by Sarah Rose
By the mid-nineteenth century, “tea in the drawing room” marked the first time that the ritualized notion of tea drinking took root in British society. Afternoon tea, which had initially been a ceremony in the higher orders of society, became a widespread custom following the gradual drop in prices. Teatime was a period of enjoyment, of visiting, of having a brief chat during the long hours between noon and the evening meal. The industrial revolution, which tea helped spur, created enough excess capital that Britons could finally enjoy the fruits of their affluence.
Today in the West it seems that a new study is released every day examining the health benefits of drinking tea—from its antioxidant and anticarcinogenic properties to its role in stabilizing diabetes, raising metabolic rates, and lowering the risk of obesity or boosting the immune system. Many of these claims might still require further scientific substantiation, but any regular consumer of tea will confirm that tea drinking increases mental alertness and short-term memory and also lowers stress. Experts are examining tea from every direction as a magic elixir for respite, recreation, and a better, longer life.
England’s great tea experiment in India was a phenomenal success. More people now drank more tea for less money. Whithin twenty years of Fortune’s theft of Chinese trade secrets, the tea trade shifted away from China to British dominions. When a single species was transported out of its native soil, the world was never again the same.
19
Fortune’s Story
To bring Fortune’s own story to an end, let us imagine a day at Kew, sometime in the 1870s.
Having sailed down the Thames, Fortune, now in his sixties, arrives at the gardens to pay homage to his botanist friends and colleagues—among them the current director, Joseph Hooker, the man once imprisoned in Darjeeling by the rajah of Sikkim along with Archibald Campbell. Hooker is a great friend of the naturalist who is stirring up the scientific world, Charles Darwin. Fortune has a lovely visit, chatting with other botanists about new discoveries, sharing memories of past scrapes, and counting himself—at last—a man among equals.
Given Fortune’s taciturn nature and his ability to keep his own company for years on end, he excuses himself from the distinguished gathering of other botanists after finishing his tea and takes a walk through exquisite gardens that once existed for the pleasure of royalty but are now, rightly, a hothouse of scientific development.
Fortune steps up to a great greenhouse, the Palm House, gloriously situated on a hill. Kew’s first director and Fortune’s former superior, the father of the current director, William Jackson Hooker, had the Palm House constructed with a roof 66 feet high to accommodate the great height of its eponymous tree, making the structure the focus of Kew. The tropical giants grow until they reach the ceiling. The all-glass Palm House utilizes the fundamental principles of Ward’s discovery, and its engineering is based on developments in shipbuilding: It is essentially an upside-down glass ship’s hull. Nestled amid the palm trunks are further examples of tropical imperial exploration—spices, fruits, timber, fibers, perfumes, and materia medica, the prizes of previous plant hunters.
Fortune wanders on, to a part of the garden that might have been his very favorite: the Chinese pagoda. The pagoda was built in 1761 for a dowager princess in the midst of a fad in Britain for anything exotic and Chinese. A Chinese influence has become popular in decorative arts throughout the country: in the furniture designs of Thomas Chippendale, in textiles, in fine porcelain, and in the Kew pagoda built of English redbrick. Fortune is reminded of China in everything he looks upon. And the pagoda, more than anything else, recalls his long years of travel and the images of a faraway country that still haunt him decades later.
In truth, we have no record of what Fortune experienced on this visit or precisely when it occurred. What we do know of Fortune’s adventures comes from his published works on China, India, and Japan, and from the copious records kept by the faceless, dutiful, admirable East India Company clerks. Although a great deal of the company’s archives were destroyed when the charter was revoked after the mutiny, there is, thankfully, an ample supply of documents in the British Library. However, none of Fortune’s private papers survive except his letters to others, such as those to Joseph Hooker, director of Kew.
Following his first tea trip, Fortune returned home to his wife and children—but only very briefly. He scarcely had time to write his memoirs and reacquaint himself with his loved ones, see to the younger Fortunes’ well-being, and impregnate his wife before the company called again.
