Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, pulled off one of history's greatest acts of corporate espionage: stealing the secrets of tea production from China.
In this episode we'll explore his daring adventure, the fascinating world of 19th-century tea trade, and how his actions forever changed the global tea industry.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a Scottish man called Robert Fortune.
[00:00:27] He was a botanist, an expert in plants, but he has gone down in the record books for having pulled off what has been called the greatest corporate espionage in history: the theft of tea from China.
[00:00:42] His is an amazing story that brings together colonialism, international trade, economics, drugs, addiction, botany, pirates and, of course, tea.
[00:00:54] OK then, Robert Fortune.
[00:00:59] It is something of a stereotype that British people love drinking tea.
[00:01:04] Like most stereotypes, there is some truth behind it.
[00:01:08] Brits drink a reported 100 million cups of tea every single day.
[00:01:14] In terms of the amount of tea consumed per capita, per person, Brits are the third biggest consumers of tea in the world, behind only Ireland and Turkey.
[00:01:27] And this has been going on for almost 400 years.
[00:01:32] As you may know, or you might remember from episode number 238, in which we did a deep dive into the history of tea, tea was first brought to Britain in the 1650s.
[00:01:45] It was expensive, and was initially something that only the upper classes could afford.
[00:01:51] Fast forward 150 years or so, and it was something that practically every Brit could afford to drink on a daily basis, multiple times a day even.
[00:02:03] It was safer to drink than water, because it was boiled, it was nice and warm, which comes in handy on a cold, damp British winter morning, it gave you a nice little caffeine boost, and it tasted good.
[00:02:17] Well, it was tea, people enjoyed drinking it then for the same reasons that I and perhaps you enjoy a cup today. By the start of the 19th century, tens of millions of Brits were hooked to their morning tea, but there was a problem.
[00:02:38] Their dealer, the source of the tea, was right over on the other side of the world: china.
[00:02:46] Practically all the tea in the world at this time came from China, and the Chinese were not prepared to let anyone else in on the secret of how you make tea.
[00:02:58] I mean, Brits made tea by adding boiling water to the leaves, and then adding milk and sugar, they knew how to “make” tea once they had the tea leaves.
[00:03:07] But as to where these leaves came from, and how they were prepared so that they could be used for tea, well that was a mystery.
[00:03:18] It was an important mystery to solve for greater reasons than simply curiosity. Firstly, there was the question of how Britain could continue to pay for its tea habit. The Chinese needed to be paid for their tea, so Britain needed a product it could sell China in exchange for tea.
[00:03:41] The problem was that there wasn’t really anything China wanted. It didn’t want British textiles or manufactured goods. To quote the Chinese emperor in a 1793 letter to King George of Britain, “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders”.
[00:04:04] In other words, “we have everything we need”.
[00:04:09] But there was one product that the British found they could sell into China. A product that the Chinese emperor might not have wanted for his people, but that the Chinese people were more than willing to buy: the drug opium.
[00:04:26] So, the trade went like this: Britain grew opium
[00:04:30] in India, shipped it to southern China, sold it to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver, bought tea with silver, then shipped the tea back to Britain.
[00:04:43] Fast forward again to 1839, and China has had enough. Millions of Chinese are hooked on opium, and it is destroying the country.
[00:04:56] A Chinese governor in the south of China threw a massive amount of opium into the sea, sparking off the Opium Wars, which resulted in Britain winning the rights to trade in five treaty ports. We have another entire episode on the Opium Wars, that’s episode number 93, so if you’d like to explore this in more detail, I’d recommend checking that one out afterwards.
[00:05:21] But in the interests of today’s story, we must move on.
[00:05:26] By 1842 the first Opium War was over, China was licking its wounds, thoroughly defeated, and was forced to concede access to foreigners in five port cities.
[00:05:40] Britain continued to send opium into the country, and the number of Chinese addicts continued to grow.
[00:05:49] The tea trade continued, but it was now on shaky ground. Relations between Britain and China were not amicable, they were practical, based only on mutually beneficial trade.
[00:06:04] British opium went in, Chinese tea came out.
[00:06:09] And these trade relations were hanging on a thread.
[00:06:14] What would happen if China legalised the production and consumption of opium? There would be no reason for it to continue trading with Britain, and the supply of tea would be cut off.
[00:06:26] This was a big concern, and it wasn’t only because tea was so tasty.
[00:06:32] To quote a letter from the governor-general of India,
[00:06:35] " “ It is in my opinion by no means improbable that in a few years the Government of Peking, by legalising the cultivation of Opium in China, where the soil has been already proved equally well adapted with India to the growth of the plant, may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue
[00:06:56] The clue to his primary concern is in the last part of the sentence. “may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue”.
