How did the British steal the centuries-old secret of tea cultivation from China?

 

How did the British steal the centuries-old secret of tea cultivation from China?

 Long-suffering Robert Fortune bowed to Qali.  He pulled out a rusty razor and began shaving the first part of Fortune's head.  Either the razor was so blunt or Qali was so clumsy that Fortune felt as if he was not shaving my head but scratching it. Tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.

 This is an incident in September 1848 in an area not far from the Chinese city of Shanghai.  Fortune is a spy for the East India Company who has gone to a forbidden area inside China to steal tea leaves from there.  But for this purpose, he has to disguise himself first, the first condition of which is that he shaves his hair from the top of his forehead according to Chinese custom.  After going through this tragic process, Fortune's translator and guide knitted a long ram in his hair, dressed him in a Chinese cloak, and warned him to keep his mouth shut.

 There was still a problem that was not easy to hide.  Fortune was more than a foot taller than the average Chinese.  He solved it by telling people that he came from the other side of the Great Wall of China, where people are tall.

 Much was at stake in this campaign.  If Fortune had succeeded, China's thousands of years of monopoly on tea would have ended and the East India Company would have started growing tea in India and supplying it to the rest of the world.  But on the other hand, if he was caught, there was only one punishment.  Death!  This was because tea production was China's national secret and its rulers had been working hard for centuries to protect it.

 Two billion cups a day

 According to a study, after water, tea is the most popular beverage in the world and two billion people in the world start their day with a hot cup of tea every day.  It is a different matter that during this time few people would have thought about how this drink which makes their mood happy and their mind active, reached them.

 This story of tea is no less than a thrilling novel.  It is a story with amazing coincidences, deceptive espionage adventures, imperialist fiber medicine, moments of good fortune and events of misfortune.

 Leaves flying in the air

 There are many famous stories about how tea started.  According to one, the ancient Chinese Diomalai king Shenong was so concerned about cleanliness that he ordered all his subjects to boil water and drink it.  One day the king's water was boiling in a forest so that a few leaves flew out of the wind and fell into the cauldron.  When Shenong drank this water, not only did he like the taste, but drinking it also made his body active.

 These were tea leaves and after experiencing their benefits, the king ordered the people to try them too.  So the drink spread to all corners of China.

 Europe first became acquainted with tea in the early 16th century, when the Portuguese began trading in its leaves.  Within a century, tea began to be drunk in many parts of the world.  But especially the British liked it so much that they started drinking from house to house.

 The East India Company was responsible for trading all kinds of commodities from the East.  He had to buy expensive tea leaves from China, and shipments from there to the rest of the world by long sea route added to the price of tea (the C-pack route was not discovered at the time!).  This was the reason why the British desperately wanted their own colonies to start growing tea in India so that China's address would be cut off.

 The biggest hurdle in this project was how the tea plant grows and how the tea is obtained from it. Despite all efforts, this secret could not be uncovered.  That's why the company now sent Robert Fortune on a dangerous espionage mission.

 For this purpose he had to go to areas of China where perhaps no European had set foot after Marco Polo.  He knew that the best black tea grows in the mountains of Fujian Province, so he ordered his leader to go there.

 In addition to shaving his head, imitating imitation sheep, and disguising himself as a Chinese merchant, Fortune also had a Chinese name, Sing Hua.  That means 'bright flowers'.

 The East India Company had specifically instructed him that 'in addition to transporting the best tea plants and seeds to India, you are obliged to provide all possible information about the cultivation of this plant and the preparation of tea leaves.  Get them so that they can be used to set up tea nurseries in India.

 He was to be paid five hundred pounds a year for this work.

 Fortune's job was not easy.  Not only did he have to learn how to produce tea from China, but he also had to steal this rare species from there.  Fortune was a trained botanist and his experience told him that a few plants would not work, but that the plants and their seeds would have to be smuggled into India on a large scale so that tea production could begin there on a large scale.  Coins

 Not only that, it also needed Chinese laborers to help them grow and produce tea on an industrial basis in India.

 During this time he himself had to acquire all the knowledge about all types of tea plants, growing season, cultivation, leaf production, teaching methods, etc., whether it is green tea or black, white or red tea.

 Fortune's goal was not to get ordinary tea plants, but to get the best tea so that the international tea business in India could be traded on a large scale with the best tea.

