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For All the Tea in China by Sarah Rose
In the late 1840s, the East Indian Company dispatched botanist (or gardener) Robert Fortune to China to bring back tea to be replanted in China. SARAH ROSE spins this out into a popular history that provides cameos of the late Qing Dynasty, global economics, the development of botany, the tea industry, Victorian sanitation, and other interesting or delicious tidbits.
The exercise succeeded and India soon supplanted China as the main source of tea for the British market.
As the somewhat breathless subtitle "How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History" makes clear, FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA follows the now well-trodden path of popular histories shining a spotlight on a commodity whose historical significance has purportedly been overlooked -- tulips, salt, cod, coffee, ice and several others having been there before.
FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA is a lively book and none-too-taxing, filled with fascinating vignettes (e.g. Fortune having his head shaved and adding a queue) and anecdotes, some uncomfortably relevant. Fortune found Chinese tea manufacturers mixing a half-pound of plaster and Prussian blue in each one pounds of green tea. "Chinese tea was effectively poisoning British consumers." Why? "The Chinese simply believed that foreigners wanted their green tea to look green." Shades of malachite green and melamine in the milk. Plus ca change…
But the problem with this style of history is that history can itself get somewhat distorted. The globalization of tea undoubtedly changed history. So did Coke. And pepper. Gunpowder. Slavery. The stirrup. Paper. History is a complicated thing and while attempts to view it through a tightly constricted lens may be interesting, they can also be misleading.
Historical quibbles aside, the largest and most currently relevant question raised -- although left undiscussed -- by FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA is in its subtitle: was tea really stolen? And was Fortune's expedition really, as says the jacket, "one of the greatest corporate thefts of all time? [emphasis mine]" At a time when intellectual property (IP) rights are one of the major policy issues facing Chinese-Western relations, this is a question of no mean significance.
If this was indeed "theft", then China's claims (total lost sales over almost two centuries, accumulated interest, etc.) would almost certainly dwarf its trade surplus and resulting foreign reserves that are the source of so much current controversy. Further, it would seem unreasonable to press China to protect IP when the West actively stole it in prior years. The fact that were no laws, regulations or international agreements at the time does not change the underlying issue.
But China were monopolists and hardly benign ones, controlling supply and prices and, as Fortune discovered, adulterating the product, something which most people would now argue excuses remedial action.
But who "owned" tea in nineteenth-century China? Ownership in the sense of IP is not a sensible concept when applied to a product and procedure in common everyday use. Fortune even acquired his plants and technical information more or less openly. China no more "owned" tea and its means of preparation that the Aztecs owned chocolate or the indigenous Americans owned maize.
But it is surely hard for western IP regimes to have it both ways: if IP can apply to items derived from biology or botany, then presumably it can apply to tea as well, and how to explain, therefore, Earl Grey?
Peter Gordon
13/05/2010
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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