[00:07:07] See, tea was big business. Taxes on tea brought in an estimated 10% of the British government’s tax revenue. As a proportion of total government revenue, this is equivalent to corporation tax today.
[00:07:26] In other words, the proportion of the government’s income that came from taxes on tea in the mid 19th century was the same as the proportion of the government’s income that comes from the profits of every single British business today.
[00:07:43] Clearly, protecting the tea trade was of great national importance, and it was of strategic concern that the secret to this entire trade, the secret of how to cultivate tea, was kept hidden deep inside a wounded enemy: China.
[00:08:01] And China at this time was a secret, mysterious place. Foreigners were not allowed to freely travel inland, all trade and all knowledge of what lay inland came through merchants in the five port cities: if you're wondering, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai.
[00:08:24] So, access to China was contained to these five port cities, and foreigners were not legally allowed to travel inland.
[00:08:33] But not all foreigners heeded this law. And it’s here that we need to meet the hero–or villain–of today’s story.
[00:08:43] His name was Robert Fortune, and he was a botanist by trade, an expert in plants.
[00:08:51] He was born in 1812, and as a young man had developed something of a name for himself as an expert horticulturist. He did not grow up in a wealthy family, he had no titles or fortune to his name, so like other entrepreneurial or adventurous Victorian young men, he decided that his name and fortune would be made through exploration.
[00:09:19] In 1842, after the end of the first Opium War, Fortune was commissioned by the Royal Horticultural Society of London to go on a trip to China and examine and collect as many plant samples as he could.
[00:09:34] It took three years, and he returned with a huge collection of wonderful samples of trees, plants and bushes.
[00:09:43] He also had a huge adventure, and–like any Victorian worth their salt–wrote and published an account of his trip, which detailed battles with pirates, encounters with opium addicts, huge storms, almost dying on multiple occasions, as well as plenty of plant references to satisfy armchair botanists back in Britain.
[00:10:07] Importantly for our story, he had also discovered that black and green tea do not come from two different types of tea plants; they come from the same tea leaf, they are simply treated in a different way.
[00:10:24] This made a name for him, and it also brought him to the attention of the most powerful company in the world at that time, some might argue the most powerful company that the world has ever seen: The East India Company.
[00:10:41] As you may know, or remember from episode number 279, The East India Company was this huge, sprawling private company that was given monopolies on trade in Asia by the British government.
[00:10:55] In 1848, a year after the publication of the account of his first trip to China, the East India Company made Robert Fortune an offer he could not refuse.
[00:11:06] They offered to pay him five times his annual salary to go to China, not only to learn the secret of how tea was made but to come back with tea plants and tea making experts, so that the East India Company could start the production of Chinese tea in India.
[00:11:27] They also threw in an extra little bonus, which was that he could keep the commercial rights to any other plants that he discovered on his trip. The East India Company was interested in one thing and one thing only: the secret of how to make tea.
[00:11:44] Fortune jumped at the offer, and set off for China. He had been there before, of course, but as a botanist, someone exploring the plants of the region.
[00:11:56] Now he was coming back for a good so valuable that countries had gone to war for it. He had to carefully create a new persona for himself, a new look and a new identity.
[00:12:10] See, Fortune was a 6 foot tall Scotsman, he was white, he was almost 2 metres tall and had big sideburns.
[00:12:20] To state the obvious, he did not look Chinese.
[00:12:24] So, he had to get creative.
[00:12:27] His persona, his alter ego, was to be a wealthy Chinese official from the north of the country who had come to observe the manufacture of tea.
[00:12:39] He shaved his head in the traditional way, and he got someone else’s ponytail sewn into his hair. He hired a collection of local Chinese men as his guides and translators, and together they seem to have managed to fool everyone. It’s not thought that he spoke any Chinese language, but he gets the men he hired to do the talking for him.
[00:13:05] It must have been incredibly tense at times, but he gets away with it because the people he met didn’t have any knowledge of what a foreigner would look like.
[00:13:15] China was a big place, the people he met probably had never seen anyone from the north of the country, and they wouldn’t be able to converse with one anyway, because they would speak different dialects. So the fact that there was this tall, white man who couldn’t speak any of their language wasn’t as strange as you might have thought.
[00:13:38] This disguise worked, and after travelling for several months deep into the Chinese interior, Fortune is allowed unrestricted access into several tea processing plants. He discovers how tea is processed, and he notes down every step in its production. How long different types of tea should be left outside to dry, how to heat the leaves, how to roll them, how to go from seed, or sapling, through to finished product.
[00:14:10] He also manages to bring with him hundreds of saplings, the little plants, which he plans to ship to India, where they can be grown, as well as back to London for observation.
