SEARCH FOR THE
SECRET
The Chinese tried by every means to keep secret the
methods of tea cultivation and processing, as they
had earlier the technology of silk production. Imperial
edicts prohibited revealing them on the pain of death.
False information about tea production was even passed
around to confuse outsiders. For three centuries China
was successful hiding the mysteries of tea, and was
the world's main tea exporter. Linnaeus was eager
to have a tea plant. His student, Per Osbek, transported
one to the Cape of Good Hope on a Swedish East India
Company vessel, but it was lost in a storm. Another
fell into the harbor when the ship's guns fired a
departing salute. He did get a plant to Uppsala in
Sweden and nourished it with great care until it was
found to be an ordinary camelia. A true tea plant
that reached Sweden in 1763 was eaten by rats. Finally
a Swedish ship brought some potted seeds, which germinated
and grew. But even then, Einnaeus did not know the
secret of processing, and assumed that green tea and
black tea were two different species.
In 1793 the embassy to China led by Eord Macartney
obtained some tea seeds which they took to Calcutta.
The next few decades saw several attempts to grow
tea outside China from seeds. Dutch growlers were
successful in Java with both seeds and plants from
Japan.
The British East India Company had been uneasy about
its total dependence on China for tea long before
the Opium War, and from 1788 on had entertained the
possibility of growing tea in India.
In the early 183Os its Tea Committee circulated a
questionnaire to all company employees inquiring about
locations with suitable climate and altitude.
In 1823 Major Robert Bruce had actually discovered
an indigenous tea used by native people in India's
Assam while living with them after the conquest of
this remote area. His brother Charles sent specimen
branches to the company's botanical gardens at Calcutta,
but they were rejected as being another form of the
flower camelia. However, when the 1830 questionnaire
came round, Charles Bruce replied by sending actual
tea seeds, plants, and processed leaves from Assam.
The find was declared "the most important and
valuable" ever made on agricultural or commercial
resources of the Empire.
By this time, China's secret seems to have been out,
for the company began importing seeds from China,
and the first Assam-grown tea was sold in 1839. In
1848 the company sent the Scottish botanist Robert
Fortune to China for plants, expert workmen, and tools.
Disguised as a
Chinese, he had earlier entered the forbidden interior
of China in order to collect plants and seeds. It
was Fortune who brought the news that green tea and
black tea actually came from the same plant and differed
. only in processing. The native strain of Assam tea
in fact proved much better in the end. The Chinese
plants did not do well in India, and their cultivation
was abandoned, but not before they managed to crossbreed
with the Indian strain and weaken it. The Tea Committee
probably had no inkling that from these experimental
beginnings India would become the world's leading
producer of tea. She holds this position today, with
output exceeding billion pounds and a million acres
dedicated to tea gardens. Ceylon, formerly j a coffee
grower, became a producer of high quality tea after
the crop wasintroduced in 1870 as an answer to a coffee
blight.
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