HOW A SCOTTISH BOTANIST STOLE CHINA'S TEA AND CHANGED INDIAN HISTORY
Image Source - OZY Robert Fortune knew his tea. In 1843, the Scottish botanist sailed to China, funded by the Royal Horticultural Society, to study the varieties of the drink grown there that had become hugely popular in Britain. But when the British East India Company reached out to him in 1848 and requested he return to China, it was for a very different mission — this time not to study, but to steal. By that time — more than 2,000 years after the Chinese first started sipping tea and two centuries after the British fell hard and fast for the drink — the British East India Company had lost its trade monopoly in China, and the supply of drink had ebbed even as demand grew. That autumn in Shanghai, Fortune shaved and put on what he later referred to as “Mandarin garb” to tour a tea factory in disguise as an official from a different Chinese province. The superintendent showed him around the factory, where workers plucked, brewed and dried the precious tea. Little di