For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
- ISBN13: 9780670021529
- Condition: New
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A dramatic historical narrative of the man who stole the secret of tea from China
In 1848, the British East India Company, having lost its monopoly on the tea trade, engaged Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener, botanist, and plant hunter, to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China-territory forbidden to foreigners-to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing. For All the Tea in China is the remarkable account of Fortune’s journeys into China-a thrilling narrative that combines history, geography, botany, natural science, and old-fashioned adventure.
Disguised in Mandarin robes, Fortune ventured deep into the country, confronting pirates, hostile climate, and his own untrustworthy men as he made his way to the epicenter of tea production, the remote Wu Yi Shan hills. One of the most daring acts of corporate espionage in history, Fortune’s pursuit of China’s ancient secret makes for a classic nineteenth-century adventure tale, one in which the fate of empires hinges on the feats of one extraordinary man.
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(out of 37 reviews)
List Price: $ 25.95
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Review by Miz Ellen for For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
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Sarah Rose has rescued the aptly named Robert Fortune from the footnotes of Victorian obscurity and written an engrossing story explaining one of the great heists of history: how the British stole tea plants from China and successfully transplanted them in India. It’s a spy story for gardeners in which daring-do and botany coexist on every page.
Robert Fortune was the son of a Scottish farm worker. Lacking the means to get a formal education, Fortune learned his skills from practical apprenticeship and obtained a post at the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Chiswick. His skill at cultivating rare blooms from the Orient in hothouses earned him a ticket to China at the end of the First Opium War. His mandate was to collect rare plants and study the botany of China. He almost died there. As he lay gravely ill, the Chinese junk he was on was attacked by pirates. Fortune roused, rushed up on deck and organized a successful defense. The incident illustrates his courage and resource when confronted by adversity.
On his return to London in 1847, he wrote a book about his experiences in China that became a bestseller. When the British East India Company looked around for a man capable of penetrating into the interior of China and obtaining plant specimens and seeds for purposed tea plantations in India, Fortune was the man they turned to.
This is a fascinating book on many fronts. As a story of corporate espionage, it touches on issues of trade and economics that are controversial today. The technology used to bring viable seeds and plants to India is astounding when one considers that sailing ships were the transportation means of that era. A spotlight is put on the opium trade, an issue that still resonates. Sarah Rose writes with a lively, clear style that makes this a hard book to put down. I recommend this book to historians, tea drinkers, economists, gardeners and corporate policy makers. Brew up a cup and enjoy!
Review by S. McGee for For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
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Oh, how I wanted to love this book. I’m a sucker for books of this kind, that shed light on little known historical episodes or trends, whether it’s Mark Kurlansky writing about cod, Dava Sobel about the quest to solve the problem of longitude, or last year’s fabulous book about the production of the first map to name America The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name by Toby Lester. What all those books have in common is effortless writing that makes the in-depth research the authors did almost vanish (just as when you watch Olympic figure skating, you forget that it’s athletic), the ability to immerse me in another world, and a broader context. Despite starting out with a fascinating story — a disguised Scotsman trying to walk off with large quantities of China’s prized tea plants and tea-making technologies, so that England wouldn’t have to rely on the erratic supply from China but could develop their own tea plantations in India — Rose doesn’t really deliver on several fronts.
Most importantly, I was left puzzling over what appeared to be big gaps between the jacket description, which promised a tale of adventure as Robert Fortune, disguised in Mandarin robes, roamed the Chinese mountains in search of the tea plants, and the reality of the book. For one thing, Fortune’s Chinese expeditions make up perhaps only a third of what is already a rather slender book (my advance copy clocks in at 250 pages or so.) And there are big gaps here. Fortune disguised himself as a Mandarin, yet he didn’t speak fluent Chinese of any kind. Did no officials suspect him? Was there a tacit conspiracy to just wink at his endeavors? Had other plant-hunters in China run afoul of officialdom? With most books of this kind that I read I am delighted at new discoveries; this time, I found myself jotting down a list of questions about things like this which piqued my curiosity but which were left unanswered. In all, Fortune seems to have had a relatively straightforward time of things, given the difficulties of traveling in an unknown country with no transportation infrastructure.
