Robert Fortune or How Tea Was Stolen to the Chinese | FULL DOCUMENTARY

[Music] this man Robert Fortune is said to be one of those who in the 19th century contributed to make Great Britain the world's greatest power this discreet man commissioned by The Honorable East India Company is said to have simply changed the world by stealing one of Imperial China's most precious secrets many things were said about Robert Fortune his boldness and the dangers he braved about his crime often considered as the first industrial theft in [Music] history about the trades he witnessed that were operated by the British Empire to ensure its Monopoly Robert Fortune was at the heart of of an adventure that changed the world here is his story here is his Legend [Music] Robert Fortune was a botanist and a plant Hunter he was the son of a farmer he was from a class that typically wasn't given an education but he was originally Scottish and there's mandatory schooling in Scotland so everybody got an [Music] education he had a kind of natural language affinity for plants and became a naturalist which at the time was a very prestigious job I think the moves that Robert Fortune made from place to place in his early days showed ambition and that he was taken on by the botanic garden showed considerable not just Zeal but [Music] knowledge he had a drive to [Music] achieve I don't think you could have risen as far as fast as he did in a society as regimented and rigid as 19th century Britain without having a great deal of determination in this account of my journey my object is to peep into the celestial Empire I shall have the pleasure of taking my readers to the Himalayas and showing them the government tea plantations from which much is expected and which are likely to prove of great Advantage not only to India but also to England and her widespread in [Music] colonies so the East India Company came to Robert Fortune he had one quality that no one else in Britain had and that is he had been plant hunting in China before he was the world's leading expert on the plants of China Fortune was given a list of items that the East India Company wanted but the most important item on the shopping list were the finest green and the finest black tea seeds so his job was to go to the best green tea areas and the best black tea areas collect seeds collect clones and bring them back to India the idea being that India would be a tea garden for the company and would save them from their own Financial Wows te was incredibly valuable because of the markup they'd say it was picked for a penny and sold for a [Music] pound the trade with China for Te was a fundamental source of government income for the British government both in the later 18th century and in the early 19th century if next season nobody brings any from China Britain were worried that they would have a rebellion so tea was becoming something that of of great financial and social political importance to the British government tea was such a fashionable drink in Britain and tea couldn't be grown in Britain so where was it grown it was grown in a foreign country what could we do about getting it grown under our own control the East India Company was the greatest Corporation in in world history it was founded in 1600 was uh chartered from the crown Queen Elizabeth gave the company exclusive Monopoly of all trade with Asia it was owned by its shareholders but grew to conquer India uh and dominate trade in Asia in India by the beginning of the 19th century it was a very huge Enterprise it would have over 150,000 people in its private so really at the the Pinnacle of the tea trade was in the uh 1820s when the company exported 40 million pounds in weight of tea from China to Britain the East India Company did offer opportunities from people from let's say not so prosperous backgrounds to actually succeed to engage in adventure but also to make their own fortunes on the 20th of June 1848 I left Southampton in the peninsula an oriental company steamship Rippon under captain morrisby [Music] in having shown that tea can be grown in the Himalayas and that it would produce a valuable and remunerative crop the next great object appears to be the production of superior tea by means of fine varieties and improved cultivation it was well known that a variety of the tea plant existed in the southern parts of China from which inferior teas only were made that being more easily procured than the fine Northern varieties from which the great mass of the best teas are made I landed in Hong Kong on the 14th of August having having nothing to detain me in Hong Kong I took the earliest opportunity of going northwards to Shanghai Shanghai actually was a little marshy Village so it wasn't anything important at all in in Chinese history China basically gave the British a settlement a huge chunk of land and say you go and live there and do business there you really have to say it was the Western Merchants who turned Shanghai into what it is today having determined if possible to procure plants and seeds from this celebrated country there were but two ways of proceeding in the business either Chinese agents must be employed to go into the country to procure them and bring them down or I must go there myself at First Sight the former way seemed the only one possible suppose I had engaged Chinese agents for this purpose and plenty would have undertaken the mission how could I be at all certain that the plants or seeds which they would have brought