Maverick Life

The tea thief

Baked tea cups for the production of special edition crockery ahead of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at William Edwards Home Ltd on May 16, 2018 in Stoke on Trent, England. (Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images)

By Don Pinnock

13 Jan 2025

It had taken Robert Fortune years of extensive planning and three months of arduous travel by boat, sedan chair and on foot disguised as a mandarin. His aim was to reach the black tea hills in the fabled Wuyi Mountains of China and steal tea.

The old monk shuffled into Robert Fortune’s room, sank to the floor with his robes flowing round him like petals and began to kowtow, touching his forehead to the floor nine times. Fortune gently raised him to his feet and for the first time felt a stab of guilt.

No Westerner had penetrated this deep into Imperial China and the Buddhist monks at the monastery had given him what he had come to steal: plants and seeds of the finest tea in the world.

He knew that if he got them and the process by which black tea leaves were prepared to India undetected, the result would destroy China’s global monopoly of fine tea and quite possibly the Chinese economy. And here he was accepting the generous hospitality and near-veneration of those he had come to defraud.

He was, he would later admit, ashamed and wrote: “I nearly lost my gravity.” It did not prevent him, however, from receiving as a parting gift from the head of the monastery seedlings of the Da Hong Pao, the most rarefied and expensive tea in the world.

Fortune’s undercover spying operations and theft would result in a global realignment of colonial domination and vast wealth for 19th-century Great Britain. At a personal level, his achievements were remarkable. He was dressed in flowing robes, his head shaved and had a long pigtail down his back. If he had been unmasked as a Westerner he would have been immediately killed. His assistant portrayed him as a nobleman from afar, hence his poor Mandarin.

It had taken years of extensive planning and three months of arduous travel by boat, sedan chair and on foot to reach the black tea hills in the fabled Wuyi Mountains in Bohea. No Westerner had ever seen the legendary black tea peaks and valleys from where the gentlest, most desired Oolong tea had its origins.

His orders from his employers, the East India Company – one of the world’s first multinational corporations – were to steal tea seeds and plants then transport them to the company’s plantations on the foothills of the Himalayas in India. Also essential was precise information on the growing, picking and preparation of the famous tea.

Scottish botanist and explorer Robert Fortune (Image: Supplied)

Fortune was a botanist but, more importantly, a gardener. These were things he understood. His almost intuitive understanding of growing things and appreciation of the skill of the Chinese farmers would endear him to those from whom he would acquire plants and seeds.

They would have had no idea of their destination.

The great tea theft cannot be appreciated without understanding the opium trade and the growing British taste for tea.

Over hundreds of years China had developed and perfected the art of growing and producing the world’s finest green and black teas, but its fierce insularity kept the secret from prying foreigners.

Tea had been introduced into England in the 1660s as part of the dowry of Portuguese princess Catherine de Braganza when she married Charles II. Because of the high cost of importation, it became a fashionable status symbol among the wealthy who could afford it.

Victorian tea cup. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

Victorian ladies at tea. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

The tea came from China which picked, roasted and blended it, then sold it to England at a painful mark-up. It was said to be picked for a penny and sold for a pound. Despite a century of diplomatic approaches, the Chinese had yielded absolutely no secrets about its manufacture to the British and it was central to the Chinese economy.

So how does opium fit into the equation?

When the British Raj took control of India in 1858, a business opportunity became available. Parts of the country were perfect for growing poppies, Papaver somniferum, a ready source of opium. English ships, which had a toe-hold in Chinese ports, began selling opium there, sparking growing demand and increasing addiction. The Exalted and Celestial Emperor in Peking had “officially” banned the sale of opium in China in 1729 but, regardless, it was smuggled in for generations afterwards.

By the mid-19th century millions of Chinese people – it was estimated one in every three adults – were opium addicts.

With demand for tea escalating in the 19th century, merchant ship captains were becoming increasingly frustrated by the high price demanded by Chinese tea merchants, but as the country held the monopoly they could do nothing about it.

