Product Description

Robert Fortune was a Scottish gardener, botanist, plant hunter - and industrial spy. In 1848, the East India Company engaged him to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China - territory forbidden to foreigners - to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea. For centuries, China had been the world's sole tea manufacturer. Britain purchased this fuel for its Empire by trading opium to the Chinese - a poisonous relationship Britain fought two destructive wars to sustain. The East India Company had profited lavishly as the middleman, but it was now sinking, having lost its monopoly to trade tea. Its salvation, it thought, was to establish its own plantations in the Himalayas of British India. There were just two problems: India had no tea plants worth growing, and the company wouldn't have known what to do with them if it had. Hence Robert Fortune's daring trip.The Chinese interior was off-limits and virtually unknown to the West, but that's where the finest tea was grown - the richest oolongs, soochongs and pekoes. And the Emperor aimed to keep it that way. In a Mandarin's dress, with a black braid sewn into his hair, Robert Fortune ventured deep inside the country, risking his life for science, adventure, and a place among the great plant explorers. From Kew Gardens to grimy Old Shanghai, and on to the remote Wu Yi Shan hills, Sarah Rose tells a true tale of pirates, rebels, subterfuge, espionage, and how one man triumphed over an exotic and corrupt Empire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40455 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
Rose's account is full of colour
--The Times

Review
Reshapes into gripping prose Fortune's own memoirs and letters ... An enthusiastic tale of how the humble leaf became a global addiction

Review
The best parts of the book are not the dangers that Fortune encountered, but Rose's assured, confident descriptions of the manufacture of tea. Like Fortune, the reader goes on a journey of discovery

Customer Reviews

A magnificent debut
Elegant, erudite, and entertaining, Sarah Rose's book is a wonderful evocation of a distant era of British colonialism, exploration, and intrigue. The discovery of the Chinese secret of tea cultivation by explorer and spy Robert Fortune (what an apropos name!) becomes, in Rose's skillful telling, more than a forgotten page from a dusty history book--it serves as a striking reminder of globalization's centuries-old roots. Sit down, pour yourself a cup of Earl Grey, and enjoy.

For the Love of Tea
Sarah Rose's refreshing account of a period of Sino-British history that is little known outside Tea Circles, is a joy to read. She likes her hero, Robert Fortune and has a love affair with Camellia Sinensis. There are snippets of information, so interesting, that one wants to make scholarly notes on the blank pages at the end of the book!
Rose's prose flows and the book deserves to be a best seller.

Tea-Big Finance and Empire Building
Dr Terry Jones (Cheshire/UK) 22 April 2009

For all the tea in China

Sarah Rose

The is an adventure story where one remains on the edge of one's seat will he make it especially after the first attempt to smuggle tea plants out of China failed because of lack of care of the plants.

One learns so much from the book. Yes part of the British Empire was based on drugs, the coolie slave trade, the fascination the Victorians had with exotic plants and the science therein especially if they could be turned into a cash crop. Above all the importance of tea to the British economy, not least because it diverted the populous away from drinking beer as a way of avoiding bacteria loaded water, since boiling water for tea did the same anti bacterial job. Coupling tea with sugar gave the British worker the instant energy buzz needed for operating the industrial revolution and boosted the sugar trade to boot. Hence the dilemma, what if the Chinese became self supporting in opium production thereby leaving no immediate product for the British to trade tea for. Hence grow ones own tea was the solution and hence the need to steal the very best plants from China. Key to success was the Ward glass case for safely transporting plants and germinating seedlings.