me had been obtained in the districts in question I therefore determined to make an effort to penetrate into the weow country myself no dependence can be placed upon the veracity of the Chinese I may seem uncharitable but such is really the case to travel in China was extremely risky fortun had to hire servants and among the qualities he was looking for were language skills at the time there was no single putanga there was no mother tongue in China that everybody spoke there were Regional dialects that were were almost incomprehensible to everybody else so to go to the green tea area he needed guides who could get him there in their mother tongue China is a very large place and it's a very diverse place and one way that the emperor had of making sure everybody considered themselves Chinese was to make them all dress the same way this was the toner men have to shave their forehead and they wear a long queue see that's not Chinese that's Manchu but as a symbol of submission you you have to to wear that if you don't wear that it's death penalty so what Fortune did was he took on this haircut it was the physical sign that he was a subject of the emperor my servants now procured me a Chinese dress and I had the pony tail which I had worn in former years nicely dressed by the barber [Music] now he doesn't look Chinese yet all it took was saying I'm from a far away Place Beyond The Great Wall Beyond The Great Wall was synonymous with be being from the farthest imaginable place on Earth if he was from Beyond The Great Wall he was just a Chinese person from very far away China at the time had a network of waterways uh rather like highways that just connected most of the Inland areas to the coast it was very easy to get around by boat these canals some of them were natural some of them were dug by coly labor hundreds of years before in massive State projects the boat was strongly built flat bottomed and very sharp both for and after the tide and wind were both fair so that we glided up the river with great rapidity it was a beautiful autumnal day and the scene altogether was was the most Charming one Buddhist temples and pagodas were observed here and there Rising above the trees it formed a striking feature in the landscape and reminded me of the borders of England and Scotland there were moments of joy for Fortune traveling in China moments where he saw things that he thought were stunningly beautiful or an exceptional and and like any traveler but I think overall he was fatigued and frustrated much of the time he was alone he had no one to talk to it doesn't sound like he was happy on a day-to-day [Music] basis every now and then we came to Rapids which it took us hours to get over notwithstanding that 15 men with long ropes fastened to the m of our boat were tracking along the shore nothing shows so much as this the indefatigable perseverance of the Chinese when looking upon a river such as this one would think it is quite impossible to navigated yet even this difficulty is overcome by hard labor and [Music] perseverance the slow progress which we necessarily made suited my purposes exactly and enabled me to explore the Botanical Riches of the country with convenience and ease and for Fortune time in the wilderness time alone to look at plants and study them and explore nature was I think his his passion his real life's work was to be out among plants and so these were moments of Exquisite joy for him he discovered a number of new plants that are very common in our Gardens today every kumquat you see is a plant that Robert fortun discovered it's the Citrus for tunai plant Hunters were considered adventurers but knowledgeable ones people going out to risk their lives to find exciting new plants for people back home they had the skill of spotting something different over 200 common garden plants in in the United Kingdom were introduced by Robert Fortune like Jasmine like honeysuckle like the raded dendrons and the [Music] aelas I think the danger for foreigners in China at that time is becoming more intense the rules were that westerners couldn't go anywhere beyond the treaty ports without being at risk of their lives on the evening of the 22nd of October I approached the suburbs of HCHO one of the latest and most flourishing cities in the richest District of the Chinese Empire the Chinese authorities have have always been most jealous of foreigners approaching or entering this town the river Tien Tang kyang which Rises amongst the green tea Hills of wio and one of its branches to the northern side of the bohia mountains was on the opposite side of the city between 5 and 6 miles a chair was soon ready for me to proceed on my journey before leaving Shanghai when Consulting the map and fixing my route I asked if it were possible to get to the mouth of the hangu river without actually passing through the city itself both my men informed me that this was quite easy after traveling in this way for about a mile and expecting every moment to get out into the Open Country I was greatly surprised by finding that I was getting more and more into a dense town for the first time I began to suspect my servants were deceiving me and that I was to pass through the city of hangu after all these suspicions were soon confirmed by the appearance of the walls and ramparts of the City it was now too late to object to this procedure houndo was the capital of the sun dasty one of the greatest dynasties of Chinese civilization it was much uh more Chinese much more