Fortune’s discovery of the coloring of green tea prompted a change in the tastes of the British public. The unveiling of the chemical greening of green tea at the Great Exhibition of 1851 marked a turning point: Britons now wanted their tea black and only black. The tea makers Fortune sent to the Himalayas were versed in the art of green tea, but the results of his findings about chemical dyes so altered British tastes, he was sent out to China for a third time with explicit instructions to hire black tea experts.
Fortune’s next trip to China also included another form of espionage when he became a drug smuggler. While Britain engaged in thievery to build its own tea trade, China, too, was plotting its botanical thievery: It planned to raise a domestic opium crop to compete with Indian Patna-raised opium. Just as tea could find a second home on the other side of the Himalayas, Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, could be transplanted to the lush rolling hills of China.
In the years after the First Opium War, although Britain had won the right to deal opium in China, China’s native opium was busily supplanting this trade. China had exercised all its ingenuity on discovering less expensive ways to get its fix. The company, a dying multinational in its last throes, feared that China’s own domestic crop would one day squeeze it out of this lucrative market entirely. Since it had a prominent horticulturist already working undercover for it there, what could be easier than expanding his remit and asking him to obtain for the company as much information as possible about China’s nascent opium crop?
Fortune returned to the company the following high-risk and ultimately rewarding items:2 dried specimens of the poppy from which Chinese opium is made
1 opium knife used by the natives in collecting the poppy seed
1 paper of seeds of some poppy
“The seeds and specimens I send now will give the means of ascertaining . . . what those differences [between the Indian and Chinese varieties] are and whether they account for the difference in quality between Indian and Chinese Opium,” Fortune wrote to the company. Botanists in India soon studied what exactly those differences were. In his popular and scholarly published works, Fortune made no mention whatsoever of his opium investigations.
When the Indian Mutiny ruined the East India Company, Fortune found himself a new employer for a brief time: the United States government. By now his fame was secure, and his accomplishments were widely celebrated. He was the father of a whole new industry in India, and the United States wanted its own share of the potential wealth. It had been taken for granted that America was a coffee-drinking culture ever since the Boston Tea Party, when a gang of patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians threw an entire shipment of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor to protest the high taxes imposed by the British Crown. But nearly a century later the American government had, in fact, ambitious plans for tea. It was believed that the agricultural regions of the South would make the United States a viable competitor in the lucrative world tea economy. Fortune was asked to assess whether or not tea could flourish in the hilly and humid southern Appalachian states, the Carolinas or Virginia. Labor was still cheap in the South.
In 1857, the U.S. Patent Office hired Fortune to bring tea seeds to America, paying his standing rate: £500 a year and all expenses. Caught up in the frenzy of industrialization, the Patent Office believed American engineers could harness steam power to automate the processing of tea.
Fortune sailed for China again in March 1858, arriving in the Chines
e interior in August. By December he had ready two Wardian cases of tea seeds and plants for his American employers. After many years of trial and error he had become an expert tea hunter.
As soon as the cases arrived in Washington, the commissioner of U.S. patents unceremoniously fired Fortune, presumably in the belief that American gardeners could take care of the by now flourishing seedlings. Indeed, the tea thrived in the Patent Office’s gardens. By 1859 some thirty thousand well-rooted plants from Fortune’s shipment were available for distribution to plantations in the South. By 1860 the dispersal of tea seeds and plants had become a significant portion of the work of the Patent Office’s agricultural division.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the newly formed U.S. Department of Agriculture lost all communication with the areas involved in the tea trials. By the war’s end, without slave labor American tea could not compete with the lower overheads in Asia: The price of picking a pound of tea in the United States was six times that of tea picked in China. Although there were a few more attempts at establishing an American tea industry, it died stillborn. Fortune spent much of the Civil War trying to recoup his fee from the Patent Office—which, it seems, he never accomplished.
