Hafizzz
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The Man Who Stole Chinas Treasure
The Man Who Stole China
On the face of it, it seemed entirely foolish to be a lone European in the interior of China. This fact was not lost on Fortunes servants. When Wang tried to negotiate Fortunes passage with the small junk captains in Shanghai, the sailors refused. Boatmen were beaten and tortured for traffickingthe waterways with Westerners on board. On this account it was impossible to engage a boat as a foreigner and I desiredmy servant to hire it in his own name, and merely state that two other persons were to accompany him. It was a shrewd plan, and Wang returned with a contract officially signed, stamped with a chop, or character-bearing seal. But as the travelling crew loaded the ship, the Coolie, either from ignorance or malice, let the captain know Fortunes secret identity. Fortune feared the boatmen would no longer consent to having a foreigner on board, especially after being tricked, but Wang assured his master the trip could proceed as planned, if only you will consent to add a trifle more to the fare . Sitting on a crate, getting a queue sewn into his hair, on only his first day out of Shanghai, Fortune had left the comparative safety of the foreign-trade zones. His status had thereupon shifted dramatically downward and he was now relying on two servants and a new hairdo to protect him. He sought to steal one of Chinas greatest treasures; angry citizens, merciless officials and opportunistic vendors would face no consequences for molesting, or even killing, him. No one would trouble to report his death.
Fortune was patient as the Coolie attended to his new coif. A small blue and white tea bowl sat nearby on a dusty crate and Fortune reached for it. Sitting still and erect, despite the discomfort of the hairstyling, he swirled the sediment of leaves and spilled the cooling tea out on to the dirty deck. Hair, muck and depleted tea leaves lay at his feet. Floors were for garbage in China it seemed, he was trying to behave in the Chinese manner, in order to fit in. And so, in the Chinese way, he had warmed the porcelain bowl and washed it with the hot water. Green tea was not Fortunes preference, absent the civilised comforts of milk and sugar. He was coming to appreciate the Chinese way of tea, plain and unadulterated. But more, he understood the expedience of doing things the Chinese way. Fortune was a constant curiosity when travelling as a Westerner; he seemed as peculiar to the Chinese as they did to him. To them the Scotsman looked grotesque; he was so tall, his nose was much longer than a nose need be, and his eyes were too round; round eyes were generally considered a sign of intelligence, but Fortune, with his halting Chinese, would have sounded like a child to them when he spoke. The simple act of eating brought him unwanted attention. He eats and drinks like ourselves, observed one member of a crowd, watching him on his first trip, Fortune recalled. Look, said two or three behind me who had been examining the back part of my head rather attentively, look here, the stranger has no tail; then the whole crowd, women and children included, had to come round to me to see if it was really a fact that I had no tail.
On this trip his servants insisted that they would join him only if he took steps to disguise himself upon leaving Shanghai. They were quite willing to accompany me, only stipulating that I should discard my English costume and adopt the dress of the country. I knew this was indispensable if I wished to accomplish the object in view and readily acceded to the terms.
The style of the day required that all ethnic Chinese men shave the front of their heads as an act of fealty to the Emperor. The tonsure of nearly 200 million people demonstrated the invading Manchurian courts power over the individual. The Qing emperors used tonsure as a way of controlling the mob, of transforming a multi-ethnic, heterodox society into a visually unified one. Refusing to be shaven was an act of sedition whereas agreeing to the ritual was a sign of submission to the status quo.
The Coolie consequently took his rusty razor to the front of Fortunes head and began to create a new, higher hairline for him. He did not shave, he actually scraped my poor head until the tears came running down my cheeks and I cried out with pain, Fortune wrote. I suppose I must be the first person upon whom he had ever operated, and I am charitable enough to wish most sincerely I may be the last.
On that first day of his journey towards tea, Fortune rehearsed the rational for his journey, the hows, the whys and the whens of his planned tea offensive. The job was big, and would require several years in China to complete. To jumpstart production in the East India Companys tea gardens, it was crucial that he bring back several thousand tea plants, many thousand more seeds, plus the highly specialised but previously elusive techniques of Chinese tea-growing and manufacturing practices. He had to recruit tea manufacturers from the finest factories. He was to learn the secrets of growing and processing the worlds most popular drink, so that he could pass these secrets on, create a master recipe, and enable large-scale production of tea in India. It was not just the horticultural challenge of raising tea that excited Fortune; as a man of science he saw no reason why a plant should remain so shrouded in myth and mystery; why it should not be subjected to the enlightened analysis of Western inquiry. In this he was a man of his time, a British naturalist who believed that simple and rational explanations could be deduced for every living thing under Gods sun. He wanted Chinas secrets.
