For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History [Kindle Edition]

Sarah Rose (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Through the adventures of Robert Fortune, a nineteenth-century plant hunter, the reader learns a delicious brew of information on the history of tea cultivation and consumption in the Western world. Rose’s book is certain to draw the attention of history buffs, foodies, avid travel-literature fans, followers of popular science, and perhaps even business-interest book consumers as she reconstructs what she posits as the “greatest theft of trade secrets in the history of mankind.” Tea was grown in China. Great Britain wanted tea. But trying to trade with the Celestial Empire was like pulling teeth. So the East India Company sent hunter Fortune, undercover (dressed in mandarin robes), to penetrate the depths of China and surreptitiously gather—steal, in other words—seeds and young plants and send them to India, where they would flourish in soil that was part of the British Empire. The author’s bold conclusion to this remarkably riveting tale is that Fortune’s “actions would today be described as industrial espionage,” but nevertheless he “changeed the fate of nations.” --Brad Hooper

Review

"A wonderful combination of scholarship and storytelling"
-Guy Raz, NPR host All Things Considered.

"With her probing inquiry and engaging prose, Sarah Rose paints a fresh and vivid account of life in rural 19th-century China and Fortune's fateful journey into it...if ever there was a book to read in the company of a nice cuppa, this is it."
-Washington Post

"The plot for Sarah Rose's For All the Tea in China seems tailor-made for a Hollywood thriller...a story that should appeal to readers who want to be transported on a historic journey laced with suspense, science and adventure."
-Associated Press

"An enthusiastic tale of how the humble leaf became a global addiction."
-The Financial Times

"A delicious brew of information on the history of tea cultivation and consumption in the Western world...a remarkably riveting tale."
-Booklist, (starred review)

"In For All the Tea in China, the most eventful era of the tea plant gets the inspired treatment it deserves."
-Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Sarah Rose steeps us in the story of Robert Fortune."
-National Geographic Traveler

"Pause to reflect that the tea you are enjoying is totally hot - as in, stolen! Nabbed! Ripped off! Nothing more than the subject of international corporate espionage!"
-Chicago Sun Times

"In this lively account of the adventures (and misadventures) that lay behind Robert Fortune's bold acquisition of Chinese tea seedlings for transplanting in British India, Sarah Rose demonstrates in engaging detail how botany and empire- building went hand in hand."
-Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China

"As a lover of tea and a student of history, I loved this book. Sarah Rose conjures up the time and tales as British Legacy Teas are created before our eyes. We drink the delicious results of Robert Fortune's adventures every day."
-Michael Harney, author of The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea

"For All The Tea In China is a rousing Victorian adventure story chronicling the exploits of botanical thief Robert Fortune, who nearly single- handedly made the British tea industry possible in India. Sarah Rose has captured the thrill of discovery, the dramatic vistas in the Wuyi Mountains, and the near-disasters involved in Fortune's exploits. For tea-lovers, history buffs, or anyone who enjoys a ripping good read."
-Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 426 KB
• Publisher: Penguin (February 22, 2011)
• Sold by: Penguin Publishing
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0030CVQKI
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,098 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Botany
  • #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Botany
  • #5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Cooking, Food & Wine > Drinks & Beverages > Coffee & Tea

More About the Author

Sarah Rose is the author of FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History (Viking, 2010), the true story of a 19th Century botanist who traveled undercover in Qing China to steal the secrets of tea for England and the East India Company; the largest act of corporate espionage in the history of the world.

Named the BBC's Book of the Week, FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA was called "a wonderful combination of scholarship and storytelling" by NPR and "An enthusiastic tale of how the humble leaf became a global addiction," by the Financial Times. It received starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal and the AudioPhile Earphones Award for the author-read audiobook.

In Hong Kong, Miami and New York, Rose has covered a broad range of beats including international politics and economics during the Hong Kong handover, finance and business during the end of the dot com bubble, the environment, and local stories such as cops, courts and schools. She now writes about food and travel for magazines such as Men's Journal and Bon Appetit.

A Chicago native, Rose holds degrees from Harvard College and the University of Chicago. She has been awarded the North American Travel Journalists Association Grand Prize in Writing, finalist in the John T. Lupton "New Voices in Literature" Award in Non-Fiction, and was a grant recipient from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

For All the Tea in China is her first book, published by Viking in the US, Hutchison in the UK.

Visit her on the web at sarahrose.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Swashbuckling Scientist and Gardener!, March 17, 2010

By 

Miz Ellen "all the letters of my real name" (Bovine Universe) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Sarah Rose has rescued the aptly named Robert Fortune from the footnotes of Victorian obscurity and written an engrossing story explaining one of the great heists of history: how the British stole tea plants from China and successfully transplanted them in India. It's a spy story for gardeners in which daring-do and botany coexist on every page.

Robert Fortune was the son of a Scottish farm worker. Lacking the means to get a formal education, Fortune learned his skills from practical apprenticeship and obtained a post at the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Chiswick. His skill at cultivating rare blooms from the Orient in hothouses earned him a ticket to China at the end of the First Opium War. His mandate was to collect rare plants and study the botany of China. He almost died there. As he lay gravely ill, the Chinese junk he was on was attacked by pirates. Fortune roused, rushed up on deck and organized a successful defense. The incident illustrates his courage and resource when confronted by adversity.

