For All the Tea in China by Sarah Rose

For All the Tea in China, by Sarah Rose

Calling all tea drinkers and history lovers! Just how did tea take the world by storm? Sarah Rose gives readers the fascinating answer to this question, beginning with the story of the tea trade between England and China. She has brought to light a little-known area of the past that has had an important impact on the entire world, as well as chalking her book full of enlightening historical background.

She structures the book around the mission of Robert Fortune, hired by the East India Trading Company to discover the secrets of tea in China so that Britain could grow their own tea and have greater control over its trade in their empire. Fortune came from a lower-class background in Scotland, learning about plants simply by hands-on experience. He had a talent for cultivating exotic plants such as orchids, and this work was brought to the attention of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1843 and they approached him with a proposal to take a trip to China with the purpose of collecting rare oriental botanical specimens. He would be going deep into inland China, further than any westerner had gone since Marco Polo, surrounded by possible dangers and many unknowns.

His trip yielded many exotic additions to the Royal Gardens at Kew in London, so several years later in 1847 the the East India Trading Company sent Fortune back to China with the unprecedented and secret mission of collecting green and black tea plants and seeds, and to learn the secrets of Chinese tea making in the finest tea-growing provinces of China.

Rose accounts the difficulties and delights Fortune experienced along the way, and interspersed throughout the story are brief histories of various cultural influences such as the East India Company itself, the opium trade, the traditional Chinese tea making processes, and many more. As the end of Fortune's adventure draws near it is difficult to put the book down - would his dangerous mission be a success or would all the tea plants he had collected die before they could reach their destination? Who knew that talking about tea could be so interesting!

If someone is interested in history, especially British history, this book will be a goldmine of information. If someone would just like some entertaining reading that will be educational at the same time, I would recommend giving this book a try.

I hope you will find as much enjoyment in reading For All the Tea in China as I have (while drinking a cup of tea, of course)!


© 2015 Anna Morton