A Scottish gardener disguised himself to carry China's tea plants to India.
In the 1840s Robert Fortune travelled through China dressed as a Chinese merchant, collecting tea plants and hiring skilled tea makers for the East India Company. Most of the plants he took to India died. But the knowledge he brought helped build the tea industry, and he filled Western gardens with Chinese flowers.
Robert Fortune was born in Berwickshire in 1812 and trained as a gardener, working at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh before joining the Horticultural Society of London's garden at Chiswick. After the Treaty of Nanking opened Chinese ports to foreigners in 1842, the Society sent him on a three-year plant-hunting expedition to southern China. He would spend much of the next two decades there and in Japan.
Like some other European travellers of the time, he sometimes disguised himself as a Chinese merchant, venturing beyond the day's journey from the treaty ports that foreigners were allowed. Buying tea plants was reportedly forbidden by the Chinese government. In 1848, on behalf of the British East India Company, he took tea plants and experienced tea workers from China to India. He was not the first to try, but his effort is the best known, helped by Wardian cases, sealed glass boxes that kept plants alive at sea.
The story is often told as a clean heist, but the plants largely failed. Most of the Chinese tea bushes planted in India's north-western provinces died. British drinkers also preferred a strong, dark brew, which came best from the local Assam variety of the tea plant rather than the Chinese type Fortune had chosen. What proved valuable was the technology and expertise, which helped the later tea industries of Assam and Sri Lanka to flourish.
His lasting mark is in the garden. Fortune introduced around 250 ornamental plants to Britain, Australia and North America, including kumquats, many tree peonies, azaleas and chrysanthemums, and roses such as 'Fortune's Double Yellow'. More than a dozen plants bear his name, from the palm Trachycarpus fortunei to the shrub Euonymus fortunei. One import had a darker legacy: the Japanese chestnuts he brought to the United States are linked to the arrival of chestnut blight there.
Source: Wikipedia — Robert Fortune · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