But before Fortune could formulate the perfect tea recipe, however, he needed to obtain the basic ingredients: the finest classes of tea China had to offer, both green and black. To this end he decided to make at least two separate tea-hunting trips in disguiseone each for green tea and black tea, for the two never grew together in the same regions. Green tea and black tea required different growing conditions, Fortune believed. The best green tea was in the north, whereas the best black came from mountains in Southern China.
Fortune chose to make the first of his trips to the green tea districts of Zhejiang and Anhui Provinces. His second would not take place for at least another season, when he would go to the fabled black tea districts of the Bohea or Wu Yi Mountains in Fujian province, travelling as far as two hundred miles inland.
While black tea was the bigger prize for Fortune and the East India Company, given its popularity in the West, it was also more difficult to obtain. High among the fingerlike mountain karsts, the thin air and chill nights produced the richest Oolongs, Pekoes and Souchongs: the finest black teas in the world. It was at least a three-month trek south from Shanghai to the border areas between Fujian and Shaanxi provinces, without the option of remaining out of public view on a river boat. The misty Wu Yi Shan were remote. No foreigner, save the occasional French missionary, had been there since the days of Marco Polo.
By comparison, the logistics of stealing green tea were relatively uncomplicated because the districts producing the finest greens were easy to get to, requiring only a few weeks sail on the great Yangtze River and its tributaries. He had made similar, shorter ventures on his previous trip, travelling by boat until he reached a distant hillside, then wandering with Wardian cases until he had harvested his seeds and dug his fill of specimens.
On his first trip to China, Fortune had learned more about tea growing than any Westerner in the world. He had visited accessible green tea gardens near the treaty port of Ning Bo in the company of the British Consul. Two entire chapters of Three Years Wanderings are devoted to what he observed there about the growth, manufacture and processing of the tea plant. Tea was so crucial to the economy of the British Empire that no book on Chinas flora would be complete without an examination of the subject. Fortune had even brought back tea plant specimens to Englands botanical gardens, sad little greenhouse shrubs, useful for study and spectacle but worthless for illustrating just how tea came to be made. Fortune blamed the jealousy of the Chinese Government for his lack of knowledge. The Emperor prevented foreigners from visiting any of the districts where tea is cultivated. Chinese tea merchants had proved an unreliable source for tea-growing knowledge; they were too far down the chain of supply to be of any use to a scientist. His living tea plants in English hothouses could not even settle the ongoing debate as to whether green tea and black were different species or the same. We find our English authors contradicting each other, some asserting that the black and green teas are produced by the same variety and that the difference in colour is the result of a different mode of preparation, while others say that black teas are produced from the plant called by botanists Thea bohea, and the green from Thea viridis, Fortune had recorded. Preparation or variation? A second trip to China would enable him finally to put the matter to rest.
On the day Fortune sat on his riverboat, under the Coolies blade, the world had only one source of supply for its tea: China. If Fortunes mission was successful, India would soon be on a path to rival and then surpass China in tea cultivation; the East India Company would save itself; Britain would trumpet its triumph over the Chinese Emperor; Fortune would advance science and gain personal glory. He would be the first man to try planting an entire garden of teaan entire new industryfrom foreign seedlings.
To seed India with inferior tea stock was hardly going to make him a heroo a fortune. There was no point in sending to India a motely assortment of inferior tea plants, as previous collectors had done. Fortune was only interested in procuring the most celebrated teas in China: It was a matter of great importance to procure them from those districts in China where the best teas were produced. And he was charged with getting them there in good health, ready to transplant into Indian soil. Fortune needed to be as sure as he could be about exactly what he was collecting and shipping to India. He considered himself a scientist, though his mission was to conduct espionage.
As a scientist, his work was only as good as the data he could collect, so he knew he had to verify, first-hand, the facts about what he was collectingits location, ecology and cultivation. While it occurred to Fortune that he might manage things much more expeditiously and with less risk if he were to send local operatives to do the collecting and reportingas the Company had done for generationsFortune dismissed this option. He had little confidence that Chinese agents would be dependable enough to seek out the best that China had to offer. If India was to rival China in the world market for tea, it was a matter of great importance to procure them from those districts in China where the best teas were produced. And if he did not collect them himself, well? Where was the adventure in that, let alone the science?
Yet the white people are always picturing non-whites as thieves !
