Reddit reviews For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History
We found 8 Reddit comments about For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Except that first it involved an incredibly daring bit of espionage to steal the plant and the secrets of fermenting black tea from the Chinese, who were controlling it. It'd require a spy sortie at least.
The story itself is wild:
https://www.amazon.com/All-Tea-China-England-Favorite/dp/0143118749/
The hypocrisy is amazing. Britain, Germany, America certainly had no problems with stealing intellectual property [see below] or erecting huge barriers to trade [https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/]. In fact, they even invaded and drugged a nation to steal wealth [https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Opium-Wars-Jack-Beeching/dp/0156170949/].
 
IP theft is a century's long Western tradition
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-26/china-didn-t-invent-industrial-espionage
http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/0143118749
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/internet-privacy/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.html
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/26/a_nation_of_outlaws/?page=full
http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Program-Scientists/dp/0316221031/
http://japanfocus.org/-Christopher-Reed/2177/article.html
http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/0143118749
I am a little bit of a tea fanatic - for a yank - and also a nerd. This book is a great read on the subject - really fascinating stuff. Imperialism, drugs, botanical history, industrial espionage, Scottish dude passing himself off as Chinese...
They made better history back then.
I know exactly what you mean. My wife can't understand why I read mainly non-fiction type books. She reads all sorts of fiction, but to me, it's just not that interesting. I would rather read about something real.
A few interesting reads I read last year: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3872.A_History_of_the_World_in_6_Glasses
and http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/0143118749 .That one about all the tea in China is a really awesome read.
My BookDepository order has arrived! Been hyped to read this book about tea since I drunkenly made the order two weeks ago!
archive.org has a digitized copy of All About Tea Vol. I where you can read about the history of Assam tea starting here. The Bruce discovery of tea in Assam did predate Fortune's 2nd trip to China, but commercially nothing came of it. Bruce's cultivation was an experimental scale demonstration.
For All the Tea in China has a pretty lengthy description of how Assam came to be the dominant tea cultivation area in India, and how the cluelessness of East India Company personnel almost wrecked the Darjeeling industry before it got started.
In any event, even if you accept the claim that Singpho people were drinking a brew made from tea for 700 years before Bruce "discovered" them, the first plantings in Japan were earlier.
http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/0143118749 < fun book on tea going from china to india
> At first, there were several tea ceremonies that were customarily performed for and by those wishing to guarantee strong offspring
Sarah Rose briefly touches on this in For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History
By the mid 19th century it appears that this particular ceremony may have been going out of fashion everywhere except in the rural areas. On Fortune's first visit to China for the East India Company he hired a man named Wang to act as his guide & interpreter and general gopher. Wang ended up taking Fortune to his home village which was deep in green tea growing country and Fortune apparently wrote about this strange custom.
He only gave it a line or two since his focus was almost entirely on gathering tea leaves, so Sarah Rose doesn't focus much on it either.
Edit: Sarah Rose said no such thing in For All the Tea in China. However Fortune (the man who stole the tea for the East India Company) really did hire a man named Wang, and Wang really did take him to his village in the heart of green tea country (though as Fortune found out green tea and black tea are actually the same plant).