[00:14:23] And if you are wondering whether he just puts them in his pocket, or he has a big tray of them like someone returning from a garden centre, no, it was slightly more advanced than that.
[00:14:35] Shortly before he had set off, a fellow Scotsman and botanist had invented something called the “Wardian Case”, which is basically a sealed glass house.
[00:14:46] What he discovered was that this sealed glass case creates its own mini ecosystem, so a plant can survive without water or other nutrients for a very long period of time. It allowed plants to be transported for thousands of kilometres without spoiling.
[00:15:06] At least, it did as long as the case wasn’t opened.
[00:15:10] A year into his trip, Fortune had managed to collect 13,000 plants and 10,000 seeds, more than enough to start production back in India.
[00:15:21] He dutifully packed them into Wardian cases. They would be shipped first to Hong Kong and then to Calcutta, from where they would be transported to the Himalayas, a region of northern India that had a similar climate to that of the tea-producing region of China.
[00:15:39] The problem, which Fortune would only discover many months later, was that along the way a zealous official had decided to open the Wardian cases to look at the plants, thereby destroying the carefully protected ecosystem and killing all but 1,000 of the seeds.
[00:15:58] Fortune was not to be deterred. He continued his trip, collected more seeds and plants, and also recruited a group of Chinese expert tea growers who would come with him to oversee the production of Chinese tea in India.
[00:16:14] Given how closely the Chinese guarded the secret to making tea you might have thought that this would be the hardest bit, but Fortune had the financial backing of the East India Company, and it didn’t take all that much to find tea growers who were willing to come with him.
[00:16:32] So, he had it all. the knowledge of what he had seen firsthand, the plants in their protective glass cases, and a group of Chinese tea experts who would be responsible for managing the entire operation.
[00:16:47] They arrived in India, and travelled to a region of northern India that had a similar climate to that of the tea-producing region of China.
[00:16:56] As the East India company had hoped, it worked.
[00:17:01] From these little seeds and plants, and under the watchful eyes of the Chinese tea growers, grew the Indian tea industry. Within a generation there was more tea coming from India than China, and finally the Chinese stranglehold over the secret of this beverage was no more.
[00:17:20] It was a huge coup for Britain, and for the East India Company, which would make vast amounts of money from its northern Indian tea plantations.
[00:17:30] As to Fortune, he returned to Britain, and went on to live a quiet life.
[00:17:36] If you go to 9 Gilston Road, in London’s South Kensington, you will see a blue plaque on the wall. Blue plaques are typically reserved for people of historical interest. It says “Robert Fortune lived here from 1857-1880” and lists his occupation as “plant collector”.
[00:17:59] By all accounts, Fortune was a modest man, and perhaps he would like the idea of people walking past and thinking that he was merely a man who collected plants.
[00:18:10] In reality, he was a professional botanist, an adventurer, a spy, a travel writer, a diplomat, debatably a thief, and undoubtedly a man who changed the world.
[00:18:21] But to the residents of Gilston Road, and anyone walking by and peering at the name on the blue plaque, he is and will always remain a mere “plant collector”.
[00:18:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Robert Fortune, the man who stole tea from China.
[00:18:38] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new. As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:45] Have you heard of this story before? What do you think about Robert Fortune? Heroic gardener, terrible coloniser, corporate thief, or a mixture of all three? I would love to know.
[00:18:56] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:05] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a Scottish man called Robert Fortune.
[00:00:27] He was a botanist, an expert in plants, but he has gone down in the record books for having pulled off what has been called the greatest corporate espionage in history: the theft of tea from China.
[00:00:42] His is an amazing story that brings together colonialism, international trade, economics, drugs, addiction, botany, pirates and, of course, tea.
[00:00:54] OK then, Robert Fortune.
[00:00:59] It is something of a stereotype that British people love drinking tea.
[00:01:04] Like most stereotypes, there is some truth behind it.
[00:01:08] Brits drink a reported 100 million cups of tea every single day.
[00:01:14] In terms of the amount of tea consumed per capita, per person, Brits are the third biggest consumers of tea in the world, behind only Ireland and Turkey.
[00:01:27] And this has been going on for almost 400 years.
[00:01:32] As you may know, or you might remember from episode number 238, in which we did a deep dive into the history of tea, tea was first brought to Britain in the 1650s.
[00:01:45] It was expensive, and was initially something that only the upper classes could afford.
[00:01:51] Fast forward 150 years or so, and it was something that practically every Brit could afford to drink on a daily basis, multiple times a day even.
[00:02:03] It was safer to drink than water, because it was boiled, it was nice and warm, which comes in handy on a cold, damp British winter morning, it gave you a nice little caffeine boost, and it tasted good.
