For All the Tea in China : Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula for the World's Favourite Drink

Robert Fortune was a Scottish gardener, botanist, plant hunter – and industrial spy. In 1848, the East India Firm engaged him to make a clandestine journey into the inside of China – territory forbidden to foreigners – to steal the carefully guarded secrets and techniques of tea.

For hundreds of years, China had been the world’s sole tea producer. Britain bought this gas for its Empire by buying and selling opium to the Chinese language – a toxic relationship Britain fought two harmful wars to maintain. The East India Firm had profited lavishly because the intermediary, however now it was sinking, having misplaced its monopoly to commerce tea. Its salvation, it thought, was to determine its personal plantations within the Himalayas of British India.

There have been simply two issues: India had no tea vegetation price rising, and the corporate wouldn’t have identified what to do with them if it had.

Therefore Robert Fortune’s daring journey. The Chinese language inside was off-limits and nearly unknown to the West, however that’s the place the best tea was grown – the richest oolongs, soochongs and pekoes. And the Emperor aimed to maintain it that method.