain acceptance into the higher ranks of intellectual bureaucrats by training for imperial service, but like so many rural Chinese, he had failed to pass the examinations. His impoverished family had sacrificed everything to pay for his education, and he had tried three times to qualify for the degree that would give him the social status of wearing scholar’s robes and receiving a lifetime stipend from the state. Hong was a Hakka, a member of an outsider race, one of the hundreds of ethnic minorities in China who did not enjoy the full social standing of the Han Chinese. The Hakka were rural farmers, their women did not follow the approved practice of foot binding, and centuries after settling in southern China, they were still viewed by locals as guests in the area. The magnetic Hong took all the disappointment and rage of his failure and modest beginnings and transformed them into a creation myth of biblical proportions.
After Hong failed the exams for the third time, he grew ill, weak, and fevered, descending into a delirium full of dark and wonderful visions. In his hallucinatory state he saw a dragon, a cock, and a tiger, Chinese symbols of power, aggression, and luck. He saw demons as well and the king of Hell.
A woman greeted him in Hell and called him “son.” She bathed and soothed him, wiped his brow, and cradled him to her bosom. An old man with golden hair and beard and wearing a black dragon robe identified himself as Hong’s father and commanded the young scholar to change the world. He handed Hong a sword and a golden seal and instructed him to cast out and destroy all the evil demon devils.
In the vision Hong saw another man, younger and glowing, who he learned was his older brother. While Hong would gladly have stayed with his family, his older brother was impatient that Hong should return to the world. Without his help, how would the men of earth be transformed?
“Fear not and act bravely,” his dream-father said. “In times of trouble I will be your protector, whether they assail you from the left side or the right. What need you fear?”
Hong awoke a changed man, although it wasn’t until he happened to pick up and read a Chinese translation of the Bible, which had been disseminated by missionaries, that he was able to make sense of his dream: It had been the Christian God who had spoken to him. The “older brother” in the dream was none other than Jesus Christ, which meant that he, Hong Xiuquan, a poor Chinese peasant, had to be the younger brother of Christ and, like him, a son of the one true God.
Hong shared this revelation with his neighbors and began to preach a fire-and-brimstone version of Old Testament Christianity. He baptized converts, called for a Christian community based on faith in God the Father, and demanded the destruction of the Confucian state and the demolition of ancestral shrines. He forbade household idols and ordered the elimination of ancestor worship. His followers were called on to shun opium, alcohol, foot binding, and prostitution.
Hong declared himself the Heavenly King of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. He raised a vast army of the Heavenly Kingdom, the Taiping Tianguo, foot soldiers to aid in God’s fight against the Qing emperor’s mandarins. His followers sold their property and earthly possessions and pooled their resources in a common treasury in order to bring the son of the one supreme God to rule over China. The Taiping religion was entirely new to China, a sea change from the passivity of Taoism, the conservatism of Confucianism, and the otherworldliness of Buddhist philosophies. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a radical call to arms. In the south, secret societies joined forces with the Taiping in hopes of bringing down Manchu rule. The Taiping wore their hair long in defiance of the Manchu tonsure. Their army had grown to ten thousand and would ultimately number some thirty thousand members, who would colonize much of eastern China. The Taiping rebellion would sweep through sixteen provinces and destroy over six hundred cities and twenty million Chinese people within three years. Unaware that he was heading into danger, Fortune made his way higher into the mountains, crossing the path of the oncoming Taiping army.
Despite the political unrest, the small towns seemed remarkably beautiful to him and were some of “the prettiest Chinese towns which I have seen . . . an English place more than a Chinese one.” His descriptions of the scenery became positively and uncharacteristically florid. The vales were “even more beautiful . . . surrounded by hills, dotted over with clumps of pine, cypress, and camphor trees, traversed by a branching and winding river, and extremely fertile. . . . The whole valley seems, as it were, one vast and beautiful garden, surrounded and apparently hemmed in by hills.”
In his sedan chair Fortune was borne up and around on the narrow gravel mountain tracks, every switchback leaving him teetering between the bare rock and the sky. The road was an almost superhuman undertaking, a stairway hand-carved into a mountain face. His bearers carried him straight up the high rock karsts; there seemed to be no downward slope at all, no lulls, no respites on the trail. It was unlike any other place that Fortune had known. “In some places the height was so great that it made me giddy to look down.” The valleys below were gray pools of mist. Every quarter of a mile or so the traveling group came upon a teahouse. To give his chair coolies a break, Fortune frequently stopped to sample the wares of the tea merchants, enjoying a cup of “pure bohea on its native mountains” and feeling all the more Chinese.
We find tea one of the necessaries of life in the strictest sense of the word. A Chinese never drinks cold water, which he abhors, and considers unhealthy. Tea is his favourite beverage from morning until night; not what we call tea, mixed with milk and sugar, but the essence of the herb itself drawn out in pure water. One acquainted with the habits of this people can scarcely conceive the idea of the Chinese Empire existing, were it deprived of the tea plant; and I am sure that the extensive use of this beverage adds much to the health and comfort of the great body of the people.
