Getting Back into Writing

After a long break from writing I made several unsuccessful attempts at starting a new post, only to realize it wasn’t going to be easy. Rather than give up, I decided to write about a book I came across recently, ‘For All The Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History’ by Sarah Rose, published in 2010.

The title of the book was intriguing, and so were the first few paragraphs.

‘There was a time when maps of the world were redrawn in the name of plants, when two empires, Britain and China, went to war over two flowers: the poppy and the camellia. 

The poppy, Papaver somniferum, was processed into opium, a narcotic used widely throughout the Orient in the 18th and 19th centuries. The drug was grown and manufactured in India, a subcontinent of princely states united under the banner of Great Britain in 1757.

The camellia, Camellia sinensis, is also known as tea. The Empire of China had a near-complete monopoly on tea, as it was the only country to grow, pick,  process, cook, and in all other ways manufacture, wholesale, and export the “liquid jade.”

For nearly 200 years, the East India Company sold opium to China and bought tea with the proceeds. China, in turn, bought opium from British traders out of India and paid for the drug with the silver profits from tea.’

This is the fascinating story of how Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, was sent by the East India Company to go deep inside China and smuggle out the tea plant for British plantations in India. The year was 1848.

I ordered an audio version of the book, which is difficult to concentrate on, and honestly, not so enjoyable. I will be ordering the hardcover soon! There are a few documentaries on the subject, including 'Robert Fortune: The British Spy Who Stole China's Tea Secrets' on YouTube, which I have yet to watch.