His final trip to the Far East, in 1862, took him to both China and Japan and was the only one he made as a private citizen, working for nursery firms and paying his own way. Fortune could finally keep for himself a share of each and every discovery and all ensuing profits. Japan, a previously closed country with a latitude similar to Britain’s, was thought to possess botanical prizes that would adapt nicely to the climate of England. Fortune benefited handsomely from his finds there; his botanical discoveries were embraced by enthusiastic plant collectors throughout Britain, and so in his final years he became very wealthy. Moreover, after having spent so much time in Asia, meeting mandarins and farmers, peasants and poets, he had developed a good eye for the arts and decorative objects of the East, which remained highly prized by the Western aristocratic and merchant classes. When he died in 1880, his estate was valued at over £40,000 (at least $5 million today).
Fortune popularized a remarkable variety of flora in the wake of his Chinese travels. The plants he “discovered” in the Orient number in the hundreds and include the bleeding heart, the winter jasmine, the white wisteria, twelve species of rhododendron, and the chrysanthemum. He corrected Linnaeus’s definition of tea’s taxa by proving that green and black teas were one and the same, and he improved the health of Britain by revealing that the Chinese were coloring green tea with poison. Fortune’s experiments with transporting tea seeds in Wardian cases also made it possible for many plants, inluding the great trees of England—the towering oak and chestnut—to migrate. Prior to his improvements on the Wardian box, many species could not be replanted in the colonies because acorns and chestnuts, much like tea seeds, simply did not travel well. His work made it possible for entire agricultural economies to find new markets in new homes.
But Fortune’s world of plant hunting was already receding quickly into the past. Once the Suez Canal opened, ships were able to travel between China and England in little over a month, avoiding the treacherous temperature changes of traveling around the Horn and minimizing the threat to plant cargo. Telegraph cables were wired from one part of the globe to another so that the improvisational bravado that marked his time in China faded away as information became more easily and widely disseminated.
It might have seemed to Fortune that all the grandeur of the earth had been completely cataloged and numbered. There was now new work to be done utilizing Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Natural history was no longer the mere act of classification; it became a hunt for the narrative of how species evolve adaptive characteristics through competition and natural selection.
There would be no more Robert Fortunes: The East India Company was gone and with it the institutional need for plant-hunting botanists. There was no longer any giant corporate monopoly willing to pay for research and development on the scale of the Honourable Company. Fortune had played his part on a grand stage as a younger man. In his time he had done his part to enrich Britain; he made it more green and pleasant still. So many of Fortune’s precious seedlings, so delicately packed and cared for in faraway Cathay, had found a home at Kew, under the shadow of the great pagoda.
By the time Fortune was an old man, the tea plantations of India had outstripped those of China, whose tea would never again be as competitive in the Western market. Fortune’s tea theft would continue to reap benefits: Tea would be brought to Ceylon, to Kenya, to Turkey, and it would be judged to be good and even excellent quality. When Robert Fortune stole tea from China, it was the greatest theft of protected trade secrets that the world has ever known. His actions would today be described as industrial espionage, viewed in the same light as if he had stolen the formula for Coca-Cola. Any number of international treaties now police foreign exploitation and protect national commercial treasures.
Today there is only guarded enthusiasm for the mass globalization of indigenous plant life. We know now that when species are brought to new habitats, where they may have no natural predators or competitors, they can overpopulate and decimate local ecosystems. Entire islands have been overrun as the result of the kind of botanical frontiersmanship that Fortune and his contemporaries routinely practiced.
Robert Fortune died in 1880. Little is known about how he spent the very last years of his life. For reasons of her own, his wife, Jane, burned all his papers and personal effects upon his death.
Acknowledgments
First thanks belong to my agent, Joy Tutela, who with grace and guidance helped me broaden a story about a gardener into a book about his world. Joy has fought for me, nurtured me, and put me in my place ever so gently. She and her colleagues, David Black, Susan Raihofer, Leigh Ann Eliseo, Gary Morris, Johnathan Wilber, Caspian Dennis, and Abner Stein, are the noblest, kindest, and, dare I say, the best agents in the entire world.