cultural uh had more intellectuals so in other words in hjo you easily recognized foreigners were not supposed to go there take things calmly and never lose your temper should be the motto of everyone who attempts to travel in China these were the principles on which I generally acted but in the present instance I was not allowed to carry them out to the fullest extent he was very nervous he was highly aware of his vulnerable situation you're really not wor goo so you must have some sort of excuse and have Chinese people like a compor who can explain to local people oh don't worry we're coming from Shanghai we have a a letter from the the the magistrate of Shanghai whatever you could lie about anything because they wouldn't know Robert Fortune was very lucky violence in China at that time was very random it could happen at any time so Fortune was actually quite lucky that he managed during those years to get through pretty much unscathed he could have lost his life my fellow passengers who were chiefly merchants and servants were quiet and inoffensive indeed they did little else but lull in bed and sleep except when they were eating or smoking one of them was a confirmed opium smoker and the intoxicating drug had made him a perfect slave so opium is a tremendous problem in China they're a nation of addicts every bit as much as England is a nation of tea addicts China was a nation of opium addicts and it was a much more destructive plant our best estimates are that about 12 million people were opium smok in China in the late [Music] 1830s the British began to encourage the cultivation of opium in India with a specific purpose of enabling their trade with [Music] China Britain keep going to China to buy tea and they keep paying with s so they ran out of server In The End by the 1820s so they wanted to find out something the Chinese would buy with silver so they can get some of the silver [Music] back what Britain's opan trade did is it enabled a small spark to grow into a big fire [Music] these controlled the production of opium in its lands in India it sold these at its auctions uh in in Kolkata and ensured that this opium was then used to gain access to China this was very clear very conscious law breaking of of the highest [Music] order these company was clearly the biggest drug dealer in world [Music] history the emperor send a commissioner commissioner Ling to cantal to tell the foreigners please don't bring opium to China and commissioner L also wrote a letter to GRE Victoria about you prohibit open in your own country why are you sending so much open to to us can you stop it now of course the merchants can never stop it because it's all this money so commissioner Ling forcefully took their opan stock out of them and burn [Music] them the first open War really broke out in 1839 it was a response by the British State who sent in British forces to a sense Protect free trade so you could say that in the end the opan War Began because of te it's dispute about tea and of course China lost to war maybe it's the humiliation Chinese people suffered from foreigners from the British I think they developed hatreds for foreigners [Music] the river tiangang kyang sometimes called the Green River and which I was now has its sources far away amongst the mountains to the westward all the green and black tea comes down this River on its way to Shanghai it was a matter of great importance to procure plants and seeds from those districts in China where the best teas were produced and I now set about accomplishing this object the boatmen amused themselves by yelling and uttering in strange sounds these were taken up and distinctly repeated again and [Music] again the Chinese have strange prejudices and opinions about this place they told me that the spirits of men after death often chose to dwell amidst this wild and beautiful scenery and they said it was they that now repeated these sounds and echoed them from Hill to Hill e [Music] [Music] we reached our destination a little before dark and there I had the first view of the far famed sunloan the hill where green tea is said to have been first discovered for 3 Days the rain fell incessantly and it was also very cold sow Mountain which in ordinary weather I could have seen from the windows was now enveloped in a cloak of mist and every tree and Bush was bent down with heavy drops of [Music] rain at last on the fourth day the clouds cleared away the sun Shone out again with his usual brilliancy and the whole face of nature wore a cheerful and smiling [Music] [Applause] [Music] aspect it is exquisitly beautiful it is so gorgeous he gets to go tea picking in some of the greatest tea grounds anywhere and it kind of makes the terrible time worth it I was now out every day from morning until evening busily employed in collecting seeds in examining the vegetation of the hills and in obtaining a good collection of those Tea Seeds and young plants from which the finest green teas of Commerce are are [Music] prepared I observed that the natives never took many leaves from the weaker plants and sometimes passed them all together in order that their growth might not be checked the natives always take care to have the plants in a strong and vigorous condition before they commence Gathering the best part of the tea bush was the flush the bud and the two top leaves so in order to pick that it did require a certain amount of skill these tea picking girls would pick 30,000 of those in a single day which was maybe