While Fortune enthused over the Chinese way of drinking tea, he was less willing to acclimatize himself to the dubious comforts of the Chinese roadside inns where he took up nightly residence. They were dark and tiny, not much more than human stables; their walls were blackened with soot and grease from the kitchen fires. Yet the trip was a pleasure to him, for by now he was so entranced with China that he took even the poor accommodations in good humor: “I never expected to find my way strewed with luxuries,” he drily observed.
As it had in the past, though, Fortune’s grand plan was complicated by the personal aims and scheming of his hired help. Despite Sing Hoo’s relatively elevated background, he, too, turned out to have an eye for opportunity. Fortune had intentionally tried to keep his luggage to a minimum—a few necessary items of clothing, and a sleeping mat—in order to leave more room for tea plants and seeds. Sing Hoo, on the other hand, had “a strange propensity of accumulating” unnecessary things.
“Everything good comes from Nanche,” he insisted while purchasing heaps and bolts of grass cloth. This household staple, used to cover dirt floors in peasants’ homes, was a few cents cheaper inland than on the coasts, giving Sing Hoo an unexpected business windfall—one that outraged Fortune, who funded their transport.
“You see,” Sing Hoo explained while conceding it was necessary to hire a coolie to carry their baggage, “we have reduced it so much that he will not have half a load. Now the carriage of this cloth will not add anything to the expenses, and the man’s load will be properly balanced.”
Fortune remained unmoved.
“Travelers in my country who have a goodly portion of luggage are always considered more respectable than those who have little,” Sing Hoo continued authoritatively.
His continual jockeying for self-advancement made Fortune feel badly used. He would never be at ease w
ith the Chinese penchant for personal gain; it ran contrary to his own sense of pecuniary propriety. Much to the delight of his chair coolies, Fortune often insisted on running ahead on the trail, to pick fresh seedlings, take samples of topsoil, and explore the mysteries of the ravines of the heights.
Bohea, covered with oak and bamboo, thistle and pine, was indeed a botanist’s dream. As Fortune wandered, Sing Hoo followed with the cases and trowels, digging up a sample of every undiscovered species and many new varieties of familiar ones. Fortune’s empty sedan chair soon became filled with clippings and cuttings from the hillside, but since these were far heavier than grass cloth, the bearers began to object; they were unable to make sense of their growing burden of “what they considered weeds.” From time to time a coolie would rebel, put down his load, and deliver an angry rant about the weight of the sod he carried and how unnecessary it was.
Any sympathy Fortune had for the complaining men was tempered by his enthusiasm for the hunt. He threatened the coolies and made promises to them, flattered and bullied them, bribed and intimidated, and offered bonuses for the increasing weight of his Wardian cases. He was resolute; the samples and herbaria were to travel with him all the way up Bohea’s mountains, back down to Shanghai, and on to Kew. It was only by “dint of determination and perseverance” that his plant haul was carried several hundred miles into the tea hills and out again in complete safety. These would be the first plants ever brought from China’s Wuyi Mountains to Europe.
After weeks of climbing, they approached the summits of the Bohea range, the high mountain pass that separated the interior Jiangxi Province from coastal Fujian. “Never in my life had I seen such a view as this, so grand, so sublime. High ranges of mountains were towering on my right and on my left.” Fortune was overcome as he ascended ever higher into the clouds and the bamboo forests at the pass. Streams trickled down the mountainsides, and waterfalls splashed into them, joining below to become the Min River that flowed into the sea at Fuzhou where the pirates made port.
The traveling band had arrived at the “gates” of Bohea, the limestone pillars to either side of the mountain pass. These karsts were forged by nature and then worn down by water over the course of millennia. Fortune stood at the gateway to the celestial tea country, beholding “one of the grandest sights” he had ever seen and allowing himself to muse for a few moments on its beauty.
For some time past I had been, as it were, amongst a sea of mountains, but now the far famed Bohea ranges lay before me in all their grandeur, with their tops piercing through the lower clouds, and showing themselves far above them. They seemed to be broken up into thousands of fragments, some of which had most remarkable and striking outlines.
Fortune was among the first foreigners to try to describe the grandeur of the Wuyi Mountains. For centuries learned Confucian scholars carved poems into the base of the hills, testaments to tea, the power of the Eternal, and the might of Nature. Wuyi Shan had good feng shui: good wind and good water. “At a distance they seemed as if they were the impress of some giant hand.” Fortune believed they were initially created by water “oozing” out of the porous rocks, forming natural carvings that were then augmented by “Emperors and other great men.”
They were now at the heart of black tea country, and tea farms striped every mountainside. The weather was fine, if chilly, with sunlight gleaming off the eastern faces of the karsts, tinting them gold, while their shaded sides were “gloomy and frowning.” Fortune’s mind began to wander. “Strange rocks, like gigantic statues of men or various animals, appeared to crown the heights.”
“Look, that is Woo-e-Shan!” Sing Hoo exclaimed.
Fortune recalled the sight of those hills with reverence: “Here I could willingly have remained until night had shut out the scene from my view.”
