Robert Fortune: The British Spy Who Stole China’s Tea Secrets

This man, Robert Fortune, is said to be one of those who, in the 19th century, contributed to make Great Britain the world's greatest power. This discreet man, commissioned by the Honourable East India Company, is said to have simply changed the world by stealing one of Imperial China's most precious secrets. Many things were said about Robert Fortune, his boldness and the dangers he braved. About his crime, often considered as the first industrial theft in history. About the trades he witnessed that were operated by the British Empire to ensure its monopoly. Robert Fortune was at the heart of an adventure that changed the world. Here is his story. Here is his legend. Robert Fortune was a botanist and a plant hunter. He was the son of a farmer. He was from a class that typically wasn't given an education, but he was originally Scottish and there's mandatory schooling in Scotland, so everybody got an education. He had a kind of natural language affinity for plants and became a naturalist, which at the time was a very prestigious job. I think the moves that Robert Fortune made from place to place in his early days showed ambition and that he was taken on by the botanic garden showed considerable, not just zeal, but knowledge. He had a drive to achieve. I don't think you could have risen as far or as fast as he did in a society as regimented and rigid as 19th century Britain without having a great deal of determination. In this account of my journey, my object is to peep into the celestial empire. I shall have the pleasure of taking my readers to the Himalayas and showing them the government tea plantations from which much is expected and which are likely to prove of great advantage not only to India, but also to England and her widespread colonies. So the East India Company came to Robert Fortune. He had one quality that no one else in Britain had and that is he had been plant hunting in China before. He was the world's leading expert on the plants of China. Fortune was given a list of items that the East India Company wanted, but the most important item on the shopping list were the finest green and finest black tea seeds. So his job was to go to the best green tea areas and the best black tea areas, collect seeds, collect clones, and bring them back to India. The idea being that India would be a tea garden for the company and would save them from their own financial woes. Tea was incredibly valuable because of the markup. They'd say it was picked for a penny and sold for a pound. The trade with China for tea was a fundamental source of government income for the British government, both in the later 18th century and in the early 19th century. If next season nobody brings any tea from China, Britain will worry that they would have a rebellion. So tea was becoming something that of great financial and social political importance to the British government. Tea was such a fashionable drink in Britain and tea couldn't be grown in Britain, so where was it grown? It was grown in a foreign country. What could we do about getting it grown under our own control? East India Company was the greatest corporation in world history. It was founded in 1600, was chartered from the crown. Queen Elizabeth gave the company exclusive monopoly of all trade with Asia. It was owned by its shareholders but grew to conquer India and dominate trade in Asia. In India, by the beginning of the 19th century, it was a very huge enterprise. It would have over 150,000 people in its private army. So really at the pinnacle of the tea trade was in the 1820s when the company exported 40 million pounds in weight of tea from China to Britain. East India Company did offer opportunities from people from, let's prosperous backgrounds, to actually succeed, to engage in adventure, but also to make their own fortunes. On the 20th of June 1848, I left Southampton in the Peninsular and Oriental Company steamship, Ripon, under Captain Morrisby IN. Having shown that tea can be grown in the Himalayas and that it would produce a valuable and remunerative crop, the next great object appears to be the production of superior tea by means of fine varieties and improved cultivation. It was well known that a variety of the tea plant existed in the southern parts of China from which inferior teas only were made, that being more easily procured than the fine northern varieties from which the great mass of the best teas are made. I landed in Hong Kong on the 14th of August. Having nothing to detain me in Hong Kong, I took the earliest opportunity of going northwards to Shanghai. Shanghai actually was a little marshy village, so it wasn't anything important at all in Chinese history. China basically gave the British a settlement, a huge chunk of land, and say you go and live there and do business there. You really have to say it was the western merchants who turned Shanghai into what it is today. Having determined, if possible, to procure plants and seeds from this celebrated country, there were but two ways of proceeding in the business. Either Chinese agents must be employed to go into the country to procure them and bring them down, or I must go there myself. At first sight, the former way seemed the only one possible. Suppose I had engaged Chinese agents for this purpose, and plenty would have undertaken the mission, how could I be at all certain that the plants or seeds which they would have