A problem worth millions of pounds

Until the mid-19th century, China held an absolute monopoly on tea. The secret of growing and making it had been guarded for millennia, and no other country could produce tea the same way. Britain, by then, was hopelessly dependent on it: everyone drank tea, from aristocrats to workers, for whom milk and sugar in the cup helped them last until supper.

The problem was money. Chinese tea had to be paid for in silver, and that silver poured out of the British treasury in a river. It infuriated the Empire. So the East India Company decided on something simple but brazen: if you can't buy it cheaper — steal the production itself and move it to your own colony, India.

All that was missing was a man mad enough for the job.

The botanist who became a spy

That man was Robert Fortune — a Scottish botanist and "plant hunter" who had already been to China and survived pirates, typhoons and fever there. In 1848 he was offered a mission: infiltrate the tea provinces forbidden to foreigners, steal living plants, uncover the secrets of production — and carry all of it to India. The pay was five hundred pounds, five times his annual salary.

There was one catch: after the Opium War, foreigners were forbidden, on pain of death, from travelling into the country's interior. So Fortune did what any self-respecting adventurer would — he dressed up. He shaved his head, attached a queue in the Chinese fashion, put on local clothes and called himself Sing Wa. His imperfect accent and odd looks he explained simply: I'm from a distant province beyond the Great Wall, we all look like this there.

And, improbably, it worked.

What he saw in there

Posing as a distinguished official who had travelled far to admire the craft, Fortune gained what no European before him had — access to the tea factories. He noted down every step: when to pick the leaf, how to dry it, roll it, process it.

And he made two discoveries that overturned Europe's understanding of tea. First: black and green tea aren't two different plants, as everyone then believed, but the same bush, simply processed differently. Second — far more alarming. He noticed the workers at a "green" factory had blue fingers. It turned out the Chinese were dyeing green tea for export with Prussian blue and gypsum — because the British paid more for a vivid green colour. In other words, the fashionable "healthy" green tea the British public was drinking was literally tinted with poison for the sake of its colour.

The heist of the century

Then came the logistics. Living seedlings would never survive the long sea voyage to India under ordinary conditions. But Fortune got lucky: shortly before, another Scotsman had invented the "Wardian case" — essentially a sealed miniature glasshouse in which plants could live for months. It became his secret weapon.

In the end Fortune smuggled thousands of tea plants and tens of thousands of seeds into India — and, most valuable of all, living Chinese masters who knew how to make tea and could teach the Indians. In 1851 he returned to India with the whole haul.

The consequence we're still drinking

Here lies the "historical significance" worth telling this story for. It was after Fortune that the tea industry truly took off in India — Assam, Darjeeling, and later Ceylon. Within a few decades the colonies overtook China and became the world's main suppliers of tea. A monopoly China had guarded for millennia was broken within a single lifetime by one man in someone else's clothes. China's tea market would take more than a century to recover from that blow.

Was Fortune a hero? Depends who you ask. To Britain — a brilliant adventurer. To China — a thief who robbed an entire country. The most honest answer is: both at once.

But one thing is certain: when you hold a cup of Indian tea today, you're holding a direct continuation of that story. I feel it every time I choose blends for Pink Elephant — because some of them come from exactly those hills a man with a fake queue once crept into.