Did you know about the Great Tea Heist?

A cup of tea might be a regular aspect of our lives, but did you know it was heisted? Next time when you are about to enjoy a cup of tea, you might want to take a moment to think about the undercover plant hunter and treachery that led to the contents of your cup.

In this blog, let’s explore the story of one of the biggest heists in the world.

We now know about the tea plantations in India and other parts of the world, but this was only due to the actions of Robert Fortune. Before then, China was the only nation with both the plants and knowledge on how to manufacture tea.

Robert Fortune was born in the early 1800s near Glasgow to a working-class family. From an early age, he was interested in botany, which eventually led him to take up a senior post at the Horticultural Society in London.

In 1847, he published a book, Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk, and Cotton Countries, published in London, about his three years of exploration and plant hunting in the tea-growing provinces of China.

On his first trip, Fortune expected to find identifiable black tea plants in black tea gardens. He discovered that the tea plants there looked just like the green tea plants in the green tea gardens. Over the course of that first three-year visit, when securing several tea samples and thoroughly examining them, he had concluded that any difference between green tea and black was the result of the processing alone. Black tea is fermented; green tea is not. To make black tea, the leaves are allowed to sit in the sun for an entire day to oxidize and wilt, basically to spoil a little. After the first twelve hours of stewing, black tea is turned, the liquor is stirred around, and the mixture is left to cure for another twelve hours. This longer curing process develops black tea’s tannins, its strong bitter flavour, and its dark colour. Although it is called fermenting, the process of producing black tea is technically incorrectly named. Nothing ferments in a chemical sense; there are no microorganisms breaking down sugars into alcohol and gas. Black tea is, rather, cured or ripened. But the language of wine colours the language of all beverages, and so the label of “fermentation” has stuck to black tea.

The East India Company had been impressed by Fortune’s account of his first expedition. The company believed that if the finest tea seedlings could be obtained, together with the secrets of production, from the hinterland of China, it could grow precious tea in the British colony of India and control a trade that dominated 19th-century economics.

The East India Company issued Robert with his mission impossible in May 1848. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse; £500 per annum, which was five times his existing salary. He was also granted the commercial rights to any plants he may acquire along the way, which would have been a valuable perk, allowing him to service the lucrative market among England’s aristocratic elite for amateur horticultural collections and exotic gardens. The company was only interested in tea.

“The task required a plant hunter, a gardener, a thief, a spy,” writes Sarah Rose, in her award-winning book, For All the Tea in China (2010), which records Fortune’s great British tea heist.

“I think that’s a fair description of him but, without question, he didn’t think he was stealing,” says Rose, who lived and worked in Hong Kong for 2½ years in the late 1990s and is now based in New York. “He would have thought the plants belonged to the world. The notion of intellectual or sovereign property developed well after his time.”

Fortune donned a disguise and headed into the Wu Si Shan hills in a bold act of corporate espionage. With his servant, Wang walking five paces ahead to announce his arrival, Robert Fortune, dressed in his mandarin garb, entered the gates of a green tea factory. Would the master of the factory allow an inspection from a visitor, an honoured and wise official who had travelled from afar province to see how such glorious tea was made?

“I am Chinese from a distant province beyond the Great Wall,” he would assure local folk in faltering Chinese. The factory superintendent nodded politely and led them into a large building with peeling grey stucco walls. Beyond it lay courtyards, open workspaces, and storerooms. It was warm and dry, full of workers manufacturing the last of the season’s crop, and the woody smell of green tea hung in the air. This factory was a place of established ceremony, where tea was prepared for export through the large tea distributors in Canton and the burgeoning tea trade in Shanghai.

Although the concept of tea is simple — dry leaf infused in hot water; its manufacturing is not intuitive at all. Tea is a highly processed product. At the time of Fortune’s visit, the recipe for tea had remained unchanged for two thousand years, and Europe had been addicted to it for at least two hundred of them. But few in Britain’s dominions had any first-hand or even second-hand information about the production of tea before it went into the pot.

Robert’s task was not only to bring in tea seeds but also to learn the procedure for manufacturing tea. From the picking to the brewing there was a great deal of factory work involved: drying, firing, rolling, and, for black tea, fermenting. He had explicit instructions from the East India Company to discover everything he could: “Besides the collection of tea plants and seeds from the best localities for transmission to India, it will be your duty to avail yourself of every opportunity of acquiring information as to the cultivation of the tea plant and the manufacture of tea as practised by the Chinese and on all other points with which it may be desirable that those entrusted with the superintendence of the tea nurseries in India should be made acquainted.”

But the recipe for the tea was a closely guarded state secret.

At the entry of the tea factory, hanging on the wall, was a selection from Lu Yu’s great work on tea, the classic Cha-Ching.

The best quality tea must have

The creases like the leather boots of Tartar horsemen,

Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock,

Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine,

Gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr,

And be wet and soft like

Earth newly swept by rain.