four or five lounds of these very light tea flushes when she saw I was in Earnest she went out to the tea plantations and brought me some young plants which she begged me to accept I felt highly pleased with her gratitude and gladly accepted the plants which increased my store very considerably [Music] one of the most important things that fortune needed to bring to the East India Company was not just te seeds he needed the recipe for tea it's not an obvious recipe if you see a tea plant you would not know how to get that into a teacup it's not a pick and eat fruit it's not an apple it's a highly processed product when the leaves are brought in from the plantations they are spread out thinly on flat bamboo trays in order to dry off any Superfluous moisture they remain for a very short time exposed in this manner in the meantime the roasting pans have been heated with a Brisk wood fire a portion of leaves are now thrown into each pan and rapidly moved about and shaken up with both hands they are immediately affected by the heat begin to make a crackling noise and become quite moist and flaccid while at the same time they give out a considerable portion of vapor they remain in this state for four or 5 minutes and then are drawn quickly out and placed upon the rolling table the object being to get rid of a portion of the sap and moisture and at the same time to twist the leaves these balls of leaves are frequently shaken out and passed from hand to hand having been thrown again into the pan a slow and steady charcoal fire is kept up and the leaves are kept in Rapid motion by the hands of the workmen sometimes they're thrown up upon the ratten table and rolled a second time in about an hour the leaves are well dried and their color has become fixed they are of a dullish green color but become brighter afterwards did Fortune think he was a spy at the time going undercover going where he wasn't allowed by law I believe he must have just considered it the uh Perils of the job and the way he got things done less than he was somehow committing this clandestine act whatever he he took I would like to call Steel it was to stop China's Monopoly overt and stop Britain's dependence on China so in that sense it is theft it's Industrial and Commercial espionage so sullow mountains were the Fulfillment of the first year of his travels Fortune considered himself extremely successful he had plants he had seeds he had everything he could possibly want he really thought it was a home run he was going to give the company everything they needed that this was all he needed to do he was going to ship it off to India and the green tea part of his Mission would be [Music] complete since my return to Shanghai I had been busy getting the tea plants carefully planted in Wards cases in order to send them to India TC retain their Vitality for a very short period if they are out of the ground in 1849 however I succeeded in finding a sh and certain method which will apply to all shortlived seeds as well as to those of the tea plant it's simply to sew the seeds in WS cases soon after they gathered Nathaniel Ward invented really what's a mini miniature greenhous which allowed plants to be brought from abroad in a way that never been possible before a wardian case which was developed in the early 1830s was a bit like an aquarium but with a top on it was designed so that once the plant was put in it and was watered the water would evaporate off the plant and would continue to hit the glass and then re-evaporated down so it was really a self-watering system the waran case meant that you could put your plants um on the ship um in the sunlight if there weren't a storm that the plants would then get the sunlight would survive the um travel but would be enclosed and would be safe from danger in this time period so he moved his seeds and plants to India on a ship and that took about a month and then when they got to Kolkata someone opened the boxes you're never supposed to open them they only work when they're really a close system and then someone watered them and this is a problem and then as the plants travel up into the Himalayas the glass breaks of the many hundreds of plants he sent he could probably count on a hand how many survived and they were weak and it was just it was just a total failure his first year was nothing but [Music] worthless it gets very small shrift in his book it's basically a paragraph I can only imagine how horrible it must have felt but for Fortune he just gives it a little bit of and that didn't work guess we'll have to do a little more he keeps a stiff upper lip he doesn't give away just how devastating it was I was not quite satisfied with the result of my journey I did not like the idea of returning to Europe without being perfectly certain that I had introduce the tea plant from the best black tea districts of China into the government plantations in the Northwestern provinces of India at the time the scientific Community believed green and black tea were entirely different species confusingly enough they didn't grow in the same place forun needed to learn all of that I made preparations for another and perhaps still more important Journey to the fine black tea country of wian although one of my men had brought me a fine collection of tea plants and seeds from the celebrated black tea country I confess I felt it would be much more satisfactory if I could visit the district myself [Music] he is going to the heart of the thing that England loves