That being the case, I was glad to have the additional material in this book, which roams from the new tea plantation in the Indian Himalayas to Calcutta; from discussion of new shipping technologies for fragile plant life to details on how to brew a proper cup of tea. But the jumps back and forth in detail — this book covers everything from the concept of plant exchanges as part of British colonial trade to the Indian Mutiny — and felt overly choppy. Meanwhile, details of life in the China through which Fortune was passing remain skimpy. Did he see or know of foreigners who had transgressed the emperor’s rules about where they could live? Did he worry about this? Did he encounter any Taiping rebels; what did he think about a Hakka would-be scholar calling himself the second son of God and Jesus’s younger brother? Did he try to get to some of the premier tea gardens around Hangzhou when his annoying servants directed his sedan chair through the city instead of around it? I’m going to have to turn to Fortune’s own chronicles to find out.
It’s a mildly interesting survey of what was probably a fascinating experience. It will probably be somewhat interesting to the casual reader, but there are other (and better) books about botanic adventuring out there, among them Flower Hunters by Mary Gribbin, Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants or The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession. If you’re interested in the general issue of adventurous plant hunters or botany, try these (or Anna Pavord’s new book, Searching for Order: The History of the Alchemists, Herbalists and Philosophers Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Plant World. (She wrote a very popular book about the tulip and tulip mania a while back.) This book had too many gaps for me to call it a good and compelling account of the times and the events, even though it has its moments.
A big weakness, already noted by others, is the absence of any kind of footnotes. These didn’t have to be numbered footnotes and could, instead, have been end-notes that don’t interrupt the flow of such popular and non-scholarly histories. But I lost track of the number of times I went to look for the source of a particular anecdote or piece of information, before recalling that there are no detailed footnotes. That would have been less of a problem if the narrative had been less choppy and thus engrossed me more, or if there had been fewer gaps in the narrative.
Rated 3.5 stars; rounded down. Recommended to general readers with modest expectations; this is interesting, but not a dramatic or exciting read.
Review by T.L. Walliser for For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
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Sarah Rose’s Book “For All the Tea in China” is a must-read. It’s a wonderful, entertaining ride into a lesser known chapter of history- how the British smuggled tea leaves out of China. The writing is terrific and it’s a true page-turner. It made me feel like a kid again when I used to love reading classic adventure stories like “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Around the World in Eighty Days.” I hadn’t found myself this excited abut reading a book in a while, plus many modern day parallels make Robert Fortune’s world of Industrialization and the Victorian Age seem not so very far away at all. I highly recommend this book as a great, fun, and fascinating read!
Review by Theseus for For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
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This little book centers around the odd tale of a gentleman by the name of Robert Fortune who, in the middle of the 19th century, was engaged to be a spy. His mission — to sneak into a section of China and steal the secrets of Tea horticulture and manufacturing.
His masters were the Britiech East India Company who were desperate to learn these secrets because they had lost the monopoly on the tea trade.
This oddball story of corporate espionage yields a fun, well-told, brisk book.
Review by A. R. Grenier for For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
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One thing that this book has going for it – and the only thing, really – is that the topic is interesting. I love looking at globalization from a historical perspective, and this does that. I do have a background in history – I am not an academic, but my undergraduate degree was in the field. As such, I was a little skeptical about her comment in the 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…” However, I decided that if she could pull off the story than I’d give her that it is in fact a work of popular nonfiction (even though that’s assuming that non-academics don’t want to know where she got her information).
The problem with this approach that I discovered shortly into the book, is that the entire work comes off as pure conjecture. On one page, Rose will note that there is little in the way of primary source material on Fortune’s life – that his wife destroyed much of it, if it ever existed, upon his death. There is no clear way of looking into how Fortune was as a private man. On the next page she’ll be describing how Fortune reacted or felt about certain things. Yet she repeatedly notes that there is actually no information to support how Fortune might have felt. How can you claim to be nonfiction when you are writing a story that is pieced together with your own imagination?
I suppose I could get past that irritant if the story itself was well written – but it’s not. The writing style is jilted and wandering with occasional side notes that are unnecessary. Overall, I would not recommend this book.