brought me had been obtained in the districts in question? I therefore determined to make an effort to penetrate into the Weichao country myself. No dependence can be placed upon the veracity of the Chinese. I may seem uncharitable, but such is really the case. To travel in China was extremely risky. Fortune had to hire servants, and among the qualities he was looking for were language skills. At the time, there was no single Putonghua. There was no mother tongue in China that everybody spoke. There were regional dialects that were almost incomprehensible to everybody else. So to go to the green tea areas, he needed guides who could get him there in their mother tongue. China's a very large place, and it's a very diverse place, and one way that the emperor had of making sure everybody considered themselves Chinese was to make them all dress the same way. This was the tanture. Men have to shave their forehead, and they wear a long queue. See, that's not Chinese. That's Manchu, but as a symbol of submission, you have to wear that. If you don't wear that, it's death penalty. So what Fortune did was he took on this haircut. It was the physical sign that he was a subject of the emperor. My servants now procured me a Chinese dress, and I had the ponytail, which I had worn in former years, nicely dressed by the barber. Now, he doesn't look Chinese. Yet, all it took was saying, I'm from a faraway place, beyond the Great Wall. Beyond the Great Wall was synonymous with being from the farthest imaginable place on earth. If he was from beyond the Great Wall, he was just a Chinese person from very far away. China, at the time, had a network of waterways, rather like highways, that just connected most of the inland areas to the coast. It was very easy to get around by boat. These canals, some of them were natural, some of them were dug by coolie labor hundreds of years before in massive state projects. The boat was strongly built, flat-bottomed and very sharp, both fore and aft. The tide and wind were both fair, so that we glided up the river with great rapidity. It was a beautiful autumnal day, and the scene altogether was the most charming one. Buddhist temples and pagodas were observed here and there, rising above the trees. It formed a striking feature in the landscape, and reminded me of the borders of England and Scotland. There were moments of joy for Fortune traveling in China, moments where he saw things that he thought were stunningly beautiful and exceptional, like any traveler. But I think overall he was fatigued and frustrated much of the time. He was alone, he had no one to talk to. It doesn't sound like he was happy on a day-to-day basis. Every now and then we came to rapids, which it took us hours to get over, notwithstanding that 15 men with long ropes fastened to the mast of our boat were tracking along the shore. Nothing shows so much as this, the indefatigable perseverance of the Chinese. When looking upon a river such as this, one would think it is quite impossible to navigate it, yet even this difficulty is overcome by hard labor and perseverance. The slow progress which we necessarily made suited my purposes exactly, and enabled me to explore the botanical riches of the country with convenience and ease. And for Fortune, time in the wilderness, time alone to look at plants and study them and explore nature, was I think his passion, his real life's work, was to be out among plants. And so these were moments of exquisite joy for him. He discovered a number of new plants that are very common in our gardens today. Every kumquat you see is a plant that Robert Fortune discovered. It's the citrus fortunae. Plant hunters were considered adventurers, but knowledgeable ones, people going out to risk their lives to find exciting new plants for people back home. They had the skill of spotting something different. Over 200 common garden plants in the United Kingdom were introduced by Robert Fortune, like jasmine, like honeysuckle, like the rhododendrons and the azaleas. I think the danger for foreigners in China at that time is becoming more intense. The rules were that Westerners couldn't go anywhere beyond the treaty ports without being at risk of their lives. On the evening of the 22nd of October, I approached the suburbs of Hangzhou, one of the latest and most flourishing cities in the richest district of the Chinese empire. The Chinese authorities have always been most jealous of foreigners approaching or entering this town. The river, Qiantangjiang, which rises amongst the green tea hills of Weichou and one of its branches to the northern side of the Bohia Mountains, was on the opposite side of the city between five and six miles. A chair was soon ready for me to proceed on my journey. Before leaving Shanghai, when consulting the map and fixing my route, I asked if it were possible to get to the mouth of the Hangzhou river without actually passing through the city itself. Both my men informed me that this was quite easy. After traveling in this way for about a mile and expecting every moment to get out into the open country, I was greatly surprised by finding that I was getting more and more into a dense town. For the first time, I began to suspect my servants were deceiving me and that I was to pass through the city of Hangzhou after all. These suspicions were soon confirmed by the appearance of the walls and ramparts of the city. It was now too late to object to this procedure. Hangzhou was