 Finally, after a difficult three-month trek on boats, palanquins, horses, and difficult trails, Fortune managed to reach a large tea factory in the valley of Mount Vavi.  Here, in addition to the strong aroma of tea, a wooden plank on the door greeted Fortune.  There was an ancient poem inscribed on it in praise of tea:

 In high tea leaves

 There should be doubts

 Like a Tartar leather shoe

 There are waves

 Like the hanging flesh of the neck of a mighty bull

 It blooms like this

 Like fog in a valley

 It shines like this

 Like a gust of wind on a lake

 It should be so soft and moist

 Like the earth after a fresh rain

 Earlier in Europe, green tea and black tea plants were considered separate.  But Fortune was not surprised to find that both types of tea were made from the same plant.  The real difference is in the way they teach and cook.

 Fortune kept a deep but silent observation and taking notes of every step of making tea here.  If he did not understand something, he would ask through his leader.

 Serious mistake that turned into luck

 Fortune's hard work paid off and he finally managed to smuggle tea plants, seeds and a few laborers to India, saving the eyes of the authorities.  Under his supervision, the East India Company started growing these plants in the Assam region.

 But he made a serious mistake.

 The plants that Fortune brought were accustomed to the cold seasons of China's high mountain ranges.  The hot air of Assam did not suit them and they dried up one by one.

 Before all this hard work went in vain, a strange coincidence occurred.

 Call it the fortune of the East India Company or the misfortune of China that at the same time it came across a case of a plant growing in Assam.

 The plant was discovered in 1823 by Robert Bruce, a Scottish traveler.  The local tea-like plant grew as a wild shrub in the mountainous regions of Assam.  However, according to most experts, the drink was inferior to tea.

 Following the failure of the Fortune plant, the company turned its attention to this plant in Assam.  When Fortune researched it, he found that it was very close to the Chinese tea plant, and that their lineage was the same.

 The technology of tea production and leaf preparation smuggled from China and the trained workers proved to be extremely useful.  When the leaf was prepared according to these methods, people began to like it a lot during the experiments.

 And so the biggest theft of intellectual property in the history of the corporate world succeeded even though it failed.

 Following the success of indigenous tea, the company began its trade by allocating large areas of Assam for the cultivation of this Indian plant, and within a decade its production surpassed China in terms of quantity, quality and price.  Given

 Due to the decline in exports, China's tea gardens began to dry up and the country, famous for its tea, collapsed into a corner.

 'Liquid Halwa' instead of real tea

 The British introduced an 'innovation' in tea making.  Sugar was used for thousands of years by adding leaves to boiling water. The British started adding sugar and later milk to this drink.

 The truth is that even today the Chinese find it strange to mix anything else in tea.  While the Indians adopted many other habits of the British, they also began to mix these in the tea of ​​their rulers.

 Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, an Urdu writer and scholar, writes about this in his book Ghobar-e-Khater:

 "Tea is a Chinese product and has been used for fifteen hundred years according to Chinese specifications, but no one has ever dreamed that this subtle essence could be contaminated with the density of milk.  ۔  But in the seventeenth century, when the British became acquainted with it, it is not known what they thought, that they invented the innovation of mixing milk.  And since the tradition of tea in India was through him, this black innovation spread here too, gradually the matter reached to the point that people started drinking tea by adding tea instead of milk.

 "People make a kind of liquid dessert instead of tea, drink it instead of food and are happy that we drank tea.  Who can say to these ignorant people?

 Alas, you did not drink! '

 India's role in the American Revolution?

 Former Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi, during his visit to the United States in 1985, presented a proof of India's important role in the tea story when he addressed a joint session of the Congress and said that Indian-made tea  The spirit of independence from Britain was aroused.

 He was referring to 1773 when the East India Company sold tea in the United States but did not pay taxes.  Fed up, one day some Americans boarded a ship on the shores of Boston and threw the company's tea bags into the sea.  The British government responded with "Iron Hands", which caused unrest in the American colony that finally led to the end of American independence three years later.

 However, as may be clear from the above story, Rajiv Gandhi was misunderstood.  In the 18th century, Indians did not start growing tea and the East India Company bought tea directly from China.

 That is why when Narendra Modi addressed the Congress at length in 2016, he did not mention tea during that time.  However, according to some, his right to the issue was far greater than that of his predecessor, Rajiv Gandhi, due to his long association with tea.

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