[00:02:17] Well, it was tea, people enjoyed drinking it then for the same reasons that I and perhaps you enjoy a cup today. By the start of the 19th century, tens of millions of Brits were hooked to their morning tea, but there was a problem.
[00:02:38] Their dealer, the source of the tea, was right over on the other side of the world: china.
[00:02:46] Practically all the tea in the world at this time came from China, and the Chinese were not prepared to let anyone else in on the secret of how you make tea.
[00:02:58] I mean, Brits made tea by adding boiling water to the leaves, and then adding milk and sugar, they knew how to “make” tea once they had the tea leaves.
[00:03:07] But as to where these leaves came from, and how they were prepared so that they could be used for tea, well that was a mystery.
[00:03:18] It was an important mystery to solve for greater reasons than simply curiosity. Firstly, there was the question of how Britain could continue to pay for its tea habit. The Chinese needed to be paid for their tea, so Britain needed a product it could sell China in exchange for tea.
[00:03:41] The problem was that there wasn’t really anything China wanted. It didn’t want British textiles or manufactured goods. To quote the Chinese emperor in a 1793 letter to King George of Britain, “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders”.
[00:04:04] In other words, “we have everything we need”.
[00:04:09] But there was one product that the British found they could sell into China. A product that the Chinese emperor might not have wanted for his people, but that the Chinese people were more than willing to buy: the drug opium.
[00:04:26] So, the trade went like this: Britain grew opium
[00:04:30] in India, shipped it to southern China, sold it to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver, bought tea with silver, then shipped the tea back to Britain.
[00:04:43] Fast forward again to 1839, and China has had enough. Millions of Chinese are hooked on opium, and it is destroying the country.
[00:04:56] A Chinese governor in the south of China threw a massive amount of opium into the sea, sparking off the Opium Wars, which resulted in Britain winning the rights to trade in five treaty ports. We have another entire episode on the Opium Wars, that’s episode number 93, so if you’d like to explore this in more detail, I’d recommend checking that one out afterwards.
[00:05:21] But in the interests of today’s story, we must move on.
[00:05:26] By 1842 the first Opium War was over, China was licking its wounds, thoroughly defeated, and was forced to concede access to foreigners in five port cities.
[00:05:40] Britain continued to send opium into the country, and the number of Chinese addicts continued to grow.
[00:05:49] The tea trade continued, but it was now on shaky ground. Relations between Britain and China were not amicable, they were practical, based only on mutually beneficial trade.
[00:06:04] British opium went in, Chinese tea came out.
[00:06:09] And these trade relations were hanging on a thread.
[00:06:14] What would happen if China legalised the production and consumption of opium? There would be no reason for it to continue trading with Britain, and the supply of tea would be cut off.
[00:06:26] This was a big concern, and it wasn’t only because tea was so tasty.
[00:06:32] To quote a letter from the governor-general of India,
[00:06:35] " “ It is in my opinion by no means improbable that in a few years the Government of Peking, by legalising the cultivation of Opium in China, where the soil has been already proved equally well adapted with India to the growth of the plant, may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue
[00:06:56] The clue to his primary concern is in the last part of the sentence. “may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue”.
[00:07:07] See, tea was big business. Taxes on tea brought in an estimated 10% of the British government’s tax revenue. As a proportion of total government revenue, this is equivalent to corporation tax today.
[00:07:26] In other words, the proportion of the government’s income that came from taxes on tea in the mid 19th century was the same as the proportion of the government’s income that comes from the profits of every single British business today.
[00:07:43] Clearly, protecting the tea trade was of great national importance, and it was of strategic concern that the secret to this entire trade, the secret of how to cultivate tea, was kept hidden deep inside a wounded enemy: China.
[00:08:01] And China at this time was a secret, mysterious place. Foreigners were not allowed to freely travel inland, all trade and all knowledge of what lay inland came through merchants in the five port cities: if you're wondering, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai.
[00:08:24] So, access to China was contained to these five port cities, and foreigners were not legally allowed to travel inland.
[00:08:33] But not all foreigners heeded this law. And it’s here that we need to meet the hero–or villain–of today’s story.
[00:08:43] His name was Robert Fortune, and he was a botanist by trade, an expert in plants.
[00:08:51] He was born in 1812, and as a young man had developed something of a name for himself as an expert horticulturist. He did not grow up in a wealthy family, he had no titles or fortune to his name, so like other entrepreneurial or adventurous Victorian young men, he decided that his name and fortune would be made through exploration.
[00:09:19] In 1842, after the end of the first Opium War, Fortune was commissioned by the Royal Horticultural Society of London to go on a trip to China and examine and collect as many plant samples as he could.
[00:09:34] It took three years, and he returned with a huge collection of wonderful samples of trees, plants and bushes.