the capital of the Song dynasty, one of the greatest dynasties of Chinese civilization. It was much more Chinese, much more cultured, had more intellectuals. So in other words, in Hangzhou you are easily recognized. Foreigners were not supposed to go there. Take things calmly and never lose your temper should be the motto of everyone who attempts to travel in China. These were the principles on which I generally acted, but in the present instance, I was not allowed to carry them out to the fullest extent. He was very nervous. He was highly aware of his vulnerable situation. You're really not supposed to go to Hangzhou. So you must have some sort of excuse and have Chinese people like a comfort door who can explain to local people, oh don't worry, we're coming from Shanghai, we have a letter from the magistrate of Shanghai, whatever. You could lie about anything because they wouldn't know. Robert Fortune was very lucky. Violence in China at that time was very random. It could happen at any time. So Fortune was actually quite lucky that he managed during those years to get through pretty much unscathed. He could have lost his life. My fellow passengers, who were chiefly merchants and servants, were quiet and inoffensive. Indeed, they did little else but lull in bed and sleep, except when they were eating or smoking. One of them was a confirmed opium smoker, and the intoxicating drug had made him a perfect slave. So opium is a tremendous problem in China. They're a nation of addicts. Every bit as much as England is a nation of tea addicts, China was a nation of opium addicts, and it was a much more destructive plant. Our best estimates are that about 12 million people were opium smokers in China in the late 1830s. The British began to encourage the cultivation of opium in India with a specific purpose of enabling their trade with China. Britain keep going to China to buy tea and they keep paying with silver. So they ran out of silver in the end by the 1820s. So they wanted to find out something the Chinese would buy with silver so they can get some of the silver back. What Britain's opium trade did is it enabled a small spark to grow into a big fire. The East India Company controlled the production of opium in its lands in India. It sold these at its auctions in Calcutta and ensured that this opium was then used to gain access to China. This was very clear, very conscious law-breaking of the highest order. The East India Company was clearly the biggest drug dealer in world history. The emperor sent a commissioner, Commissioner Lin, to Canton to tell the foreigners, please don't bring opium to China. And Commissioner Lin also wrote a letter to Queen Victoria about you prohibit opium in your own country. Why are you sending so much opium to us? Can you stop it? And of course the merchants can never stop it because it's all this money. So Commissioner Lin forcefully took their opium stock out of them and burned them. The first opium war really broke out in 1839. It was a response by the British state who sent in British forces to, in a sense, protect free trade. So you could say that in the end the opium war began because of tea. It's a dispute about tea. And of course China lost the war. Maybe it's the humiliation Chinese people suffered from foreigners, from the British. I think there developed a hatred for foreigners. The river Tiantanqiang, sometimes called the Green River, on which I was now, has its sources far away amongst the mountains to the westward. All the green and black tea comes down this river on its way to Shanghai. It was a matter of great importance to procure plants and seeds from those districts in China where the best teas were produced. And I now set about accomplishing this object. The boatmen amused themselves by yelling and uttering strange sounds. These were taken up and distinctly repeated again and again. The Chinese have strange prejudices and opinions about this place. They told me that the spirits of men after death often chose to dwell amidst this wild and beautiful scenery. And they said it was they that now repeated these sounds and echoed them from the far-famed Sunglo Shan, the hill where green tea is said to have been first discovered. For three days the rain fell incessantly. And it was also very cold. Sunglo Mountain, which in ordinary weather I could have seen from the windows, was now enveloped in a cloak of mist. And every tree and bush was bent down with heavy drops of rain. At last on the fourth day the clouds cleared away. The sun shone out again with his usual brilliancy. And the whole face of nature wore a cheerful and smiling aspect. It is exquisitely beautiful. It is so gorgeous. He gets to go tea picking in some of the greatest tea grounds anywhere. And it kind of makes the terrible time worth it. I was now out every day from morning until evening busily employed in collecting seeds, in examining the vegetation of the hills, and in obtaining a good collection of those tea seeds and young plants from which the finest green teas of commerce are prepared. I observed that the natives never took many leaves from the weaker plants and sometimes passed them all together in order that their growth might not be checked. The natives always take care to have the plants in a strong and vigorous condition before they commence gathering. The best part of the tea bush was the flush, the bud and the two top leaves. So in order to pick that it did require a certain amount