The East India Company's Theft of China’s Tea Secrets

Great Britain's relationship with tea is part of its cultural identity. But before the mid-1800s, China was the only source of tea, which was a problem in the eyes of the East India Company. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Tracy, do
you drink tea? I do. I drink coffee more, but
I do drink tea as well. I drink coffee more.

(00:24):
I try to incorporate more tea into my, uh my diet,
but it's tricky. I tend to default coffee. But today
around the world, people drink tea all the time, and
of course, for Great Britain, it's no secret that tea
has become part of the cultural identity. We'll talk about
some shifts in that at the end, but right up
until the nineteenth century, the only place that tea was
really being grown and prepared was China. So, uh, this

(00:48):
brings up the question of how did tea become the
drink of Britain? And that story is kind of a
long one. It comes with some caveats as to where
truth and legend overlap. But then there's this really interesting
nineteen century corporate espionage story that comes into the mix. Uh,
So I thought we would talk about that kind of
the it's not even a brief history of tea. It's
really like Great Britain's relationship with tea as we know it. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:13):
there's some things back in the archive that are similarly
about tea, but totally different in terms of which specific
tea things they are discussing. Yeah. So, as with a
whole lot of food products that have been around for
a really long time, we don't really know where the

(01:34):
idea to brew tea leaves came from. Uh. There are
lots of different speculative stories about its origins, though, and
one of the ones that is most frequently cited is
the story of Chinese Emperor Shennong. And according to the
legend seven b C. The emperor, who was scientifically pretty knowledgeable,

(01:55):
was sitting with a cup of boiled water when a
leaf from a nearby camellia dropped into it, and knowing
that this wasn't dangerous, the emperor gave it a sip
after seeing how the hot water caused the plant to
release color into the liquid, and voila tea was born.
There's another story that comes from Buddhist origins, and and

(02:17):
that's hail the monk Bodha Dharma was wandering and meditating
as he traveled for nine years without sleeping, and he
sat down to meditate by a tree, but he fell asleep.
And he became so angry by his body's weakness and
succumbing to sleep, that he cut his eyelids off and
cast them into the dirt. There a tea plant grew

(02:38):
up to honor that sacrifice and also provide a natural stimulant.
I will step aside and say that this story has
always cracked me up, because it seems like the least
zen thing on earth to cut your eyelids off in anger. Yeah,
but that's just me. Uh. Tea containers dating back to
the third century have been found in China and some

(03:00):
that are possibly even older, and T is referenced in
a poem believed to have been written sometime in the
second or first century b CE titled a Contract with
a Servant, and the book The Classic of Tea was
written by Lu Yu in the eighth century. In short,
China's history with T is a very long and very
rich one. Modern tea production is much faster, though production

(03:25):
is compacted into a twenty four hour timeline that starts
the moment that tea leaves are picked. The leaves are
sorted by size, and then they go through a second
inspection to classify them by size, appearance, and what type
of tea they will become. For leaves selected and classified
to become black tea, they are processed in one of
two ways. The so called orthodox method requires first withering

(03:48):
the tea. The leaves are spread out on a wire
mesh trough and air is circulated around them to dry
them out. So then these leaves are rolled, and that's
what makes them look sort of spend ly and twisted.
Then they're oxidized and once again laid out in a
thin layer in a warm room. As the enzymes and
the leaves react with the oxygen in the air, the

(04:10):
leaves changed colors, and the length of time that they're
left to oxidized determines how strong the tea is, so
the longer they oxidize, the stronger the tea will be.
And then after oxidation, the leaves are dried through a
process called firing one more time to remove the remaining
moisture and destroy any remaining enzymes, so all reaction processes

(04:31):
are halted, and then those tea leaves are ready to
be packed up. The second method, which is known as cut,
tear and curl or CTC, is pretty much the same process.
The only real difference is that in the rolling stage
they're put through rollers with sharp teeth that break the
leaves down into very tiny fragments, and this enables more