Warmest thanks to my editor at Hutchison, Paul Sidey, whose enthusiasm for Robert Fortune frequently outpaced my own, and to James Nightingale, Laura Mell, and Emma Mitchell. Thanks to the entire Viking team: Rick Kot, Holly Watson, Laura Tisdel, Meghan Fallon, Kate Griggs, Nancy Resnick, Jerry Buckley, Margaret Payette, and Paul Buckley.
Lord, make me worthy of my friends:
Weidong Fu is my honored teacher, translator, and companion whom I miss terribly. I can only hope this book is a fitting souvenir of our travels together.
Scott Anderson brought me Robert Fortune one very dark winter and, with bottomless patience and generosity, weathered my tantrums. He read every word of the text many times over and then told me, quietly, to make it better. I would not be the writer I am without him. Moe, Donna, and Kelly Anderson taught me to love gardens. Donna died before she could read this book, which owes a tremendous debt to her delight and skills in the garden. Every tomato I eat reminds me of her.
Kim Binsted is my fellow traveler. It is entirely her fault that I ever lived in China. She welcomes me to Hawaii each winter, no matter how tragic I become. I will follow her anywhere. Even to Mars.
Joel Derfner is the most talented man alive. A girl could not find a sexier or funnier companion on the terrible road to publication.
My first readers, Rachel Elkin Lebwohl, Victor Wishna, Saul Austerlitz, and Joel Derfner, provided my first moments of reward in three long years—in addition to sterling line edits.
Megan Von Behren was my genealogist, and Daniel Von Behren was my cheerleader—and I am thrilled to be their wife.
Much of this book was researched and written far from home, and I am grateful to those who gave me shelter and friendship in beautiful places. In London: Julian Land, Miriam Nabarro, and Coco Campbell; in Tuscany: Henry, Tory, Elizabeth, and Joe Asch; in Maine: Marc, Lauren, David, and Delia Laitin; in Delhi: Janaki Bahadur and Christopher Kremmer.
Other friends of Sarahworld who deserve a kiss and baked goods: The Magnificent Seven who ke
pt the wine flowing, Karen Bekker, Catharine Clark, Tammy Hepps, Charlie Paradise, Adina Rosenthal, and Shana Sisk. I have been blessed with wonderful teachers: Darlene McCampbell, Earl Bell, Richard Ford, and Alan Richman. Chicago would never be warm without Maria, Sergio and Pierralberto Deganello, Tino Palacio, Mindy Graham, Rosie Humphrey, and Burt Friedman. Hawaii would be warm but no fun without Jennifer Baker, Jason “Big Red” Jestice, and Walter Eccles. Charles Coxe gave me assignments when I needed them most. Laila, Talia, and Mia Veissid and their parents, Marco and Phyllis, cheered me through dreary revisions and continue to do so.
Special thanks to Barney Rose, Clare Hollingworth, Betsy and Jeff Garfield, Evan Cornog and Lauren McCollester, Stephanie Jordan and Adam Brown, Shai Ingber, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jason, Beth, Barbara, and Bill Myers, Richard Bradley, Elaine Land, Anita Fore and the Author’s Guild, and the late Gladys Kenner, who always said China was no place for a young lady.
Last, tea and I share a birthday: The first flush picking is celebrated on the third day of the third lunar month, which corresponds to the third of April (or thereabouts). If I have expressed that happy birthright, it is in no small part thanks to my parents, Helen Cohen Rose and Gerald Rose, without whom this book (and I) might never have flowered.
Notes
As this is a work of popular history, not a scholarly undertaking, I have avoided the use of footnotes and tried to steer clear of mentioning sources in the body of the text. Nevertheless, this is a work of nonfiction, and anything in quotes comes from a letter, memoir, newspaper, or other contemporaneous source.
I have relied heavily on Robert Fortune’s four memoirs, his letters to the East India Company, and other company documents housed in the British Library. Over five hundred books and documents were consulted in putting this project together. Each of the broader themes—Fortune, the East India Company, China, and professional botany—have been the subject of inquiry by minds greater and more learned than my own.