of skill. These tea picking girls would pick 30,000 of those in a single day, which was maybe four or five pounds of these very light tea flushes. When she saw I was in earnest she went out to the tea plantations and brought me some young plants which she begged me to accept. I felt highly pleased with her gratitude and gladly accepted the plants which increased my store very considerably. One of the most important things that Fortune needed to bring to the East India Company was not just tea seeds. He needed the recipe for tea. It's not an obvious recipe. If you see a tea plant you would not know how to get that into a tea cup. It's not a pick and eat fruit, it's not an apple, it's a highly processed product. When the leaves are brought in from the plantations they are spread out thinly on flat bamboo trays in order to dry off any superfluous moisture. They remain for a very short time exposed in this manner. In the meantime the roasting pans have been heated with a brisk wood fire. A portion of leaves are now thrown into each pan and rapidly moved about and shaken up with both hands. They are immediately affected by the heat, begin to make a crackling noise and become quite moist and flaccid, while at the same time they give out a considerable portion of vapour. They remain in this state for four or five minutes and then are drawn quickly out and placed upon the rolling table. The object being to get rid of a portion of the sap and moisture and at the same time to twist the leaves. These balls of leaves are frequently shaken out and passed from hand to hand. Having been thrown again into the pan a slow and steady charcoal fire is kept up and the leaves are kept in rapid motion by the hands of the workmen. Sometimes they're thrown up upon the rattan table and rolled a second time. In about an hour the leaves are well dried and their colour has become fixed. They are of a dullish green colour but become brighter afterwards. Did Fortune think he was a spy? At the time going undercover, going where he wasn't allowed by law, I believe he must have just considered it the perils of the job and the way he got things done less than he was somehow committing this clandestine act. Whatever he took, I would like to call steal, it was to stop China's monopoly over tea and stop Britain's dependence on China. So in that sense it is theft. It's industrial and commercial espionage. So Sang Lo mountains were the fulfillment of the first year of his travels. Fortune considered himself extremely successful. He had plants, he had seeds, he had everything he could possibly want. He really thought it was a home run, he was going to give the company everything they needed, that this was all he needed to do. He was going to ship it off to India and the green tea part of his mission would be complete. Since my return to Shanghai, I had been busy getting the tea plants carefully planted in Ward's cases in order to send them to India. Tea seeds retain their vitality for a very short period if they are out of the ground. In 1849 however, I succeeded in finding a sure and certain method which will apply to all short-lived seeds as well as to those of the tea plant. It's simply to sow the seeds in Ward's cases soon after they're gathered. Nathaniel Ward invented really what's a miniature greenhouse which allowed plants to be brought from abroad in a way that's never been possible before. The Wardian case which was developed in the early 1830s was a bit like an aquarium but with a top on it. It was designed so that once the plant was put in it and was watered, the water would evaporate off the plant and would continue to hit the glass and then re-evaporate down, so it was really a self-watering system. The Wardian case meant that you could put your plants on the ship in the sunlight if there weren't a storm. The plants would then get the sunlight, would survive the travel, but would be enclosed and would be safe from danger in this time period. So he moved his seeds and plants to India on a ship and that took about a month. And then when they got to Calcutta, someone opened the boxes. You're never supposed to open them. They only work when they're really a closed system. And then someone watered them. And this is a problem. And then as the plants travel up into the Himalayas, the glass breaks. Of the many hundreds of plants he sent, he could probably count on a hand how many survived. And they were weak, and it was just, it was just a total failure. His first year was nothing but worthless. It gets very small shrift in his book. It's basically a paragraph. I can only imagine how horrible it must have felt. But for fortune, he just gives it a little bit of, and that didn't work. I guess we'll have to do a little more. He keeps a stiff upper lip. He doesn't give away just how devastating it was. I was not quite satisfied with the result of my journey. I did not like the idea of returning to Europe without being perfectly certain that I had introduced the tea plant from the best black tea districts of China into the government plantations in the northwestern provinces of India. At the time, the scientific community believed green and black tea were entirely different species. Confusingly enough, they didn't grow in the same place. Fortune needed to learn all of that. I made preparations for another and perhaps still more important journey to the fine black tea country of Wuyishan. Although one of my men had brought me a fine