Carrying on my plan to read more about tea, I started on For All the Tea in China, a book that deals with a very specific part of tea’s history: how tea and the knowledge of tea processing left China and made its way into the world.

While the subtitle says “how England stole the world’s favourite drink and changed history”, it really should be “how Robert Fortune stole the world’s favourite drink and changed history” because it is centered on Fortune’s adventures and his published accounts of his time in China (of course he was the one who smuggled tea and lured tea produces to India so it would be weird if he wasn’t the focus)

To be honest, while I was vaguely aware that tea was smuggled out of China, I didn’t know that the way it was smuggled out was so exciting! At that time, China was closed off to visitors (interesting to me because I always thought that only Japan had a sakoku period) which meant that to travel inland, Fortune had to adopt the hairstyle and dress of a Chinese man.

The environment was also, as the book put it, “hostile […] to Britons unaccustomed to the humidity, insects, vermin, disease, and terrible sanitation of even the most civilised outpost.” Plus the fact that he couldn’t speak Chinese fluently, which meant that he was heavily dependent on his hired translators, who happily squeezed as much money as possible out of him.

This book is so much more than just the story of Fortune smuggling out plant, though. It also talks about what the tea plant is and how to grow and process it (seem through the British struggles of growing tea in India), as well as the cultural attitudes and ideas of the day – it was pretty laughable to think that people used to debate about whether green tea and black tea cake from different plants.

Plus, the book also highlights some big changes in tea history, like how Fortune’s discovery that the Chinese were dyeing the teas with Prussian Blue to make it greener and hence appealing to the British led to a turn from green tea towards black. Or how once the best Chinese tea plants were smuggled to India, Darjeeling and other Indian teas took over from Chinese teas despite the fact that Chinese teas used to be seen as being the highest quality.

I also enjoyed (and cringed) reading about the cultural barriers that occurred. Although Fortune’s first trip to China helped softened his prejudices, he was still a very much hampered by his prejudices and apt to look down on the Chinese and completely not get the concept of saving face. Likewise, the Chinese misunderstood the British with the whole dying green tea to make it greener thing.

But the clearest example of two groups of people looking past one another might be in the use of pidgin, which is a mix of English, Chinese, and some Hindi and Portuguese. The book writes that “with communication proving so difficult, it is little wonder that foreigners and the Chinese held each other in such low esteem.” And I agree with that because you can’t respect someone you don’t understand.

All in all, this is a fascinating account of an important period in tea history. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in tea, history, or both.