[00:09:43] He also had a huge adventure, and–like any Victorian worth their salt–wrote and published an account of his trip, which detailed battles with pirates, encounters with opium addicts, huge storms, almost dying on multiple occasions, as well as plenty of plant references to satisfy armchair botanists back in Britain.
[00:10:07] Importantly for our story, he had also discovered that black and green tea do not come from two different types of tea plants; they come from the same tea leaf, they are simply treated in a different way.
[00:10:24] This made a name for him, and it also brought him to the attention of the most powerful company in the world at that time, some might argue the most powerful company that the world has ever seen: The East India Company.
[00:10:41] As you may know, or remember from episode number 279, The East India Company was this huge, sprawling private company that was given monopolies on trade in Asia by the British government.
[00:10:55] In 1848, a year after the publication of the account of his first trip to China, the East India Company made Robert Fortune an offer he could not refuse.
[00:11:06] They offered to pay him five times his annual salary to go to China, not only to learn the secret of how tea was made but to come back with tea plants and tea making experts, so that the East India Company could start the production of Chinese tea in India.
[00:11:27] They also threw in an extra little bonus, which was that he could keep the commercial rights to any other plants that he discovered on his trip. The East India Company was interested in one thing and one thing only: the secret of how to make tea.
[00:11:44] Fortune jumped at the offer, and set off for China. He had been there before, of course, but as a botanist, someone exploring the plants of the region.
[00:11:56] Now he was coming back for a good so valuable that countries had gone to war for it. He had to carefully create a new persona for himself, a new look and a new identity.
[00:12:10] See, Fortune was a 6 foot tall Scotsman, he was white, he was almost 2 metres tall and had big sideburns.
[00:12:20] To state the obvious, he did not look Chinese.
[00:12:24] So, he had to get creative.
[00:12:27] His persona, his alter ego, was to be a wealthy Chinese official from the north of the country who had come to observe the manufacture of tea.
[00:12:39] He shaved his head in the traditional way, and he got someone else’s ponytail sewn into his hair. He hired a collection of local Chinese men as his guides and translators, and together they seem to have managed to fool everyone. It’s not thought that he spoke any Chinese language, but he gets the men he hired to do the talking for him.
[00:13:05] It must have been incredibly tense at times, but he gets away with it because the people he met didn’t have any knowledge of what a foreigner would look like.
[00:13:15] China was a big place, the people he met probably had never seen anyone from the north of the country, and they wouldn’t be able to converse with one anyway, because they would speak different dialects. So the fact that there was this tall, white man who couldn’t speak any of their language wasn’t as strange as you might have thought.
[00:13:38] This disguise worked, and after travelling for several months deep into the Chinese interior, Fortune is allowed unrestricted access into several tea processing plants. He discovers how tea is processed, and he notes down every step in its production. How long different types of tea should be left outside to dry, how to heat the leaves, how to roll them, how to go from seed, or sapling, through to finished product.
[00:14:10] He also manages to bring with him hundreds of saplings, the little plants, which he plans to ship to India, where they can be grown, as well as back to London for observation.
[00:14:23] And if you are wondering whether he just puts them in his pocket, or he has a big tray of them like someone returning from a garden centre, no, it was slightly more advanced than that.
[00:14:35] Shortly before he had set off, a fellow Scotsman and botanist had invented something called the “Wardian Case”, which is basically a sealed glass house.
[00:14:46] What he discovered was that this sealed glass case creates its own mini ecosystem, so a plant can survive without water or other nutrients for a very long period of time. It allowed plants to be transported for thousands of kilometres without spoiling.
[00:15:06] At least, it did as long as the case wasn’t opened.
[00:15:10] A year into his trip, Fortune had managed to collect 13,000 plants and 10,000 seeds, more than enough to start production back in India.
[00:15:21] He dutifully packed them into Wardian cases. They would be shipped first to Hong Kong and then to Calcutta, from where they would be transported to the Himalayas, a region of northern India that had a similar climate to that of the tea-producing region of China.
[00:15:39] The problem, which Fortune would only discover many months later, was that along the way a zealous official had decided to open the Wardian cases to look at the plants, thereby destroying the carefully protected ecosystem and killing all but 1,000 of the seeds.
[00:15:58] Fortune was not to be deterred. He continued his trip, collected more seeds and plants, and also recruited a group of Chinese expert tea growers who would come with him to oversee the production of Chinese tea in India.
[00:16:14] Given how closely the Chinese guarded the secret to making tea you might have thought that this would be the hardest bit, but Fortune had the financial backing of the East India Company, and it didn’t take all that much to find tea growers who were willing to come with him.
[00:16:32] So, he had it all. the knowledge of what he had seen firsthand, the plants in their protective glass cases, and a group of Chinese tea experts who would be responsible for managing the entire operation.