In the factory, Robert learnt about the complicated manufacturing process of tea. This included the conditions under which the tea plants needed to be picked, cooked, and dried. He had to be careful not to draw any attention to himself, so he walked around the factory and took notes covertly.

The Complex Manufacturing Process

Proceeding further into the courtyard, Fortune found fresh tea set to dry on large woven rattan plates, each the size of a kitchen table. The sun beat down on the containers, “cooking” the tea. Fortune learned that for green tea the leaves were left exposed to the sun for 1-2 hours.

The sun-baked leaves were then taken to a furnace room and tossed into an enormous pan. Men stood working before a row of coal furnaces, tossing the contents of their pans in an open hearth. The crisp leaves were vigorously stirred and became moist as the fierce heat drew their sap towards the surface. Stir-frying the leaves in this way breaks down their cell walls, just as vegetables soften over high heat.

The cooked leaves were then emptied onto a table where 4 or 5 workers moved piles of them back & forth over bamboo rollers. They were rolled continuously to bring their essential oils to the surface and then wrung out, their green juice pooling on the tables.

Tightly curled by this stage, the tea leaves were not even a quarter the size they had been when picked. After rolling, the tea was sent back to the drying pans for the second round of firing, losing even more volume at every contact with the hot sides of the iron wok.

With leaves plucked, dried, cooked, rolled, and cooked again, all that was left to do was sort through the processed tea. Workers sat at a long table separating the choicest, most tightly wound leaves, which would be used in the teas of the highest quality, the flowery pekoes, the lower-quality congou and the dust, the lowest quality.

In October, he inspected a green tea factory, witnessed the enigmatic 2,000-year-old manufacturing process and was able to reveal that local producers were falsifying their product with toxic additives to make it look more attractive for the export market. He explored three other green-tea regions, collecting samples, and making ample notes before returning to Shanghai in January 1849. From there he updated his paymasters in London by letter.

“I have much pleasure in informing you that I have procured a large supply of seeds and young plants which I trust will get safely to India,” he wrote from the headquarters of Dent & Co., his temporary home in Shanghai.

Fortune had collected 13,000 plants and 10,000 seeds. However, it was winter now. This was a challenge as the fragile and vulnerable tea seeds had to be transported to the upper reaches of the Indian Himalayas via Hong Kong and Calcutta. Fortune thought he may have a hi-tech solution to the problem: the Wardian case.

In the 1830s, Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward made a discovery to transform plant hunting and the transport of flora over vast distances by sea. The doctor observed that in an enclosed glass bottle or case, plants could be self-sustaining. In daylight, moisture from soil and carbon dioxide was used for photosynthesis and at night, plants emitted oxygen and released water vapour that condensed on the inside of the cool glass and dripped onto the soil. For the first time, botanists could reliably ship flora across the realm.

Fortune spent weeks diligently packing his seedlings into glass cases and tried numerous methods for packing his seeds before accompanying the entire shipment to Hong Kong, to ensure they were not mishandled on that leg. The onward journey, however, would be a disaster. If only, Fortune had known before!

Meanwhile, in May 1849, he headed to the more remote black-tea country of Fujian province. This was the key part of his mission; black tea was considered even more precious because it was more popular in the West. Often mixed with milk and sugar, black tea had become a staple of the new urban populations of industrialised Britain. No one outside the traditional tea growing areas of China had the first idea about how it was made until Fortune reached Bohea, in the Wuyi Mountains, in July 1849.

He returned to Shanghai later that autumn, only to discover the awful news from India that just 1,000 of his first batch of seeds had survived the journey and most of those were covered in fungus and mould.

Unflinching, the botanist decided to experiment with the Wardian case. He wondered whether he could place the seeds in the soil inside the case and allow them to germinate and grow in transit. The results were highly encouraging and precious black tea seeds were successfully shipped to India.

Fortune then supervised the recruitment of experienced tea farmers and producers who would manage production in India. When Fortune left Shanghai for Hong Kong in February 1851, with his mission accomplished, he was accompanied by a team of Fujianese black-tea farmers destined for a new life in the Indian Himalayas.

It may be partially forgotten, but his success in transporting seeds to India led directly to the devastation of China’s tea industry.

“Within a generation, India’s nascent Himalayan tea industry would outstrip China’s in quality, volume and price,” writes Sarah.

Chinese tea gardens became abandoned after the Dutch and Americans followed Britain’s lead and made their own invasions in China, to gather the necessary means to start their own industries. According to the Museum of Tea Ware, by 1949, the amount of tea produced in China had fallen to 41,000 tons, of which 9,000 tons were exported. The nation synonymous with tea had been marginalised.

Production in China did not recuperate until the 1950s and the nation only recently won back its ranking as the world’s biggest tea exporter.

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