For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula for the World's Favourite Drink in Around the World in 80 Books

Dec 14, 2010 Kay rated it really liked it

Shelves: garden-botany, british-history-civ, re-reading, china, nonfiction, available-mcpl, india, exploration-adventure, espionage, commodity_history

First read December 2010. Re-read January 2023.

Since first reading this book, I subsequently travelled to China in 2014, visiting a tea farm outside Hangzhou. It was probably that visit a decade ago that rekindled my interest in this topic. But there was also a visit to a museum in Nanjing dedicated to the Taiping Rebellion, not to mention more reading about China, India, plant hunters, the East India Company, the Opium Wars, and assorted other topics that this pithy 214-page book covers.

So I' First read December 2010. Re-read January 2023.

Since first reading this book, I subsequently travelled to China in 2014, visiting a tea farm outside Hangzhou. It was probably that visit a decade ago that rekindled my interest in this topic. But there was also a visit to a museum in Nanjing dedicated to the Taiping Rebellion, not to mention more reading about China, India, plant hunters, the East India Company, the Opium Wars, and assorted other topics that this pithy 214-page book covers.

So I'd like to add now that this book was even more interesting and enjoyable to me on the second reading than the first. I highly recommend it to those who appreciate a well-written nonfiction book with a seemingly narrow focus but which, in fact, explains much about the 19th century world and resonates on into the 21st.

Well done, Sarah Rose!

(Original review from 2010 below):

"The Thrill to Conquer, but Politely"

The exotic histories of everyday items never fails to astonish me. Coffee, tea, salt, chocolate, tobacco, rubber, oil, opium, cotton, cod, spices, sugar: these stand out as some of the major commodities upon which empires have been built. Reading the exploits of intrepid botanists, who scaled mountain peaks and slashed through rain forests undertaking searches for new and useful plants, has long been a favorite adventure genre. Sarah Rose's "For All the Tea in China" stands out as one of the more entertaining entries into what might be called 'commodity histories.'

At the center of the tale is a trade balance: English (Indian) opium for Chinese tea. China had a complete monopoly on tea, a luxury that had become a necessity in British households. The cultivation and curing of tea was a closely-guarded secret, one which the British hoped to wrest from the Chinese, particularly as there was little to prevent the Chinese from growing their own opium, leaving the British with a potentially ruinous trade imbalance.

And so the East India Company, which marketed the Indian opium which was traded to China for its tea, decided to get the jump on the Chinese by stealing tea plants, seeds, and cultivation practices. They already knew that tea could be cultivated in India, but the native Indian varieties were far inferior to the Chinese product. When the Company first set out to purloin tea, in fact, it didn't even know if green and black teas came from the same plants (they did).

To carry out this project, the Company sent one man, Robert Fortune, giving him a formidable task: steal thousands of plants and seeds and ensure that they reach India safely; find out how tea is grown and cured; and last but not least, procure a number of tea specialists to be sent to Indian tea plantations to oversee production.

The felicitously named Fortune was the perfect man for the job: brave, resourceful, bold, knowledgeable, and unsentimental, bordering on thick skinned. His adventures in the interior of China, where he posed as a foreign mandarin and faced countless dangers, is the heart of the tale. Sarah Rose does a fine job of recreating the thrill of his discoveries, taking the reader along high mountain passes, into the lurching bowels of cargo holds, and through lush mist-laden valleys.

But she does an equally creditable job of explaining how vital this feat of espionage was in the shifting world order. It was, according to Rose, "the greatest theft of protected trade secrets that the world has ever known." Wryly, she notes, the effect of a cup of tea, which produces a mild lift in comparison to other stimulants, was in keeping with "Britain's reigning temper: the thrill to conquer, but politely."

And conquer they did. ...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Mike rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Good look at how England planned to break in to China and steal one of the world's biggest treasures of the age. Sitting here in Shanghai reading reports of State sponsored enterprises breaking into Google, I can only chuckle at history repeating itself, or at least rhyming. ...more

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