[00:16:47] They arrived in India, and travelled to a region of northern India that had a similar climate to that of the tea-producing region of China.
[00:16:56] As the East India company had hoped, it worked.
[00:17:01] From these little seeds and plants, and under the watchful eyes of the Chinese tea growers, grew the Indian tea industry. Within a generation there was more tea coming from India than China, and finally the Chinese stranglehold over the secret of this beverage was no more.
[00:17:20] It was a huge coup for Britain, and for the East India Company, which would make vast amounts of money from its northern Indian tea plantations.
[00:17:30] As to Fortune, he returned to Britain, and went on to live a quiet life.
[00:17:36] If you go to 9 Gilston Road, in London’s South Kensington, you will see a blue plaque on the wall. Blue plaques are typically reserved for people of historical interest. It says “Robert Fortune lived here from 1857-1880” and lists his occupation as “plant collector”.
[00:17:59] By all accounts, Fortune was a modest man, and perhaps he would like the idea of people walking past and thinking that he was merely a man who collected plants.
[00:18:10] In reality, he was a professional botanist, an adventurer, a spy, a travel writer, a diplomat, debatably a thief, and undoubtedly a man who changed the world.
[00:18:21] But to the residents of Gilston Road, and anyone walking by and peering at the name on the blue plaque, he is and will always remain a mere “plant collector”.
[00:18:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Robert Fortune, the man who stole tea from China.
[00:18:38] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new. As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:45] Have you heard of this story before? What do you think about Robert Fortune? Heroic gardener, terrible coloniser, corporate thief, or a mixture of all three? I would love to know.
[00:18:56] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:05] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a Scottish man called Robert Fortune.
[00:00:27] He was a botanist, an expert in plants, but he has gone down in the record books for having pulled off what has been called the greatest corporate espionage in history: the theft of tea from China.
[00:00:42] His is an amazing story that brings together colonialism, international trade, economics, drugs, addiction, botany, pirates and, of course, tea.
[00:00:54] OK then, Robert Fortune.
[00:00:59] It is something of a stereotype that British people love drinking tea.
[00:01:04] Like most stereotypes, there is some truth behind it.
[00:01:08] Brits drink a reported 100 million cups of tea every single day.
[00:01:14] In terms of the amount of tea consumed per capita, per person, Brits are the third biggest consumers of tea in the world, behind only Ireland and Turkey.
[00:01:27] And this has been going on for almost 400 years.
[00:01:32] As you may know, or you might remember from episode number 238, in which we did a deep dive into the history of tea, tea was first brought to Britain in the 1650s.
[00:01:45] It was expensive, and was initially something that only the upper classes could afford.
[00:01:51] Fast forward 150 years or so, and it was something that practically every Brit could afford to drink on a daily basis, multiple times a day even.
[00:02:03] It was safer to drink than water, because it was boiled, it was nice and warm, which comes in handy on a cold, damp British winter morning, it gave you a nice little caffeine boost, and it tasted good.
[00:02:17] Well, it was tea, people enjoyed drinking it then for the same reasons that I and perhaps you enjoy a cup today. By the start of the 19th century, tens of millions of Brits were hooked to their morning tea, but there was a problem.
[00:02:38] Their dealer, the source of the tea, was right over on the other side of the world: china.
[00:02:46] Practically all the tea in the world at this time came from China, and the Chinese were not prepared to let anyone else in on the secret of how you make tea.
[00:02:58] I mean, Brits made tea by adding boiling water to the leaves, and then adding milk and sugar, they knew how to “make” tea once they had the tea leaves.
[00:03:07] But as to where these leaves came from, and how they were prepared so that they could be used for tea, well that was a mystery.
[00:03:18] It was an important mystery to solve for greater reasons than simply curiosity. Firstly, there was the question of how Britain could continue to pay for its tea habit. The Chinese needed to be paid for their tea, so Britain needed a product it could sell China in exchange for tea.
[00:03:41] The problem was that there wasn’t really anything China wanted. It didn’t want British textiles or manufactured goods. To quote the Chinese emperor in a 1793 letter to King George of Britain, “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders”.
[00:04:04] In other words, “we have everything we need”.
[00:04:09] But there was one product that the British found they could sell into China. A product that the Chinese emperor might not have wanted for his people, but that the Chinese people were more than willing to buy: the drug opium.
[00:04:26] So, the trade went like this: Britain grew opium
[00:04:30] in India, shipped it to southern China, sold it to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver, bought tea with silver, then shipped the tea back to Britain.
[00:04:43] Fast forward again to 1839, and China has had enough. Millions of Chinese are hooked on opium, and it is destroying the country.
