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    For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History
    For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History
    For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History
    Audiobook7 hours

    For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History

    Written by Sarah Rose

    Narrated by Sarah Rose

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In 1848, the British East India Company, having lost its monopoly on the tea trade, engaged Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener, botanist, and plant hunter, to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China-territory forbidden to foreigners-to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing. For All the Tea in China is the remarkable account of Fortune's journeys into China-a thrilling narrative that combines history, geography, botany, natural science, and old-fashioned adventure.

    Disguised in Mandarin robes, Fortune ventured deep into the country, confronting pirates, hostile climate, and his own untrustworthy men as he made his way to the epicenter of tea production, the remote Wu Yi Shan hills. One of the most daring acts of corporate espionage in history, Fortune's pursuit of China's ancient secret makes for a classic nineteenth-century adventure tale, one in which the fate of empires hinges on the feats of one extraordinary man.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 18, 2010
    ISBN9781400185375
    For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History

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    Reviews for For All the Tea in China

    4.5/5

    17 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      It is a fancinating historical work about how the East India Company flexes their muscle with China and commissions Robert Fortune (a botanist of poor social standing amongst the Brittish Social Elite) to smuggle precious tea plants out of the interior of China where no occidental has been before. The goal to control the largest commodity in British History. He endures great risk and many obstacles but in the end obviously successful. Good flow and pace to the story.
    • 5/5
      Combine Wicked Plants, Salt, and Simon Winchester-like writing, and you will come up with a book like For All the Tea in China. This is a entertaining, if quick, read of botanical espionage and tells both how tea became a staple of England social customs and how it fueled the colonializing British Empire. By stealing plants and seeds from China and transplanting tea to India, the British shifted the balance of trade, furthered scientific methods along the way, and ultimately altered geopolitical landscapes and economies. It is also a story of the pluck and courage of explorers such as Robert Fortune who disguised himself as a mandarin and was one of the first Europeans to travel in and out of China's interior. Though there are occasional gaps in weaving the narrative, if you are like me and don't have the time or inclination to read more in-depth titles on the subject, then you won't be disappointed.
    • 4/5
      Oh, how I wanted to love this book. I'm a sucker for books of this kind, that shed light on little known historical episodes or trends, whether it's Mark Kurlansky writing about cod, Dava Sobel about the quest to solve the problem of longitude, or last year's fabulous book about the production of the first map to name America (The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name by Toby Lester). What all those books have in common is effortless writing that makes the in-depth research the authors did almost vanish (just as when you watch Olympic figure skating, you forget that it's athletic), the ability to immerse me in another world, and a broader context. Despite starting out with a fascinating story -- a disguised Scotsman trying to walk off with large quantities of China's prized tea plants and tea-making technologies, so that England wouldn't have to rely on the erratic supply from China but could develop their own tea plantations in India -- Rose doesn't really deliver on several fronts. Most importantly, I was left puzzling over what appeared to be big gaps between the jacket description, which promised a tale of adventure as Robert Fortune, disguised in Mandarin robes, roamed the Chinese mountains in search of the tea plants, and the reality of the book. For one thing, Fortune's Chinese expeditions make up perhaps only a third of what is already a rather slender book (my advance copy clocks in at 250 pages or so.) And there are big gaps here. Fortune disguised himself as a Mandarin, yet he didn't speak fluent Chinese of any kind. Did no officials suspect him? Was there a tacit conspiracy to just wink at his endeavors? Had other plant-hunters in China run afoul of officialdom? With most books of this kind that I read I am delighted at new discoveries; this time, I found myself jotting down a list of questions about things like this which piqued my curiosity but which were left unanswered. In all, Fortune seems to have had a relatively straightforward time of things, given the difficulties of traveling in an unknown country with no transportation infrastructure. That being the case, I was glad to have the additional material in this book, which roams from the new tea plantation in the Indian Himalayas to Calcutta; from discussion of new shipping technologies for fragile plant life to details on how to brew a proper cup of tea. But the jumps back and forth in detail -- this book covers everything from the concept of plant exchanges as part of British colonial trade to the Indian Mutiny -- and felt overly choppy. Meanwhile, details of life in the China through which Fortune was passing remain skimpy. Did