For All the Tea in China

A decade or more ago, I picked up For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose from the free box that used to sit outside a used bookstore down the street from my office.* And then it sat on my shelf, unread.

I will admit, it made its way to the top of the to-be-read pile recently because I was doing a lot of traveling and wanted something that was physically light but had some mental heft to read in route. It turned out to be a very good choice for many reasons, including the fact that the heart of the book was about one man’s travels through China in the 19th century. His travails made the annoyances of modern air travel look small indeed.

For All the Tea in China is the story of how the British East India Company sent botanist Robert Fortune to China in 1848 with the mission of acquiring tea plants and smuggling them out of the country. Their goal was to establish tea plantations in the Himalayas, allowing them to circumvent China, which was then tea purveyor to the world. In 1851, he made a second trip—this time to acquire tea experts to teach Indians how to properly grow and process the plants he had acquired. (Getting them out of the country was just as illegal as smuggling the plants themselves.)

Rose tells the basic story as an adventure, with overtones of the imperialist adventure stories I happily read as a child,** complete with disguises, untrustworthy local employees, pirates, and territorial East India Company agents. She uses that story as a framework for discussing the role of botany in general and tea in particualar in the growth of the British Empire, the details of tea production, and the tea trade in Britain. She makes interesting side trips into subjects like Linnaeus’s classification system,*** Wardian cases (what we known as terrariums),  and ship building.

Well worth the read, with or without a mug of tea at hand.

*That box was a treasure trove. For years I checked it almost every day and scored some wonderful things, including a 1913 edition of the unabridged Funk & Wagnalls that holds a place of honor in my study.

**Oh all right, I still read them on occasion. But now I am aware of the problematic elements that escaped me when I first discovered them.

***Which led me into a side trip of my own as I realized that I had put Carl Linneaus in the wrong century in my mental chronology of the world.

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