(04:52):
tea to be shipped in smaller packing space that was
developed in World War Two. Yeah, that was for when
you were shipping by human not weight. Uh. And green
tea doesn't go through the oxidation process, though it is
steamed or pan dried to stop enzymatic reactions. Oolong tea
is created through sort of a mixed process of bruising

(05:13):
the leaves and then letting them go through partial oxidation,
and white tea is made the same way green tea is,
but only new leaves and buds are used. But all
of these processes remained a total mystery to the Western
world for quite a long time, even as Europeans and
British people in particular were drinking tea as part of

(05:35):
their daily routine. So today it's estimated that about a
hundred and sixty five million cups of tea are consumed
in Britain every day, Whereas coffee, while it has grown
in popularity still only clocks in and around seventy million cups.
But that love of tea is hardly a new thing
for the British Isles. By the eighteen hundreds, tea was

(05:56):
already wildly popular in Britain. King Charles the Second and
his Portuguese wife Katherine of Braganza are credited with being
the ones to bring tea to England in the sixteen hundreds.
He was popular in other countries of Europe already by
that time, including in the Netherlands and Portugal. As part
of Catherine of Braganza's dowry, ships loaded with luxury goods

(06:18):
were sent to England, and among them was a trunk
of tea. But while that story points to Katherine as
the bringer of tea to England, there is actually mentioned
of tea in England in a diary entry by Samuel
Peeps on September twenty, sixteen sixty, writing quote, and afterwards
I did send for a cup of tea, a China

(06:38):
drink of which I never had drank before, and went away. Now,
that diary entry was written almost two years before Catherine
arrived in the country, which happened in May of sixteen sixty. Two.
So even if the tea was already there, Catherine certainly
did love it, and as a royal she set the trends.
There was even a poem about her and her love

(07:01):
of tea for her birthday, the year after she married Charles.
The poem was written by Edmund Waller and it reads,
Venus her myrtle Phoebus has his bays tea, both excels
which she vouchsafes to praise the best of queens, the
best of herbs. We owe to that bold nation which
the way did show, to the fair region where the

(07:23):
sun doth rise, whose rich productions we so justly prize.
The muses friend tea does our fancy aid progress those
vapors which the head invade, and keep the palace of
the soul serene fit on her birthday to salute the queen.
Coming up, we're going to talk about the East India

(07:43):
Company's interest in tea and how the beverage became even
more ingrained in British culture. But first we're gonna go
get a cup of tea and cause for a sponsor break.
The East India Company, which has come on the show before,
had been established in sixteen hundred and as t interest

(08:04):
grew in England, the company developed a growing interest in
the tea trade. The E. I. C. S alliance with
King Charles the Second was fruitful in this regard, as
land that had also been part of Catherine's dowry was
given to the East India Company by Charles in a
long term rental agreement, and that land was the port
city of Bombay, which is modern day Mumbai. The East

(08:26):
India Company used this as their main office for trade
with the farriest from that point on, and over time
tea imported from China became a staple in the British isles.
Britain's coffee houses started offering tea to customers in the
second half of the sixteen hundreds, and as the leaf
brewed beverage started surpassing coffee and popularity. The East India

(08:48):
Company's monopoly on the tea trade, particularly in the colonies,
really shaped Britain's history. Folks who listened to our show,
we'll know that the passing of the t Act in
seventeen seventy was what led to the Boston Tea Party.
And then in the eighteen forties, when Britain was already
very deep into its love affair with tea, the beverage

(09:09):
experienced another uptick in popularity, and that was, according to
common legend, thanks to Anna Russell, the seventh Duchess of Bedford.
And as that story goes, Anna felt herself feeling a
little rundown in the afternoons because the stretch between lunch
and late dinner, which at that point was kind of
in the eight or nine o'clock hour, was quite long,

(09:29):
so she asked her servants to bring her tea and
light snacks. And she really found that she liked a
little bit of bread and butter with a cup of
tea so well that she started doing it as a
daily ritual, and she started to invite her friends to
join her in the afternoons to take tea. This is
when I usually have tea because I will often want
a little pick me up, but know that a cup