collection of tea plants and seeds from the celebrated black tea country, I confess I felt it would be much more satisfactory if I could visit the district myself. He is going to the heart of the thing that England loves most, which is black tea. And he is struck dumb by how beautiful it is. The far-famed Wuyishan is a collection of little hills, none of which appear to be more than a thousand feet high. They have a singular appearance. It appears as if they had been thrown up by some great convulsion of nature to a certain height and as if some other force had then drawn the tops of the whole mass slightly backwards, breaking it up into a thousand hills. Wuyishan is considered by the Chinese to be one of the most wonderful as well as one of the most sacred spots in the empire. It was really in Wuyishan where his breath was taken away the first time he beheld those beautiful karsts that rise out of the river and just the tea that's growing on the cliffs. He was completely taken aback at such perfect beauty. There is a tea shop for the refreshment of those who are toiling up or down the mountain. We stopped at these places on our way and refreshed ourselves with a cup of the pure bojia on its native mountains. There's a strain of tea there called the Dahongpao, the big red robe tea, that is even now considered sort of the most valuable tea or some of the most valuable tea in China. The tea soon quenched my thirst and revived my spirits and called to my mind the words of a Chinese author who says, tea is exceedingly useful. Cultivate it and the benefit will be widely spread. Drink it and the animal spirits within you will be lively and clear. So he was at a place where there was coolie labor moving goods up and down these routes in China at all times. There was a general sense not just in fortune but in China that coolies are not people as much as they are just pure labor. I mean they're almost like oxen. You treat them as you would, no one thinks about how many cows it takes to move something up a mountain or donkeys and these people were very little more than human donkeys. They were the trucks that moved the goods. Coolies is a translation of hard labor. It's been turned into a western word. Coolies, they have no land, they have no possessions and they sell their labor. Long trains of coolies were seen winding their way through the valleys, loaded with tea to be sold to the English and American merchants. These were views of China and the Chinese as they are seen in everyday life. In the distance they resembled a colony of ants on the move. However numerous the coolies or however good the road, I never observed any two of them walking abreast as people do in other countries. Crossing these mountains is no child's play. In calculating my distances I had not taken into consideration the many hills and mountains we had to cross on our way, which not only impeded our progress but made the road much longer than it appeared on the map. I was hot, thirsty and weary after ascending the hill under a stifling heat and I begged to be accommodated with food and lodgings. We intended to take up our quarters in one of the principal temples near the top. The Buddhist priesthood seem always to have selected the most beautiful spots for the erection of their temples and dwellings. He's welcomed into this tea district. This was not a place where he was threatened. It was probably a moment where he was perhaps safest in all of China. In truth the good priests seem to pay more attention to the cultivation and manufacture of tea than to the rights of their peculiar faith. Rather like the Burgundian monks who let us know where all the great planting grounds are and wrote it down and kept great notes century after century so that we're still getting the best wine out of the same hillsides that we were getting wonderful wine out of a thousand years ago. Tea had the same kind of provenance. The same hillsides produced the most wonderful terroir and they produced the best tea and the monks were the ones who preserved that knowledge. Tea is considered a kind of essential part of meditation. It is calming. It helps you focus. So it was very integrated into the monks spiritual practice as well as their daily life. They would also sell it and it would support their There are many myths about how tea came to be that are Buddhist myths. The Buddha was trying to concentrate. He was going to pray without ceasing and he fell asleep and he was so angry at himself that he ripped his eyelids out in frustration and everywhere he threw his eyelid a tea plant grew up and so tea became this symbol of how we can stay alert and stay awake and concentrate on the divine. The character for tea, cha, really only came around in the time of the Tang dynasty, the ninth century. Tea up until that time did not have its own Chinese character. Many other characters had been used to represent tea. When it became so popular, well at that point it was decided it needed its own character. The character cha would be written with a grass radical on top followed by a ren which means person and then underneath a tree. Grass, human, tree. Those three elements symbolize the harmony between man and nature. I now bade farewell to the far certainly the most wonderful collection of hills I had ever beheld. In a few years hence when China shall have been really open to foreigners and when the naturalist can roam unmolested amongst these hills with no fear of fines