12
Bohea, July 1849
The day had grown bright and hot as Fortune’s exhausted chair coolies spiraled their way into the hills, following the narrow footpath to its steep, straight terminus in the sky.
“It is impossible to go any farther!” they insisted, so Fortune got out of the chair and walked ahead alone, climbing on his own for hours.
“Look!” they cried, forgetting their heavy loads and the rough trip, transported for a moment by the beauty of the hills. “Have you anything in your country to be compared with it?”
Indeed, Fortune had not. No matter how hot, uncomfortable, and far from home he was, or how unending the climb seemed, there was no hill or vale in the British Isles that could stand against the might and grandeur of the Wuyi Mountains. Because Wuyi’s tea leaves appear to bloom a purple shade and then turn red as they ripen, Wuyi tea was known in the local dialect as bo he, meaning red tea, which when anglicized became bohea.
As Fortune approached the center of black tea production, he observed that the plantations looked like “a little shrubbery of evergreens. As the traveller threads his way amongst the rocky scenery . . . he is continually coming upon these plantations, which are dotted upon the sides of all the hills. The leaves are of a rich dark green, and afford a pleasing contrast to the strange and often barren scenery which is everywhere around.”
Tea pickers were busy on every slope, gathering the fresh shoots. “They seemed a happy and contented race; the joke and merry laugh were going round, and some of them were singing as gaily as the birds in the old trees.” The pickers were mostly women, with broad straw hats shielding their faces from the sun and large grass baskets slung across their backs—and perhaps even a child slung in front. The pickers stayed in the fields from early morning through dusk, from April through October, picking each bush every ten days. A female traveler, who followed Fortune’s route in 1870, wrote:I am greatly struck by the number of girls whom we meet working as tea-coolies, and by the enormous burdens which they carry slung from a bamboo which rests on their shoulder. Each girl carries two bags thus slung, the weight of a bag being half a picul, which is upwards of 60 lb. Thus heavily burdened, a party of these bright, pleasant-looking young women march a dozen miles or more, chatting and singing as they go. . . . The tea-plantations are scattered over the hills, forming little dotted patches of regularly planted bushes. Here the girls and women are busy selecting the young green leaves, which they pick and collect in large basket-work trays of split bamboo.
Tea-picking women, the caichanu, were heralded in song and story as dainty, noble, and objects of romantic interest. China’s long history of politician-poets ensured that throughout the various dynasties there would always be some formalized appreciation of the beauty of these women and the harsh conditions in which they worked. A popular analogy held that the tea-picking girl had all the purity and nobility of the tea she picked, and contained in such beauty was hardship. Tea’s purity was personified by the virginal caichanu, and her diligence was embodied in the tea mountain’s majesty, for tea picking was dreary, soul-destroying work.
The tea harvest did have some advantages for the women of rural China, however. It relieved them of the solitary sphere of work in the home and brought them into the world. If a caichanu on a hillside was subject to the harsh light of public scrutiny, where her morals could easily be brought into question, the tea harvest also permitted her a degree of freedom. Walking the hillsides with other women, she could escape for a while the tyranny of a mother-in-law and the confines of familiar walls. It was this seasonal liberty—so contrary to Confucian notions of familial right and morality—that invited both the notice of scholars and serenades. “The Ballad on Picking Tea in the Garden at Springtime” goes:Each picking is with toilsome labor, but yet I shun it not,
My maiden curls are all askew, my pearly fingers all benumbed;
But I only wish our tea to be of a superfine kind,
To have it equal their “dragon’s pellet,” and his “sparrow’s tongue.”
For a whole month, where can I catch a single leisure day?
For at earliest dawn I go to pick, and not till dusk return;
Then the deep midnight sees me still before the firing pan—
Will not labor like this my pearly complexion deface?
Today tea plants are allowed to grow only to waist height, and each bush is “tabled,” a process that leaves it looking as if its entire top half had been lopped off. This makes for a wide, low base for convenient picking, and bushes are kept in neat, efficient rows. But in Fortune’s time they grew virtually wild over a hillside. Fortune was stunned by the sheer labor involved in tea picking. It was not the bending or the hot climate or even the high altitude that made the work so arduous but, rather, the sheer volume of tea picked. If the tea bush were a Christmas tree, pickers would take leaves only from the bough where the star is placed, the very tip, and perhaps from a few of the branches with ornaments on them. From each bush comes only a handful of leaves because only the two most tender leaves sprouting from the end of a branch release the gentle and mellow taste that becomes tea; the older leaves on the stem below taste harsh and sooty. A nimble tea picker can pluck up to thirty thousand tea shoots per day, which includes the time it takes to examine each shoot and make sure no stalk enters the mix. It takes about thirty-two hundred shoots to make a pound, so an expert tea picker might gather as much as ten pounds of green leaf a day. The ratio of picked leaf to dry is five to one, meaning five pounds of fresh tea leaves are picked for every processed pound for sale.
“The natives are perfectly aware that the practice of plucking the leaves is very prejudicial to the health of the tea-shrubs, and always take care to have the plants in a strong and vigorous condition before they commence gathering,” Fortune noted.