(09:50):
of coffee is going to be too much pick me up,
so I have tea instead. Anna Russell was also a
lady in waiting to clean Victoria, and the two of
them were friends. So just as Catherine of Braganza's influence
had popularized tea in the first place, Victoria's interest in
her friend's idea made afternoon tea a trendy activity among

(10:10):
first the aristocracy and then the rest of Britain. It
also evolved from a simple snack of bread and butter
with some tea and some more of an afternoon meal
that could feature finger sandwiches and pastries. However, it is
worth noting that's similar to the way that Catherine gets
credit for bringing tea to England when it had actually
already been there. There do seem to be mentioned of

(10:31):
afternoon tea as a ritual and a social event prior
to Anna's alleged invention of it, dating all the way
back to the mid seventeen hundreds, so it's likely that
really Anna's high social profile simply lead to her tea
parties kind of getting more historical attention. There's also some
discussion of how that kind of launched a whole industry

(10:52):
of like China, specifically for tease, so it may be
just that kind of economic driver that makes this the story.
And it is also a cute story about this hungry
lady who then invents this extra meal and has her
friends over, so it's it's understandable that that caught on
That reminds me of our podcast about the Brief History

(11:12):
of White Weddings, where we talk about the development of
China sets to be sold to brides and like creating
the idea that you needed that super super new You
don't you don't need that. But it's very brief history
of tea in Britain is really intended to set the
stage for the meaty part of this story, which is

(11:32):
starting in the mid eighteen hundreds, at which point t
had become vital to Britain's identity. But at the time
all tea was still being exported from China. The East
India Company did not like being forced to deal with
one country for an item that was so important to Britain.
They saw this as a fundamental imbalance. The an early

(11:54):
effort to reverse this imbalance was by exporting opium to China.
I just want to say, opium for tea is not
an equivalent trade, no, And it's more complicated than that. Right.
It wasn't like they were trading directly to China. They
were trading the opium two people for silver, and then

(12:15):
that opium was being sold in China and it completely
messed up the Chinese market. Yeah, it led to like
the enormous problems with addiction like this was this was
not a good way to try to get a better
trade deal over Tea, and it led to the First
Opium War, which was fought between Britain and China as

(12:36):
China tried to make Britain stop illegally sending them opium.
And we're gonna come back to the First Opium more briefly.
We're not going to get super deep into it. That
is a whole other matter on its own, But first
we have to actually introduce a man into the story
named Robert Fortune. So Robert Fortune was born in Berwickshire, Scotland,

(12:57):
on September thirteen to a farming family. He grew up
to become a botanist, and he worked at the Edinburgh
Botanical Garden and the Royal Horticultural Society. In eighteen forty two,
he embarked on a plant finding expedition in China on
behalf of the Royal Horticultural Society. The First Opium War
had just ended at this point with the signing of

(13:19):
the Treaty of Nanking in Britain immediately took advantage of
its greater trade footprint in China and Fortune's trip was
part of that. All of China was not open to
foreigners at this point, but Fortune, on this journey had
traveled right up to the edges of the boundaries of
those forbidden areas as he sought out plants. It was

(13:39):
the first of several journeys, and he wrote several books
about these travels, filled not only with horticultural and botanical information,
but also riveting stories of pirates and danger and dressing
in disguise to hide his European origins. The stories in
his first published travel journal, three Years Wanderings in the
Northern Provinces of China, became really popular in Britain society circles,

(14:03):
and that it got the attention of the East India Company. Yeah,
that's a fascinating read because there, I mean, it reads
it's borderline Horatio Alger, except with a much chiller tone
because it is very like their bandits and he's you know,
kept sick in the hold of a boat. He doesn't
think he's going to ever get back to England. He

(14:24):
thinks he's going to die there. And it's pretty exciting stuff.
Because Fortune had experience traveling to China, he was the
natural choice for the East India Company to send on
a mission of utmost importance. They needed someone to be
a tea spy. If they could gather the secrets of
China's tea industry and gather some plants in the process,

(14:45):
those plants could then be grown in India and the
East India Company would be able to bypass China for
its tea needs, breaking the years and years old trade
monopoly and creating its own revenue stream. This entire i
he is really emblematic to me of the East India
Company's whole attitude towards China and really the British Empire's

