For All the Tea in China by Sarah Rose Arrow Books HK$153
Who was behind the greatest theft of trade secrets the world has ever known? Robert Fortune, according to Sarah Rose. Readers aren't expected to have heard of the Scotsman, which adds interest to this historical work about the botanist-turned-industrial spy who stole tea from China for the East India Company. The economic behemoth saw how important it was for England to wean itself off its thirst for tea grown in China, which was why it paid for a stealth mission into the country's interior: pilfered seedlings could be grown in British India. Fortune's first expedition (1848-1851) wasn't his last. And it wasn't just tea he was asked to purloin. Plant stealing, writes Rose, worked in both directions. He was to gather information on China's nascent opium crop, which was supplanting the British trade in the drug. Fortune is important for other reasons: 'discovering' hundreds of plants and flowers and proving that green and black teas were of the same taxa. He also showed that the Chinese were using poison to dye green tea. Rose has done well to extract a book from Fortune's three memoirs, among other sources. One thing missing, however, is an index.