[00:04:56] A Chinese governor in the south of China threw a massive amount of opium into the sea, sparking off the Opium Wars, which resulted in Britain winning the rights to trade in five treaty ports. We have another entire episode on the Opium Wars, that’s episode number 93, so if you’d like to explore this in more detail, I’d recommend checking that one out afterwards.
[00:05:21] But in the interests of today’s story, we must move on.
[00:05:26] By 1842 the first Opium War was over, China was licking its wounds, thoroughly defeated, and was forced to concede access to foreigners in five port cities.
[00:05:40] Britain continued to send opium into the country, and the number of Chinese addicts continued to grow.
[00:05:49] The tea trade continued, but it was now on shaky ground. Relations between Britain and China were not amicable, they were practical, based only on mutually beneficial trade.
[00:06:04] British opium went in, Chinese tea came out.
[00:06:09] And these trade relations were hanging on a thread.
[00:06:14] What would happen if China legalised the production and consumption of opium? There would be no reason for it to continue trading with Britain, and the supply of tea would be cut off.
[00:06:26] This was a big concern, and it wasn’t only because tea was so tasty.
[00:06:32] To quote a letter from the governor-general of India,
[00:06:35] " “ It is in my opinion by no means improbable that in a few years the Government of Peking, by legalising the cultivation of Opium in China, where the soil has been already proved equally well adapted with India to the growth of the plant, may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue
[00:06:56] The clue to his primary concern is in the last part of the sentence. “may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue”.
[00:07:07] See, tea was big business. Taxes on tea brought in an estimated 10% of the British government’s tax revenue. As a proportion of total government revenue, this is equivalent to corporation tax today.
[00:07:26] In other words, the proportion of the government’s income that came from taxes on tea in the mid 19th century was the same as the proportion of the government’s income that comes from the profits of every single British business today.
[00:07:43] Clearly, protecting the tea trade was of great national importance, and it was of strategic concern that the secret to this entire trade, the secret of how to cultivate tea, was kept hidden deep inside a wounded enemy: China.
[00:08:01] And China at this time was a secret, mysterious place. Foreigners were not allowed to freely travel inland, all trade and all knowledge of what lay inland came through merchants in the five port cities: if you're wondering, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai.
[00:08:24] So, access to China was contained to these five port cities, and foreigners were not legally allowed to travel inland.
[00:08:33] But not all foreigners heeded this law. And it’s here that we need to meet the hero–or villain–of today’s story.
[00:08:43] His name was Robert Fortune, and he was a botanist by trade, an expert in plants.
[00:08:51] He was born in 1812, and as a young man had developed something of a name for himself as an expert horticulturist. He did not grow up in a wealthy family, he had no titles or fortune to his name, so like other entrepreneurial or adventurous Victorian young men, he decided that his name and fortune would be made through exploration.
[00:09:19] In 1842, after the end of the first Opium War, Fortune was commissioned by the Royal Horticultural Society of London to go on a trip to China and examine and collect as many plant samples as he could.
[00:09:34] It took three years, and he returned with a huge collection of wonderful samples of trees, plants and bushes.
[00:09:43] He also had a huge adventure, and–like any Victorian worth their salt–wrote and published an account of his trip, which detailed battles with pirates, encounters with opium addicts, huge storms, almost dying on multiple occasions, as well as plenty of plant references to satisfy armchair botanists back in Britain.
[00:10:07] Importantly for our story, he had also discovered that black and green tea do not come from two different types of tea plants; they come from the same tea leaf, they are simply treated in a different way.
[00:10:24] This made a name for him, and it also brought him to the attention of the most powerful company in the world at that time, some might argue the most powerful company that the world has ever seen: The East India Company.
[00:10:41] As you may know, or remember from episode number 279, The East India Company was this huge, sprawling private company that was given monopolies on trade in Asia by the British government.
[00:10:55] In 1848, a year after the publication of the account of his first trip to China, the East India Company made Robert Fortune an offer he could not refuse.
[00:11:06] They offered to pay him five times his annual salary to go to China, not only to learn the secret of how tea was made but to come back with tea plants and tea making experts, so that the East India Company could start the production of Chinese tea in India.
[00:11:27] They also threw in an extra little bonus, which was that he could keep the commercial rights to any other plants that he discovered on his trip. The East India Company was interested in one thing and one thing only: the secret of how to make tea.
[00:11:44] Fortune jumped at the offer, and set off for China. He had been there before, of course, but as a botanist, someone exploring the plants of the region.
[00:11:56] Now he was coming back for a good so valuable that countries had gone to war for it. He had to carefully create a new persona for himself, a new look and a new identity.
[00:12:10] See, Fortune was a 6 foot tall Scotsman, he was white, he was almost 2 metres tall and had big sideburns.