he see or know of foreigners who had transgressed the emperor's rules about where they could live? Did he worry about this? Did he encounter any Taiping rebels; what did he think about a Hakka would-be scholar calling himself the second son of God and Jesus's younger brother? Did he try to get to some of the premier tea gardens around Hangzhou when his annoying servants directed his sedan chair through the city instead of around it? I'm going to have to turn to Fortune's own chronicles to find out. It's a mildly interesting survey of what was probably a fascinating experience. It will probably be somewhat interesting to the casual reader, but there are other (and better) books about botanic adventuring out there, among them Flower Hunters by Mary Gribbin; Jennifer Potter's Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants or The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession by Andreas Wulf. If you're interested in the general issue of adventurous plant hunters or botany, try these (or Anna Pavord's new book, Searching for Order: The History of the Alchemists, Herbalists and Philosophers Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Plant World. (She wrote a very popular book about the tulip and tulip mania a while back.) This book had too many gaps for me to call it a good and compelling account of the times and the events, even though it has its moments. A big weakness is the absence of any kind of footnotes. These didn't have to be numbered footnotes and could, instead, have been end-notes that don't interrupt the flow of such popular and non-scholarly histories. But I lost track of the number of times I went to look for the source of a particular anecdote or piece of information, before recalling that there are no detailed footnotes. That would have been less of a problem if the narrative had been less choppy and thus engrossed me more, or if there had been fewer gaps in the narrative. Recommended to general readers with modest expectations; this is interesting, but not a dramatic or exciting read.
    • 4/5
      This is a well-written, engaging piece of non-fiction. The author manages to convey the story of how the trade secrets of the tea industry were stolen from China and brought to India in a way that did not seem like a stuffy, boring history lecture. Although I generally prefer fiction to non-fiction, this was an interesting, well-researched read.
    • 3/5
      This could have been a fascinating book about one of the most economically impactful thefts of intellectual property in history, but unfortunately. it was a little too light on details and data to be completely successful. Though I enjoyed reading this book, it left me wanting more- more information, more details, more history. As the book itself was fairly short, it could have included more of that missing information to make for a more satisfying read. I expected the details of Fortune's actual adventures in China to dominate the book, and was disappointed that they didn't make up a larger portion of the narrative.
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful book tracing the origins of tea since the 1800s. The journey of green and black tea from the mountains of China to the slopes of the Himalayas to the common teapots in England is outlined in detail, thanks to the memoir and copious notes taken by Robert Fortune, the man responsible for not only bringing high quality teas to England but also for bringing back many flowering plants and hedgerows that are now found in many an English garden.For such a slim volume, this book packs a great deal of fascinating information. There's the journeys of Robert Fortune itself and his adventures among the Chinese during the mid 1800s, how he disguised himself as a mandarin to avoid hostilities, his brush with pirates in the high seas, and his experiments which improved the success rate in transporting delicate plants and seeds from China to India and back to England. In addition to this, bearing in mind the focus of this book being tea, we are also treated to an insight into the secrets of tea growing and harvesting, which had remained closely guarded secrets by the Chinese, until they were uncovered by Robert Fortune and smuggled out of China. We're even given tips to the proper way to brew a good pot of tea.Lest you think this is nothing but a horticultural lesson, Ms Rose, includes relevant historical notes on the Taiping Revolution, the Opium Wars, the beginnings of the Indian movement towards independence, Britain's economic and industrial growth and the smuggling of Chinese coolies out of China to other parts of the world. She explains not only what these events are, but what caused them and why they were important events. Robert Fortune's notes on the Chinese secrets of tea-growing and harvesting, in addition to his hiring and transporting Chinese tea experts to India, can be considered industrial espionage, for surely if he had been discovered by the Chinese government, he would have been arrested and possibly executed. Fascinating read.
    • 4/5
      Pro: I love the idea that an exchange of flowers between empires and botanists changed the course of history. This beverage, along with coffee, is so ubiquitous and woven into the fabric of our daily lives that most of us probably never stop to think about it. Especially not those of us for whom interest in it stopped right around the time some Bostonians got fed up and tossed it overboard into the harbor. But the story told here is fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. A good jumping off point to explore further topics like the Opium Wars, how industrialization in England led to such a fascination with growing thingsCon: I spent the entire time I was reading the book wishing I had scones and clotted cream at hand.