On his return to London in 1847, he wrote a book about his experiences in China that became a bestseller. When the British East India Company looked around for a man capable of penetrating into the interior of China and obtaining plant specimens and seeds for purposed tea plantations in India, Fortune was the man they turned to.

This is a fascinating book on many fronts. As a story of corporate espionage, it touches on issues of trade and economics that are controversial today. The technology used to bring viable seeds and plants to India is astounding when one considers that sailing ships were the transportation means of that era. A spotlight is put on the opium trade, an issue that still resonates. Sarah Rose writes with a lively, clear style that makes this a hard book to put down. I recommend this book to historians, tea drinkers, economists, gardeners and corporate policy makers. Brew up a cup and enjoy!

47 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nonfiction?, March 12, 2010

By 

A. R. Grenier (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

One thing that this book has going for it - and the only thing, really - is that the topic is interesting. I love looking at globalization from a historical perspective, and this does that. I do have a background in history - I am not an academic, but my undergraduate degree was in the field. As such, I was a little skeptical about her comment in the Notes "As this is a work of popular history, not a scholarly undertaking, I have avoided the use of footnotes and tried to steer clear of mentioning sources in the body of the text. Nevertheless, this is a work of nonfiction..." However, I decided that if she could pull off the story than I'd give her that it is in fact a work of popular nonfiction (even though that's assuming that non-academics don't want to know where she got her information).
The problem with this approach that I discovered shortly into the book, is that the entire work comes off as pure conjecture. On one page, Rose will note that there is little in the way of primary source material on Fortune's life - that his wife destroyed much of it, if it ever existed, upon his death. There is no clear way of looking into how Fortune was as a private man. On the next page she'll be describing how Fortune reacted or felt about certain things. Yet she repeatedly notes that there is actually no information to support how Fortune might have felt. How can you claim to be nonfiction when you are writing a story that is pieced together with your own imagination?
I suppose I could get past that irritant if the story itself was well written - but it's not. The writing style is jilted and wandering with occasional side notes that are unnecessary. Overall, I would not recommend this book.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Tea is not so much a thing as a cupful of effects", February 24, 2010

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

The genre of how one product changed our lives flourishes, and perhaps Britain more than America was so altered by the export of cheap, tasty black tea in Victorian times. Yet, Rose shows how globalization, the drug trade, rapid transport, and botanical espionage and corporate deceit managed to boost Robert Fortune into his modest role as the East India Company's operative who'd pluck Chinese tea seeds and smuggle them out in glass boxes to India, where they would become the hybrids mingled with Himalayan plants to make the black tea we enjoy today.

This would earn billions for a British empire tangled in the opium trade with a restive China, and replace that nation's supply of tea with that grown by its more reliable subjects in India. This shift kept English domination, expanded globalization, set off quicker tea clippers to bring tea to an invigorated porcelain and clay manufacturing region, and would increase health standards as less beer and more water was boiled and then brewed.

Tea picking, she explains, is as if the topmost boughs and last couple of leaves of a Christmas tree were selected. Extremely laborious to gather, 32,000 shoots make ten pounds, nearly what a picker could gather in a day. Five pounds of fresh leaves produce one dry pound.

I found such details intriguing. As Vine offers a proof to read, I do not know if maps and pictures will be included, but no such evidence is in my copy. These features would have enriched the text, for while Rose tells the journeys of Fortune carefully, Western readers unfamiliar with China might have benefited from charts here. Also, the Sepoy Mutiny episode, however crucial to the hold of the East India Company and the British empire over India, appears tangential to merit its own chapter, however skillfully summarized.

Rose tells Fortune's own dramatic story well. As he wrote his own account, there is necessary paraphrase and citation, but largely we hear it retold by Rose rather than recounted by Fortune. Along the way we learn about gardens as incorporating the dimension of time into space, of Chinese "face," the sordid coolie trade, opium dens, Enfield rifles, pirates, and how Fortune gave his name to the edible fruit he found, Citrus fortunei, or the kumquat. His 13,000 original seedlings in terraria failed to survive, but another batch did, and from these, the Assam tea business and Darjeeling blends thrive today. He also learned what confounded earlier botanists: while green and black tea plants are harvested separately in different regions, the tea is from the same plant, Camellian sinensis, but only black is cured or "harvested." Cheap sugar boosted the British preference for a tea able to take milk and sugar, the black kind. But, the Indian Assam variety originally was too harsh for European palates, and a hybrid from the protected Chinese varietals was demanded.

Fortune's journey along the "Bohea" Great Tea Road is the highlight of this narrative. At the Wuyi Shan monastery, Buddhists cultivated the craft. Today, the Da Hong Pao type is still guarded by armed men, worth far more than its weight in gold. Here, Fortune found the seeds he'd sneak out that would become today's tea stock. It was a business even around 1850 bringing in $650 million annually in today's money, and out of such a lucrative commerce, Rose demonstrates, globalized networks began to extend that we rely on today with Asia and beyond.