[00:12:20] To state the obvious, he did not look Chinese.
[00:12:24] So, he had to get creative.
[00:12:27] His persona, his alter ego, was to be a wealthy Chinese official from the north of the country who had come to observe the manufacture of tea.
[00:12:39] He shaved his head in the traditional way, and he got someone else’s ponytail sewn into his hair. He hired a collection of local Chinese men as his guides and translators, and together they seem to have managed to fool everyone. It’s not thought that he spoke any Chinese language, but he gets the men he hired to do the talking for him.
[00:13:05] It must have been incredibly tense at times, but he gets away with it because the people he met didn’t have any knowledge of what a foreigner would look like.
[00:13:15] China was a big place, the people he met probably had never seen anyone from the north of the country, and they wouldn’t be able to converse with one anyway, because they would speak different dialects. So the fact that there was this tall, white man who couldn’t speak any of their language wasn’t as strange as you might have thought.
[00:13:38] This disguise worked, and after travelling for several months deep into the Chinese interior, Fortune is allowed unrestricted access into several tea processing plants. He discovers how tea is processed, and he notes down every step in its production. How long different types of tea should be left outside to dry, how to heat the leaves, how to roll them, how to go from seed, or sapling, through to finished product.
[00:14:10] He also manages to bring with him hundreds of saplings, the little plants, which he plans to ship to India, where they can be grown, as well as back to London for observation.
[00:14:23] And if you are wondering whether he just puts them in his pocket, or he has a big tray of them like someone returning from a garden centre, no, it was slightly more advanced than that.
[00:14:35] Shortly before he had set off, a fellow Scotsman and botanist had invented something called the “Wardian Case”, which is basically a sealed glass house.
[00:14:46] What he discovered was that this sealed glass case creates its own mini ecosystem, so a plant can survive without water or other nutrients for a very long period of time. It allowed plants to be transported for thousands of kilometres without spoiling.
[00:15:06] At least, it did as long as the case wasn’t opened.
[00:15:10] A year into his trip, Fortune had managed to collect 13,000 plants and 10,000 seeds, more than enough to start production back in India.
[00:15:21] He dutifully packed them into Wardian cases. They would be shipped first to Hong Kong and then to Calcutta, from where they would be transported to the Himalayas, a region of northern India that had a similar climate to that of the tea-producing region of China.
[00:15:39] The problem, which Fortune would only discover many months later, was that along the way a zealous official had decided to open the Wardian cases to look at the plants, thereby destroying the carefully protected ecosystem and killing all but 1,000 of the seeds.
[00:15:58] Fortune was not to be deterred. He continued his trip, collected more seeds and plants, and also recruited a group of Chinese expert tea growers who would come with him to oversee the production of Chinese tea in India.
[00:16:14] Given how closely the Chinese guarded the secret to making tea you might have thought that this would be the hardest bit, but Fortune had the financial backing of the East India Company, and it didn’t take all that much to find tea growers who were willing to come with him.
[00:16:32] So, he had it all. the knowledge of what he had seen firsthand, the plants in their protective glass cases, and a group of Chinese tea experts who would be responsible for managing the entire operation.
[00:16:47] They arrived in India, and travelled to a region of northern India that had a similar climate to that of the tea-producing region of China.
[00:16:56] As the East India company had hoped, it worked.
[00:17:01] From these little seeds and plants, and under the watchful eyes of the Chinese tea growers, grew the Indian tea industry. Within a generation there was more tea coming from India than China, and finally the Chinese stranglehold over the secret of this beverage was no more.
[00:17:20] It was a huge coup for Britain, and for the East India Company, which would make vast amounts of money from its northern Indian tea plantations.
[00:17:30] As to Fortune, he returned to Britain, and went on to live a quiet life.
[00:17:36] If you go to 9 Gilston Road, in London’s South Kensington, you will see a blue plaque on the wall. Blue plaques are typically reserved for people of historical interest. It says “Robert Fortune lived here from 1857-1880” and lists his occupation as “plant collector”.
[00:17:59] By all accounts, Fortune was a modest man, and perhaps he would like the idea of people walking past and thinking that he was merely a man who collected plants.
[00:18:10] In reality, he was a professional botanist, an adventurer, a spy, a travel writer, a diplomat, debatably a thief, and undoubtedly a man who changed the world.
[00:18:21] But to the residents of Gilston Road, and anyone walking by and peering at the name on the blue plaque, he is and will always remain a mere “plant collector”.
[00:18:33] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Robert Fortune, the man who stole tea from China.
[00:18:38] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new. As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:45] Have you heard of this story before? What do you think about Robert Fortune? Heroic gardener, terrible coloniser, corporate thief, or a mixture of all three? I would love to know.
[00:18:56] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:05] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