(15:07):
attitude towards China. Like the Treaty of Nanking that we
referenced earlier was basically a treaty that gave that gave
Britain all of the benefit and China zero of the benefit.
And it was just basically like, hey, you have this thing,
we should have it, so we're gonna come take it.
There is an attitude of let's take it, like that
seems to be the solution to every problem. Yeah, so

(15:31):
Fortune had already made some tea discoveries on his previous travels.
He had found the rather surprising information that green tea
and black tea actually came from the same type of plant,
although generally those used for black tea were grown in
different areas than those used for green tea. Additionally, some
of the bushes were revered for their age and the

(15:51):
quality of leaves that they produced, but they were still
the same species Camelia senensis. This was a huge revelation
and one that Contra predicted commonly held beliefs at the
time among British botanists. And I would say, people that
drink tea today but don't necessarily know a lot of
tea about tea today might come to the same conclusion

(16:11):
that the green tea and the black tea that they
have had are two different plants because they taste they're different. Yeah,
And the scientific minds of Britain had been hard at
work trying to suss out the nature of China's tea industry,
and they had spent more than a century at that
point examining tea leaves to try to discern the nature
of the plants that produced the drink that had become
so beloved. They basically were looking at process tea leaves

(16:34):
and trying to backwards engineer what kind of plants they
thought they came from. So prior to fortunes observations abroad,
it was firmly believed that the plants that produce different
types of tea were related but had to be different.
But even with this new information found by Fortune, the
multiple steps in processing tea remained a complete mystery to
the British, and so did actual plant samples. Here is

(16:58):
the direction that Fortune risk seaved. Quote 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 practiced by the Chinese, and on all other points

(17:19):
with which it may be desirable that those entrusted with
the superintendence of the tea nurseries in India should be
made acquainted. So we're going to delve into this mission
and how it played out and how it impacted international trade.
Really after we first pause for a little sponsor break.

(17:44):
So right before the break, we talked about how Robert
Fortune had gotten this mission from the East India Trade company,
and this was not a quick, get in, get the information,
get out situation. It was going to be a lengthy
trip away from his wife, Jane, and their two children,
Helen and John. Helen, the older of the two children,
was just seven in when this all happened, and John

(18:05):
was only four, So Robert Fortune was going to be
missing a significant period of time in his children's childhoods.
And Robert and Jane had also recently lost their third child, Agnes,
in infancy, and this job, which would take him away
from his family, also came with inherent dangers. While there
was more territory in China open to Britain, there was also,

(18:27):
because of the nature of that treaty that Tracy mentioned
that was completely one sided, really a lot of hostility
toward British citizens there in the wake of the First
Opium War. Fortune knew that if he really wanted to
unlock the secrets of China's tea production, he was going
to have to spend years gathering information about it. He
needed plants, he needed seeds, and he needed to learn

(18:48):
everything he possibly could about the growth, the harvest, and
the preparation of tea. He was driven not just by
his assignment, but by his own desire to collect new
species and expand his own knowledge. And additionally, he was
allowed to collect non te specimens while he traveled and
he would retain all rights to those discoveries. The East

(19:09):
India Company only wanted the tea. Yeah, this is one
of those things where he sometimes gets simplified as like
a tee thief, and he certainly was doing that mission.
But for him there was a much broader appeal that
he was a man who wanted to collect plants and
he was fascinated by finding different species. That was the
whole purpose of his prior travels in China. So it's

(19:30):
a little more nuanced than just I'm gonna go sneak
in and steal things. He was like, you're gonna pay
for me to go and explore and find new species
for several years, all right. Yeah, he basically had funding
for a horticulture expedition provided that he did all this
spy work with tea first or during so fortune hired
two servants in China, both from t DRIs districts and

(19:53):
from their starting point at Shanghai. The servants who would
be traveling with him and helping him to enter spaces
that he might not otherwise have access to prepared him.
He had to leave his European clothes behind and take
on the style of the locals, sort of. His front
hairline was shaved and a braided q was sewn into
the back of his hair, and Fortune wrote of this