The East India Company tried to solve the problem by planting tea in the hill stations of India, a country over which it had gained firm control by the mid-century. The product was poor, the taste bitter and Indian Assam tea found no market traction back home. The discerning English public demanded Chinese tea.

The solution was a no-brainer: use opium to fund the tea trade.

Where the English had been trading for their breakfast tea with silver and racking up a crushing balance of payments problem, the growing opium trade quickly reversed the imbalance in England’s favour.

For well more than 100 years the trade in both plants would pour silver bullion into the coffers of the British exchequer. Tea taxes funded railways, roads and Civil Service salaries, among the many other necessities of an emerging industrial nation, while opium financed the management of India – the shining jewel in Queen Victoria’s imperial crown. For London it was a deal made in heaven. For China, with addiction soaring, it was closer to an arrangement crafted in hell.

In 1839 a leading Chinese court official in the trading port of Canton, rankled by unscrupulous foreigners and the opium addiction among his own people, held the entire foreign encampment hostage, ransoming the 300 Britons for their opium, then worth £6-million (about £145-million today) and destroyed the entire stock.

A young Queen Victoria sent in her navy to keep the opium-for-tea arrangement alive. In what would be known as the Opium War, it trashed the Chinese junks that tried to hold it off and Britain defeated the Qing Dynasty from which it demanded massive concessions, including the island of Hong Kong plus limited access to five walled ports on the mainland.

Until then no foreigner had been permitted to leave China’s southernmost port to explore the interior. With the Qing defeat, the door opened just a crack. However, there was a nagging worry in London, stated by an influential general named Henry Harding.

“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. Under this view I deem it most desirable to afford every encouragement to the cultivation of Tea in India.”

If the manufacture of tea in India was to be successful, Britain would need good specimens of the finest plants, thousands of seeds and the ancient knowledge of Chinese teamakers. But inland China was still closed to foreigners on pain of death. Forced to sign crippling treaties humiliating the Emperor, China was seething with unrest.

What was needed was a brave botanist, a gardener, a spy and a thief.

Enter Robert Fortune. A hunter of exotic plants, Fortune had been to China before on an expedition for the Royal Horticultural Society, but nearly died of fever. Almost every plant he got back to London was unknown in the West. He was not university trained but had a qualification in horticulture. Under his skilled hands, plants grew.

About his first trip, he would write a book, Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, which contained some ripping tales of bravado.

In disguise, he wrote: “I believe I made a very fair Chinaman.” He successfully befriended Chinese peasants, boatmen, guides and porters. It would stand him in good stead for what was to follow.

After returning to London and writing his book, he was summoned to East India House, the headquarters of the East India Company, in January 1848. They would, they said, pay him £500 a year plus passage and other travel expenses to steal from China the finest plants, seeds and recipes in the manufacture of tea. He would have to keep the plants healthy and arrange for their transplanting to India.

After some thought, he agreed.

Later that year Fortune was in Shanghai – in disguise in a flat-bottomed boat with two servants and the accoutrements for plant collecting – heading inland towards the Yellow Mountain and the home of green tea.

After a hair-raising trip where his disguise was almost blown, he was told the recipe for the production of the tea. He returned to Shanghai with the precious plants in specially glazed sealed boxes called Wardian cases, as well as seeds and shipped them to India. But the ship was delayed, the cases were unsealed too early and the seeds rotted. It was a total failure.

Taeping Tea Clipper 1863

Chinese port. (Photo: Devon and Exeter Institution)

A Wardian case. (Image: Wikimedia)

Wardian cases. (Image: Wikimedia)

Furious but undeterred, Fortune set out again, this time for the Wuyi Mountains in Bohea, the home of black tea. There was no reliable route through areas which were unknown to any Westerner. He would travel with a dignified guide named Sing Hoo who had worked in the Imperial Court. His status would prove useful, but his main value was that he was from Fujian, where the Wuyi Hills were situated and he spoke the local dialect.

They planned to take three months, travelling by boat, on foot and by sedan chair for a distance of nearly 500km. His quest was to bring back the finest tea in the world which the English craved beyond all other.

