IT was in this week of 1812 that the quite remarkable Robert Fortune was born.
The Scottish botanist credited with altering the economies of the two countries which are now the most populous in the world was born 212 years ago tomorrow on September 16, 1812, at Edrom near Duns in the Scottish Borders.
As you know, I always cite my sources, and chief of them for today’s column is the American author and journalist Sarah Rose who wrote the entertaining book For All The Tea In China about Fortune’s astonishing achievements. I am also indebted to the Dunse History Society whose website is most informative about Fortune.
One of nine children of his mother Agnes née Ridpath and father Thomas who worked in the gardens of the Kelloe estate, Robert was educated in the local parish school and on leaving there he became an apprentice gardener. Completing his apprenticeship he then began work at Moredun House south of Edinburgh and while there in 1838 he married his wife Jane, née Penny, with whom he had six children.
The following year, he moved to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh to work under the formidable botanist William McNab who quickly promoted Fortune. Word of his talent as a botanist obviously began to spread and in 1842, he was appointed superintendent of the hothouse department of the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS’s) gardens at Chiswick in London.
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The RHS was at that time intensely interested in the flora of China and in 1843, the society chose Fortune to lead a plant-collecting expedition to China.
He was instructed “to collect seed and plants of an ornamental or useful kind not already cultivated in Great Britain and to obtain information upon Chinese gardening and agriculture together with the nature of the climate and its apparent influence of vegetation”.
We know much of what happened to Fortune on that ground-breaking journey to China because he wrote a best-selling account of his travels on his return. For a start, there was the four-month journey by sea to Hong Kong, surviving a typhoon and a pirate raid along the way.
Then came his daring forays into the interior of China during which he disguised himself as a bigwig from a distant part of China, dressing in Chinese clothing and adopting a ponytail while his shaved head and naturally sun-baked features helped
him avoid detection. He also had a servant, who did much of the talking until Fortune could learn enough Mandarin Chinese.
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At that time, a little more than a year after the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) had ended the first Opium War between China and Britain, there was a law that foreigners could not travel more than 30 miles from the ports that China had opened for trade, yet using special “Wardian” cases – miniature greenhouses – Fortune was able to find plant samples from across northern China – he even risked death to obtain plants from the Emperor’s gardens – and get them shipped to London. Effectively, he smuggled the plants out of China.
Several of the species that he found were named after him as designated by the name “fortunei”. He also proved that green tea and black tea came from the same plant and the different colours arose from the manufacturing process.
Back in London, the interest of the East India Company was piqued by what Fortune was doing.
For at that time, China had a monopoly on the cultivation and preparation of tea, and the Company was anxious to use its vast areas of India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to break that monopoly.
Offering him the incentive of an annual salary of five times the £100 he earned from the RHS, the Company employed Fortune on what some authors have called the “Great British tea heist”.
Being virtually a dictatorship within the British Empire, the East India Company did not bother to hide its intentions.
Its instructions to Fortune were explicit: “Besides the collection of tea plants and seeds from the best localities for transmission to India, it will be your duty to avail yourself of every opportunity of acquiring information as to the cultivation of the tea plant and the manufacture of tea as practised by the Chinese and on all other points with which it may be desirable that those entrusted with the superintendence of the tea nurseries in India should be made acquainted.”
Crucially the Company also told Fortune to bring from China “experienced tea growers and good manufacturers without whom we will not be able to develop our plantations in the Himalayas”.
Fully aware that the Chinese protected their tea monopoly rigidly and that anyone caught trying to smuggle tea plants and seeds would be executed, Fortune went off to China again, and Rose gives a vivid account of how he managed to get inside a tea factory and learn the secrets that China had hidden for centuries.
After several adventures, Fortune decided he had enough material, and had recruited tea workers. The East India Company hired a junk to get him out and once again using the Wardian cases, Fortune got something like 20,000 seedlings out of China and into India where they were planted in Darjeeling.
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The Chinese tea did not flourish in the Indian climate but it was the processes that Fortune had discovered which saw districts like Darjeeling and Assam quite quickly become huge exporters of tea to Britain while the Chinese economy in some areas almost collapsed.
Unaware of his smuggling success, the Chinese allowed Fortune back and he also collected plants in Japan – in all, he is said to have introduced 250 species into Britain, including jasmine and the kumquat fruit.
Fortune never received the acclaim he deserved but the public lapped up his adventures in his books such as Three Years’ Wanderings In The Northern Provinces Of China. He published four such travelogues in all.
Exhausted by his journeys during which he was frequently ill, Fortune retired from travelling and spent his latter years in increasingly poor health until he died at his London home in 1880 at the age of 67. His memorial is in Brompton Cemetery.
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