(20:15):
transformation at the hands of his hired men, quote, they
were quite willing to accompany me, only stipulating that I
should discard my English costume and adopt the dress of
the country. I knew this was indispensable if I wished
to accomplish the object in view, and readily acceded to
the terms. So thus disguised, Fortune posed as a visitor

(20:35):
from a distant province, and his servants would ask intranstance
itsy factories to observe and collect samples. By the beginning
of eighteen forty nine, he had collected a significant sampling
of plants and seeds, and he started trying to send
them to India, where he also sent word that he
needed updates as to whether the plants arrived safely and
whether they and the seeds were planted successfully. Barton was

(20:59):
also able to ants plant some of his plants to
a temporary garden in Shanghai at the Dent Baling Company
Trading company before sending them onto India. This was not
the first time that the British had made efforts to
transplant tea from China, but all their previous attempts had failed,
and Fortune was very aware that his samples were very fragile,

(21:20):
and he also understood the importance of careful transport for them. Yeah,
and we're going to get to a really large number
of samples that you find out he took. And one
of the things that made this so possible is that
UH tea plants are actually pretty easy to root from
a cutting. So for our gardeners out there, basically, if

(21:41):
you cut an sample from a T plant and you
put it in dirt, it starts developing roots really really quickly.
So that's when we get to these big numbers. I
just want you to understand how that was able to
be accomplished. On one of his first factory visits, Fortune
made a rather unsettling discovery. He realized that Prussian blue

(22:01):
and gypsum were being used to add color to green
tea that was intended for export to Britain. And this
was because the producers of the tea believed that the
British preferred their tea to look more evenly green, but
of course they were adding substances that were poisonous to
achieve this cosmetic change. In the Eastern India. Company would
later use this information and samples of the pigment compounds

(22:24):
that Fortune sent back to England as a way to
show how tea grown and processed by British producers would
be superior to imported tea. Fortunes first shipment of thirteen
thousand seedlings met with a bad end. Someone somewhere along
the line opened the containers that they were shipped in
to inspect them, and this was something that Fortune had

(22:47):
expressly said should not be done. By the time they
reached their destination, all but a thousand of the plants
had died of rot, and even the living samples were
infested with fungus. The first year of Fortune's work was
for nothing, and then on the upside, the first year
had also been spent researching green tea. Black tea was

(23:08):
the more enticing target, and that was because that was
the preferred drink in Britain, So this lost work was
not the most important of his work. Fortune headed to
provinces known for black tea production next, although at that
point he had not yet learned that his samples of
green tea had been destroyed. Yeah, it was that long

(23:30):
delay in communications that caused him to not discover that
until some time later. And the containers that Fortune had
been using were called Wardian cases, named after their inventor, Dr.
Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, and the idea behind them was the
enclosed glass containers offered plants a self sustaining environment. This

(23:51):
gave Fortune an ingenious idea after that first shipment, he
realized that instead of shipping seeds and shipping seedlings, he
could plant the seeds in Wardian cases and let them
germinate as they made the journey back to India. This
method actually worked well, and it let him send better
samples that actually arrived in their destination. Intact, there were

(24:13):
so many seedlings and some of the shipments that the
men receiving them couldn't get an accurate count. The seedlings
were moved to soil on plantations in India that were
owned by the East India Company and they thrived there.
So despite these early setbacks, fortunes work for the company
wound up being a huge success, and Fortune continued his

(24:34):
sample gathering for the remainder of his trip. This was
all still happening really in the first half uh and
when he wrapped up his business finally in Shanghai, he
actually took more than plants out of the country with him.
He had had acquaintances in China recruit a team of
eight young men who were experts in growing and processing tea,
and though these men were reluctant to trust foreigners, with

(24:57):
some assistance and a bit of pressure, Fortune was able
to get them to agree to a three year contract
during which they would train the men on the Indian
plantations in the best ways to handle their plants and
their harvest. This was, to be clear, it completely uneven contract.
The workers were getting paid probably a decent amount compared