most which is black tea and he is struck dumb by how beautiful it [Music] is the far famed wian is a collection of little Hills none of which appear to be more than a th000 ft high they have a singular appearance it appears as if they had been thrown up by some great convulsion of nature to a certain height and as if some other Force had then drawn the tops of the whole Mass slightly backwards breaking it up into a thousand hills wian is considered by the Chinese to be one of the most wonderful as well as one of the most sacred spots in the [Music] Empire it was really in wuan where his breath was taken away the first time he beheld those beautiful CS that rise out of the river and just the tea That's growing on the cliffs he was completely taken aback at such perfect Beauty [Music] there is a tea shop for the refreshment of those who are toiling up or down the mountain we stopped at these places on our way and refreshed ourselves with a cup of the pure bohia on its native mountains there's a strain of tea there called the dahong pow the big red robe tea that is even now considered sort of the most valuable tea or some of the most valuable tea in China the tea soon quenched my thirst and revived my spirits and called to my mind the words of a Chinese author who says tea is exceedingly useful cultivate it and the benefit will be widely spread drink it and the animal spirits within you will be Lively and clear [Music] so he was in a place where there was [ __ ] labor moving Goods up and down these routes in China at all times there was a general sense not just in Fortune but in China that coolies are not people as much as they are just pure labor I mean they're almost like oxen you treat them as you would no one thinks about how many cows it takes to move something up a mountain or donkeys and these people were very little more than human donkeys they were the trucks that moved the goods pules is a translation of hard labor it's been turned into a western word kolies they have no land they have uh no possessions and they sell their laor long trains of coolers were seen winding their way through the valleys loaded with tea to be sold to the English and American Merchants these were views of China and the Chinese as they are seen in everyday life [Music] in the distance they resembled a colony of ants on the [Music] Move however numerous the cool is or however good the road I never observed any two of them walking AB breast as people do in other countries [Music] Crossing these mountains is no Child's Play in calculating my distances I had not taken into consideration the many hills and mountains we had to cross on our way which not only impeded our progress but made the road much longer than it appeared on the map I was hot thirsty and weary after ascending the hill under a stifling heat and I begged to be accommodated with food and lodgings we intended to take up our quarters in one of the principal temples near the top the Buddhist priesthood seem always to have selected the most beautiful spots for the erection of their temples and dwellings he's welcomed into this tea District this was not a place where he was threatened it was probably a moment where he was perhaps safest in all of China in truth the good priests seem to pay more more attention to the cultivation and manufacture of tea than to the rights of their peculiar Faith rather like The Burgundian monks who let us know where all the great planting grounds are and wrote it down and kept great notes Century after Century so that we're still getting the best wine out of the same Hill size that we were getting wonderful wine out of a thousand years ago tea had the same kind of Provence the same hillsides produce the most wonderful Terre and they produce the best tea and the monks were the ones who preserved that [Music] knowledge tea is considered a kind of entral part of meditation it is calming it helps you focus so it was very integrated into the monks spiritual practice as well as their daily life they would also sell it and it would support their monasteries there are many myths about how te came to be that are Buddha Smiths the Buddha was trying to concentrate he was going to pray without ceasing and he fell asleep and he was so angry at himself that he ripped his eyelids out in frustration and everywhere he threw his eyelid a tea plant grew up and so te became this symbol of how we can stay alert and stay awake and concentrate on the Divine the character for T cha really only came around in the time of Nong Dynasty the the 9th century te up until that time did not have its own Chinese character many other characters had been used to represent te when it became so popular well at that point it was was decided it needed its own character the character cha would be written with a grass radical on top followed by aen which means person and then underneath a tree grass human tree those three elements symbolize the harmony between man and nature [Music] I now bade farewell to the far-famed wishan certainly the most wonderful collection of Hills I had ever beheld in a few years hence when China shall have been really open to foreigners and when the naturalist can roam unmolested amongst these Hills with no fear of fines and imprisonments to haunt his imagination he will experience a rich treat indeed he was the perfect man for the job not only in terms of science but in terms of his Spirit of Adventure his ability to uh get his work done alone Westerner in the interior of