The Great British Tea Heist
Botanist Robert Fortune traveled to China and stole
trade secrets of the tea industry, discovering a
fraud in the process
By Sarah Rose
Smithsonian.com
March 09, 2010
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Great-British-Tea-Heist.html
[This is an excerpt from For All the Tea in China:
How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and
Changed History by Sarah Rose.]
In 1848, the British East India Company sent Robert
Fortune on a trip to China's interior, an area forbidden
to foreigners. Fortune's mission was to steal the
secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing. The
Scotsman donned a disguise and headed into the Wu Si
Shan hills in a bold act of corporate espionage.
With [his servant] Wang walking five paces ahead to
announce his arrival, Robert Fortune, dressed in his
mandarin garb, entered the gates of a green tea factory.
Wang began to supplicate frantically. Would the master
of the factory allow an inspection from a visitor, an
honored and wise official who had traveled from a far
province to see how such glorious tea was made?
The factory superintendent nodded politely and led them
into a large building with peeling gray stucco walls.
Beyond it lay courtyards, open work spaces, and
storerooms. It was warm and dry, full of workers
manufacturing the last of the season's crop, and the
woody smell of green tea hung in the air. This factory
was a place of established ceremony, where tea was
prepared for export through the large tea distributors
in Canton and the burgeoning tea trade in Shanghai.
Although the concept of tea is simple-dry leaf infused
in hot water-the manufacture of it is not intuitive at
all. Tea is a highly processed product. At the time of
Fortune's visit the recipe for tea had remained
unchanged for two thousand years, and Europe had been
addicted to it for at least two hundred of them. But few
in Britain's dominions had any firsthand or even
secondhand information about the production of tea
before it went into the pot. Fortune's horticultural
contemporaries in London and the directors of the East
India Company all believed that tea would yield its
secrets if it were held up to the clear light and
scrutiny of Western science.
Among Fortune's tasks in China, and certainly as
critical as providing Indian tea gardens with quality
nursery stock, was to learn the procedure for
manufacturing tea. From the picking to the brewing there
was a great deal of factory work involved: drying,
firing, rolling, and, for black tea, fermenting. Fortune
had explicit instructions from the East India Company to
discover everything he could: "Besides the collection of
tea plants and seeds from the best localities for
transmission to India, it will be your duty to avail
yourself of every opportunity of acquiring information
as to the cultivation of the tea plant and the
manufacture of tea as practised by the Chinese and on
all other points with which it may be desirable that
those entrusted with the superintendence of the tea
nurseries in India should be made acquainted."
But the recipe for the tea was a closely guarded state
secret.
In the entry to the tea factory, hanging on the wall,
were inspiring calligraphic words of praise, a selection
from Lu Yu's great work on tea, the classic Cha Ching.
The best quality tea must have
The creases like the leather boots of Tartar horsemen,
Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock,
Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine,
Gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr,
And be wet and soft like Earth newly swept by rain.
Proceeding into the otherwise empty courtyard, Fortune
found fresh tea set to dry on large woven rattan plates,
each the size of a kitchen table. The sun beat down on
the containers, "cooking" the tea. No one walked past;
no one touched or moved the delicate tea leaves as they
dried. Fortune learned that for green tea the leaves
were left exposed to the sun for one to two hours.
The sun-baked leaves were then taken to a furnace room
and tossed into an enormous pan-what amounted to a very
large iron wok. Men stood working before a row of coal
furnaces, tossing the contents of their pans in an open
hearth. The crisp leaves were vigorously stirred, kept
constantly in motion, and became moist as the fierce
heat drew their sap toward the surface. Stir-frying the
leaves in this way breaks down their cell walls, just as
vegetables soften over high heat.
The cooked leaves were then emptied onto a table where
four or five workers moved piles of them back and forth
over bamboo rollers. They were rolled continuously to
bring their essential oils to the surface and then wrung
out, their green juice pooling on the tables. "I cannot
give a better idea of this operation than comparing it
to a baker working and rolling his dough," Fortune
recalled.
Tightly curled by this stage, the tea leaves were not
even a quarter the size they had been when picked. A tea
picker plucks perhaps a pound a day, and the leaves are
const
