The East India Company’s agent was Robert Fortune, a curator at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. Unlike many of his colleagues, Fortune was neither titled nor wealthy nor even well connected. He was born in Edrom, in rural, southeast Scotland, a few miles from the border with England, and on his birth entry his father’s occupation is listed as “hedger.”1 Having little formal education, Fortune began as an apprentice and then obtained a qualification in horticulture (though not medicine like most botanists). Skilled and ambitious, he worked in positions at the botanic garden at Edinburgh and then gardens of London’s Horticultural Society 2 (now the Royal Horticultural Society). He lacked the financial self-sufficiency generally expected for such gentlemanly expeditions, even those taken at the behest of others. But as a talented botanist, experienced in the delicate process of sending plants back to Europe, and, quite exceptionally, widely traveled in China, he was the perfect man for the job.
Fortune had not long returned from a lengthy trip in China. Six months to the day after the signing of the 1841 Treaty of Nanking, following the First Opium War, the Horticultural Society had dispatched the thirty–year-old on a flora-gathering mission. Surely, the parts in his subsequent book, Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, about traveling into prohibited areas of the Middle Kingdom in disguise particularly caught the attention of the Company’s board.
For this new mission, Fortune’s brief was different—and difficult: to gather tea plants, as well as production secrets, for both green and black tea. The consensus of British botanists was that green and black tea came from different plants rather than different ways of processing the leaves; Fortune suspected otherwise. While five ports were then open to foreigners, the great tea-producing regions of the interior remained off-limits. Fortune knew that he could not rely on agents but had to go himself to be certain of the plants’ sources, as well as to gather careful notes on soil and cultivation. Apart from a handful of Arab traders and Jesuit missionaries, few foreigners had ever penetrated so deeply into China or returned alive to tell of it.
Arriving in Hong Kong in August 1848, Fortune traveled immediately a thousand miles north to Shanghai and then inland to the picturesque, green-tea-producing areas around the Yellow Mountain region. A day out of Shanghai, he had his head shaved, donned Chinese robes, and had his servant sew on a braided hair tail that hung nearly to his heels.3 Like this, Fortune became his alter ego, Sing Wa, a respected businessman from some country “beyond the great wall” that justified his height and pale skin, heavy accent, and inability to speak the local dialects, and perhaps the reason he lacked a certain intrinsic fluency with chopsticks. Traveling by boat and on a sedan chair carried by teams of locally hired “coolies,” he reached his target and found tea growing luxuriantly on the hillside. He didn’t collect tea himself, but obtained plants and seeds from nurseries.
Back in Shanghai, Fortune readied his first shipment for the Calcutta Botanic Garden. At that time, a major problem for plant hunters was getting species back to sponsoring gardens in good shape. With stowage at a premium and freshwater always in short supply, ships were reluctant to transport them. Salty sea spray and merciless tropical sun were enemies of a plant’s survival, as were livestock on board, which would nibble on the tender shoots and flowers whenever possible.
To combat this, Fortune used Wardian cases, sealed glass boxes that had been recently developed by a physician in London’s East End named Nathaniel Ward. Acting like mini-greenhouses, they allowed the plants plenty of light and a fairly stable temperature. By recycling moisture, the plants could stay alive for years within the closed environment.
Fortune packed the first batch of plants in the glazed cases. Tea seeds were particularly sensitive and, Fortune observed, only retained their vitality for a short period of time. Unsure as to the best approach, he tried several. “Some were packed in loose canvas bags,” he wrote, “others were mixed with dry earth and put into boxes, and others again were put up in very small packages, in order to be quickly forwarded by post.”4
Not until the following year (1849) did word reach him that the plants had arrived in Calcutta in good shape. The seeds, though, had failed to germinate. None of his methods, he wrote drily, “were attended with much success.”5 Although his travelogue, A Journey to the Tea Countries of China; Including Sung-Lo and the Bohea Hills; with a Short Notice of the East India Company’s Tea Plantations in the Himalaya Mountains, does not record it as such, the loss must have been a deep blow.
By then, Fortune had long since headed back into the interior. This time he traveled southwest to the famed black-tea-producing hills up the Min River and into the Bohea Hills of Fujian Province. Again, Fortune was successful in obtaining stock. With this load he tried new ways to send the seeds.
Having procured some fine mulberry-plants from the district where the best Chinese silk is produced, I planted them in a Ward’s case in the usual way, and watered them well. In two or three days, when the soil was sufficiently dry, a large quantity of tea-seeds were scattered over its surface, and covered with earth about half an inch deep. The whole was now sprinkled with water, and fastened down with a few crossbars to keep the earth in its place. The case was then screwed down in the usual way, and made as tight as possible.6
When the cases arrived in Calcutta, the mulberry plants were in good condition, and, encouragingly, the tea seeds had germinated. “The young tea-plants were sprouting around the mulberries as thick as they could come up,” wrote Dr. Hugh Falconer,7 who had recently taken over from Wallich as superintendent of the botanic garden, upon their receipt.
Fortune continued to hone his techniques as he filled and sent on more Wardian cases to Falconer. They arrived in good shape and were sent on to experimental tea gardens newly established in the western Himalayan foothills.
Now confident in his system of getting the plants and seeds to India in good shape, Fortune gathered his final, grand batch, the one that he would accompany himself to Calcutta. When this was accomplished, Fortune set out to fulfill what he deemed the most difficult part of his commission. He needed to convince experienced Chinese tea manufacturers from the best tea districts to go to India and teach their techniques to the fledging industry.
It proved easier than expected. Using a well-connected agent who offered the Chinese experts handsomely paid three-year contracts along with the promise of certain freedom in their tea planting and power over both Indians and British workers,8 Fortune engaged eight tea makers to emigrate illegally, even given the threat of torture and flogging not only to themselves but their families. He obtained a large assortment of tea-making implements.
Fortune filled fourteen Wardian cases with rows of young tea plants and sowed the tea seeds among them. He was left with a bushel of remaining seeds that he did not want to waste and layered them with earth under a collection of Chinese camellia plants for the botanic garden in two additional glass cases.
In mid-February 1851, Fortune, the Chinese recruits, the tools of their trade, and the tea-filled Wardian cases sailed from Shanghai to Hong Kong. There, the group boarded the Lady Mary Wood, a Peninsular & Oriental wooden steamship built ten years before and used on the Calcutta–Hong Kong service, for which the 160-foot steamer had carried a cargo of opium on its outbound run.9
The journey to Calcutta took a month. In mid-March, the Lady Mary Wood crossed the Bay of Bengal and entered the Hooghly River, the westernmost distributary of the Ganges. “Almost any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than you imagine,” begins a Rudyard Kipling story, “but the Pilots of the Hugli know that they have one hundred miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their hands—the Hugli between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal.”10 In addition to shifting shoals, silt beds, mud banks, heavy currents, and a seven-foot tidal bore, at the time of year when Fortune and company were making their way to Calcutta, early monsoon winds were beginning to blow up through the funnel-shaped bay. Eventually the Lady Mary Wood neared the Second City of the Empire, the City of Palaces: Calcutta.