For All the Tea in China: how England stole the world's favorite drink and changed history, by Sarah Rose
For centuries China held the monopoly on the global green and black tea markets over the United States, Europe, and the largest empire of the time, Great Britain. But when China decided to relax its trade stranglehold by allowing foreign traders access to more of its ports, the Emperor underestimated the wiliness of those traders and the impact that decision would have on world markets.
In 1848, the British East India Company, itself the first vast international conglomerate the world had ever seen, took advantage of China's relaxing trade restrictions. In a bold and risky move, the company hired Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to travel undercover to China's hidden tea regions and steal not only tea seeds, but tea plants, the secrets to tea horticulture and processing, and even Chinese tea artisans and smuggle them to the Indian Himalayas in an attempt to capture the tea trade and end China's monopoly. It was global corporate espionage on a grand scale, and could have ended in great success for the company or complete failure and the death of Fortune at the hands of Chinese authorities.
For All the Tea in China is a fascinating look at a bygone era of adventure and discovery and a decision that affects all our lives today, especially those of us who love our tea. Fortune traveled undercover disguised as a wealthy northern Mandarin for three years, enduring encounters with pirates, the selfish behavior of his own servants, and the dangerous ignorance of other botanists of his time. He visited the most remote regions of China, where few had even seen a white man, and uncovered the secrets of tea growing and processing. His endeavors and experiments revealed many trade secrets and led to advances in modern plant propagation and transport, health and medicine, and helped to shape today's world.
