From the Archives: Industrial Espionage
Reading Sarah Rose’s account of how British botanist Robert Fortune smuggled tea plants, and tea workers, out of China in the nineteenth century, made me think about another case of materials smuggled to end a Chinese monopoly. This first ran in 2012.
©Trustees of the British Museum
The Chinese produced luxury silk fabrics for several thousand years before they began trading with the west. Scraps of dyed silk gauze found in a neolithic site in Zhejiang Province date from 3600 BCE. Silk fabrics woven in complex patterns were produced in the same region by 2600 BCE. By the time of the Zhou dynasty, which controlled China from the twelfth to the third centuries BCE, silk was an established industry in China.
Wild silk, spun from the short broken fibers found in the cocoons of already-emerged silk moths, was produced throughout Asia. Only the Chinese knew how to domesticate the silk moth, bombyx mori, and turn its long fibers into into thread. They kept close control over the secrets of how to raise the domestic silkworm and create silk from the long fibers in its cocoon. Exporting silkworms, silkworm eggs or mulberry seeds was punishable by death. It was more profitable to export the finished product than the means of production.
The Chinese monopoly on the secrets of silk production and manufacture was eventually broken. According to one story, a Chinese princess, sent to marry a Central Asian king, smuggled out what silk cultivators called the “little treasures” as an unofficial dowry. (In one cringe-inducing version of this story, the princess carried the silkworms in her chignon to escape detection at the border.* It was illegal for a commoner, like a border security agent, to touch the head of a member of the royal family.) A totally different tradition tells of two Nestorian monks who smuggled silkworm eggs out of China in hollow staffs and carried them all the way to Byzantium, traveling in winter so the eggs wouldn’t hatch.
However the “little treasures” traveled, the Chinese monopoly on silk production was over by the sixth century CE, when the Middle Eastern cities of Damascus, Beirut, Aleppo, Tyre, and Sidon became famous for their silks.
* Would you want these in your hair? Makes your scalp crawl doesn’t it?
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.
Happy birthday, Sigrid Schultz!
Sigrid Schultz was born on January 15, 1893, shortly before the world’s fair known as the World’s Columbian Exposition.
Sigrid spent her early childhood in an area with the evocative name of Summerdale, now part of the Edgewater neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. The neighborhood, located within the Chicago city limits, was largely undeveloped. There were four houses on the block where the Schultz home stood. Native prairie, rich with prairie hens, pheasants, quail and a riot of bright wild flowers, ran alongside the fenced-in gardens, creating a wild playground where Sigrid roamed in the company of three boys from the house closest to the Schultz home, protected by the family’s St. Bernard, Barry, who had served as her “nanny” since she was a baby.
The idyllic Chicago childhood of Sigrid’s memory came to an end in 1901, when Sigrid was eight. Her father moved her family to Europe following an important portrait commission. He intended to stay in Europe for two years. It would be 1941 before Sigrid would once again live in the United States, but she always thought of Chicago as home.
And there is no doubt that she learned things during her years in Chicago that laid the groundwork for her later career as the Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune: the importance of language, the power of hospitality, and the necessity of standing up against bullies and prejudice.
Happy birthday, Sigrid!