China everything had succeeded far beyond my most sanguin expectations nothing therefore remained for me to do except to pack my my plants and proceed on my Voyage to India now however having been on Wan itself and over a great deal of the surrounding country and having dried specimens of all these plants before me I believe that the wian plant is closely Allied to the tea viridis and originally identical with that species but slightly altered by climate the plants of wio and wui are the same species teaba too may have a rich sprung from one and the same species on the closest examination I was only able to detect very slight differences not sufficient to constitute a distinct variety far less a species and in many of the plants these differences were not even visible therefore I was induced to believe that the peculiar characters and chemical differences which distinguish black tea from Green were to be attributed to a species of heating or fermentation accompanied with oxidation by exposure to the air and not to its being submitted to a higher temperature in the of drying as had been generally [Music] concluded the Northeast Monsoon was now blowing steadily along the coast of China this being a fair wind all sail was set and in 4 days we anchored in the Bay of Hong Kong we at once went onwards in the steam ship Lady Mary wood and arrived at Kolkata on the 15th of March soon after my arrival I received through the lieutenant governor of the Northwestern provinces orders from the governor general of IND India to visit all the tea plantations and to draw up a report upon their condition and future prospects Mr lather the commissioner had received instructions and appeared most anxious that everything should be done to ensure the speedy and safe arrival of the men and the plants I proceed onwards on the 25th of March in one of the small River Steamers as far as alabad [Music] on the evening of the 19th I left alabad in a government Carriage to Sahara Aur as I turned to look on this strange and wonderful scenery the snowy mountains lay before me in all their grandure and the Sun was shining on them to say that they Rose far above the clouds conveys no idea of their height for I was above the clouds on the spot where I stood [Music] the whole idea of growing tea in India didn't start with Fortune it was already had been going on for a while that was one of the reasons Fortune was called in to sort of carry the ball forward onto the next [Music] level as a result of this Mission nearly 20,000 plants from the best black and green tea countries of Central China have been introduced to the [Music] Himalayas six First Rate manufacturers two lead men and a large supply of implements from the celebrated weor districts were also brought and safely located on the government plantations in the Hills [Music] I mean Robert Fortune is the father of modern tea plantations outside of China every cup of tea you drink pretty much owes a debt to Robert fortune in some way he is the man who started the global tea economy and the way plants reproduce it's possible even that some clones of Fortune's tea exist now in the Himalayas [Music] the theft of tea clearly had consequences both in China and overseas I mean paradoxically in China clearly it was the the breaking of this Monopoly that China had of the production of tea and it sort of contributed to that that decline which China was undergoing really from the beginning of the uh 19th century in the end it led to the rise of Chinese nationalism and to the downfall of theq dynasty this theft had um winners and and losers other countries actually could become producers of tea whether that's in South Asia and India and Sri Lanka or indeed in Africa and other parts of the world there are hundreds and hundreds of different teas from all over the world over 50 countries produce tea now in these days when tea has become almost a necessary of life in England and her widespread in colonies its production of on a large and cheap scale is an object of No Ordinary importance but to the natives of India themselves the production of this article would be of the greatest value the poor palieri or Hill peasant at present has scarcely the common necessaries of life such a profit will enable him to purchase even a few of the necessary and simple luxuries of life and the instruction of the natives is one of the chief objects which ought to be kept in view [Music] Robert Fortune's life was a tremendous success for him because he was able to retire at about 50 after 20 years of travel with a terrific reputation and one assumes quite a lot of money [Music] as I traveled far inland and visited many districts almost unknown to Europeans I now venture to lay an account of my travels and their results before the public blessed with a sound Constitution and good health I cared little for luxuries and made light of the hardships of a traveler's life new scenes new countries and new plants were dayby day spread out before me and afforded gratification of the highest purest kind and even now when on a different side of the globe and far removed from such scenes and such Adventures I often look back upon them with feelings of unalloyed pleasure [Music] [Music]

Channel: SLICE Full Doc

Views: 17,169

Keywords: documentary, free documentary, raw, tea, china, war, espionnage, corporate espionnage, spy, uk, history, robert fortune, colonialism

Id: YbqtP-lH734

Length: 51min 7sec (3067 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2024