When river navigation ended they travelled by sedan chair then by foot along mountain footpaths. It was a slow journey which, as Fortune wrote, was both unnerving and startlingly beautiful. He also noticed extreme poverty.

The effect of the Opium War was clear, with currency radically devalued and peasants taxed to pay for the war.

Fortune was unaware that he was heading into an area which, shortly after his departure, would explode into the Taiping Rebellion, ending with the destruction of about 600 cities and death of 20 million Chinese. High in the mountains, he would cross the route the Taiping Army would take on its journey to the black tea district.

“In some places the height was so great that it made me giddy to look down,” he wrote.

Bohea, when he and Sing Hoo finally reached it after weeks of climbing, was a botanist’s dream. Black tea bushes covered the slopes and in the valleys grew oak, thistle, pine and bamboo. Black mountain karsts thrust into the sky like giant fingers, the gates of Bohea.

Fortune was in the heart of black tea country with farms everywhere. Tea pickers, mostly women, were busy on every slope. From each bush only a few leaves at the tip were picked, requiring huge labour for small amounts of tea leaves.

Fortune and Sing Hoo entered a large temple at the foot of the mountains and asked for accommodation. They were graciously received, ushered to the finest room and given tea. One sip told Fortune he had reached his goal – a ripe Oolong with the aroma of orchids. The monks then prepared a banquet lunch in their honour.

The monks specialised in the preparation of tea and were happy to share their knowledge. The tea thief took copious notes on processing and drying. In the hills he collected saplings and seeds, hiring children to help him. The monks added to his collection. Then he boxed his haul and headed back to the coast.

In Shanghai he packed the tea saplings in his Wardian cases and with the seeds safely stored he sailed for India.

The Himalayas around Darjeeling would provide perfect terroir for the Chinese tea and with Fortune’s seeds and plants a new industry was born. As the Indian plantations expanded, the price of tea came down and was embraced by all classes. By the late 19th century tea was the most popular drink throughout Britain.

To be English was to drink tea.

Every tea field following Fortune’s return would contain the genes of the plants and seeds he stole. By the time he died in 1880 – a rich man from the sale of ornamental plants collected on his travels – India had become the centre of production for high-quality tea.

The tea trade, aided by fast new ships known as tea clippers, revolutionised Britain’s capital and banking systems and saw the rapid growth of trade networks in the Far East. The trade would prolong the global dominance of the small island across the English Channel by nearly a century.

China’s tea exports went into decline. In 1911 the Qing dynasty collapsed, ushering in a fierce nationalist party known as the Kuomintang and eventually the Chinese Communist Party.

In her book, For All the Tea in China, Sarah Rose writes: “Today, Darjeeling is considered the champagne of teas. It has the finest brew, the most delicate floral nose, the richest liquor, the most opulent amber colour... When Robert Fortune stole tea from China, it was the greatest theft of protected trade secrets that the world has ever known. His actions would today be described as industrial espionage.” DM

This story was first published in the Jack Journal Vol 6. You can watch the movie here.

Sources

I am particularly indebted to insights into Fortune’s travels from the excellent book by Sarah Rose: For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History.

Robert Fortune: A Plant Hunter in the Orient by Alistair Watt.

Books by Robert Fortune:

Three Years’ Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China, a Visit to the Tea, Silk and Cotton Countries (1847).

A Journey To The Tea Countries Of China; Including Sung-Lo And The Bohea Hills (1852).

Two visits to the tea countries of China and the British tea plantations in the Himalaya (1853).

A Residence Among the Chinese: Inland, On the Coast and at Sea; being a Narrative of Scenes and Adventures During a Third Visit to China from 1853 to 1856 (1857).

Yedo and Peking: A Narrative of a Journey to the Capitals of Japan and China (1863).

The growth of tea by Liam Drew (Nature, vol. 566, no. 7742, Feb. 2019).

Tea and China’s rise: tea, nationalism and culture in the 21st century by Gary Sigley (International Communication of Chinese Culture volume 2, 2015).

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