(25:18):
to what their other options might be, but they were
also pledging to pay a massive default sum if they
were unable to fulfill their duties for any reason. So basically,
if they got sick in those three years and couldn't
do their work, they had to pay a hundred dollars,
which at the time was huge, especially compared to what
they were getting paid. It was really not fair or

(25:40):
kind in any way. These men traveled to Darjeeling and
the lesser him alay As, just as the plant samples had,
and they shared their knowledge, which had been kept for
generations only in China with the workers on the British
own plantations. The tea industry from their underwent a massive shift. Soon,
tea cuttings were cultivated in other countries as well as India,

(26:03):
but India's production was massive and they could export quality
teas at a lower price, taking the market share away
from China. This happened really quickly over the course of
like a decade, and then China spent the next hundred
years trying to catch up and finally once again became
the largest exporter of tea in the nineteen fifties. By
the time Robert Fortune died in April thirteenth, eighteen eighty,

(26:26):
it's estimated that he had introduced about two hundred eighty
plants species to the Western world from China. There are
more than a dozen plants species named after him, and
since the nineteen eighties there have been a lot of
think pieces published heralding the end of teas dominance in
Great Britain. Coffee has gained in popularity in that time,

(26:47):
but tea, as we mentioned at the top of the show,
still far outpaces it. I ran into a few different
articles predicting when coffee would surpass tea as the main
beverage of Great Britain, but those are all, you know, predictions.
I don't know. I think even if coffee does surpassed

(27:08):
tea as the most popular beverage, the association of tea
with British culture is so entrenched. Um. I can't speak
for how entrenched it is within Britain, but outside of Britain,
it's like they're so parallel that I think even outside
of the country, people will probably associate tea with Britain

(27:31):
long after it is not the most popular beverage. Well.
And I also suspect that even if it somehow is
surpassed by coffee, it's not like it's going to go away.
It will still be part of of British culture. And
I think tea has gotten more popular in other countries
as well. I feel like in the United States this
is just experiential. I don't have data on it, um.

(27:54):
You know, I have certainly noticed that tea has become
much more prevalent in for example, office breaker him, is
that it ever used to be? Uh? So you know
a teath safe. We're always gonna want tea delicious It
is delicious delicious. Do you have delicious listener mail? Have
beautiful listener mail, Rebecca, She writes, Dear Holly and Tracy

(28:17):
from an avid Stuff you Missed in History Class fan, Hello,
I've been listening to this show almost since the beginning.
I work as a custom picture framer and I do
some freelance illustration work on the side. Your podcast has
gotten me through many, many long hours of framing and drawing.
For a few years now, I've I've been doing a
monthly series every March featuring notable women of history. Stuff

(28:37):
you Missed in History Class has been an amazing source
of inspiration, information and entertainment. So as a thank you,
I've included two drawings from the series, one for each
of you. For Holly previous podcast subject Lilian Bland, you
have her hutzpah, her creativity, and her zest for life.
For Tracy previous podcast mentioned to moy goes In, you
have her drive, resilience and courage. Enjoy and if you're interested,

(28:59):
check out the full series at Rebecca Robbie dot my
portfolio dot com. Keep up the amazing work. You are
very much appreciated, Oh Tracy, these are beautiful. So this
is yet another time where I get to reveal a
thing to Tracy. I want to do it carefully because her,
Rebecca is astonishingly talented. Well, and while you carefully do that,

(29:20):
I want to say that was an incredibly flattering and
kind email. Thank you really was so um. I want
to put this in a place you can see it. What.
It's beautiful, beautiful. Her work is gorgeous. I am in
love with it. So I'm excited because I'm actually kind
of redoing my bathroom right now to be a lady's room,

(29:42):
so it's just filled with framed pieces of art of
cool ladies. Nice. Um. So that's going to be a
perfect and prominent piece of that. So thank you so much, Rebecca.
I am touched and delighted in it is. As Tracy said,
such an amazingly lovely note to get. So if you
would like to write to us, you could do so
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(30:02):
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(30:30):
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