and imprisonments to haunt his imagination he will experience a rich treat indeed. He was the perfect man for the job not only in terms of science but in terms of his spirit of adventure, his ability to get his work done alone westerner in the interior of China. Everything had succeeded far beyond my most sanguine expectations. Nothing therefore remained for me to do except to pack my plants and proceed on my voyage to India. Now however having been on Weishan itself and over a great deal of the surrounding country and having dried specimens of all these plants before me I believe that the Weishan plant is closely allied to the Thea viridis and originally identical with that species but slightly altered by climate. The plants of Weichou and Wuyi are the same species. Thea boea too may have originally sprung from one and the same species. On the closest examination I was only able to detect very slight differences not sufficient to constitute a distinct variety, far lesser species and in many of the plants these differences were not even visible. Therefore I was induced to believe that the peculiar characters and chemical differences which distinguish black tea from green were to be attributed to a species of heating or fermentation accompanied with oxidation by exposure to the air and not to its being submitted to a higher temperature in the process of drying as had been generally concluded. The northeast monsoon was now blowing steadily along the coast of China. This being a fair wind all sail was set and in four days we anchored in the bay of Hong Kong. We had once went onwards in the steamship Lady Mary Wood and arrived at Calcutta on the 15th of March. Soon after my arrival I received through the lieutenant governor of the northwestern provinces orders from the governor general of India to visit all the tea plantations and to draw up a report upon their condition and future prospects. Mr Lauva the commissioner had received instructions and appeared most anxious that everything should be done to ensure the speedy and safe arrival of the men and the plants. I proceed onwards on the 25th of March in one of the small river steamers as far as Allahabad. On the evening of the 19th I left Allahabad in a government carriage to Sahara Nepal. As I turned to look on this strange and wonderful scenery the snowy mountains lay before me in all their grandeur and the sun was shining on them. To say that they rose far above the clouds conveys no idea of their height for I was above the clouds on the spot where I stood. The whole idea of growing tea in India didn't start with fortune it was already had been going on for a while that was one of the reasons fortune was called in to sort of carry the ball forward on to the next level. As a result of this mission nearly 20,000 plants from the best black and green tea countries of central China have been introduced to the Himalayas. Six first-rate manufacturers, two lead men and a large supply of implements from the celebrated Wee Chor districts were also brought and safely located on the government plantations in the hills. I mean Robert Fortune is the father of modern tea plantations outside of China. Every cup of tea you drink pretty much owes a debt to Robert Fortune in some way. He is the man who started the global tea economy and the way plants reproduce it's possible even that some clones of Fortune's tea exist now in the Himalayas. The theft of tea clearly had consequences both in China and overseas. I mean paradoxically in China clearly it was the the breaking of this monopoly that China had of the production of tea and it sort of contributed to that that decline which China was undergoing really from the beginning of the 19th century. In the end it led to the rise of Chinese nationalism and to the downfall of the Qing dynasty. This theft had winners and and losers. Other countries actually could become producers of tea whether that's in South Asia and India and Sri Lanka or indeed in Africa and other parts of the world. There are hundreds and hundreds of different teas from all over the world over 50 countries produce tea now. In these days when tea has become almost a necessary of life in England and her widespread colonies its production upon a large and cheap scale is an object of no ordinary importance. But to the natives of India themselves the production of this article would be of the greatest value. The poor palliary or hill peasant at present has scarcely the common necessaries of life. Such a profit will enable him to purchase even a few of the necessary and simple luxuries of life and the instruction of the natives is one of the chief objects which ought to be kept in view. Robert Fortune's life was a tremendous success for him because he was able to retire at about 50 after 20 years of travel with a terrific reputation and one assumes quite a lot of money. As I traveled far inland and visited many districts almost unknown to Europeans I now venture to lay an account of my travels and their results before the public. Blessed with a sound constitution and good health I cared little for luxuries and made light of the hardships of a traveler's life. New scenes, new countries and new plants were day by day spread out before me and afforded gratification of the highest purest kind. And even now when on a different side of the globe and far removed from such scenes and such adventures I often look back upon them with feelings of unalloyed pleasure.