By the mid-19th century, Britain was an almost unchallenged empire. It
controlled about a fifth of the world's surface, and yet its weakness
had everything to do with tiny leaves soaked in hot water. By 1800,
tea was easily the most popular drink in the country. The problem? All
the tea in the world came from China, and Britain couldn't control the
quality or the price. So around 1850, a group of British businessmen
set out to create a tea industry in a place they did control: India.

For All the Tea In China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink
and Changed History is Sarah Rose's account of the effort to control
the tea market, what she calls the "greatest single act of corporate
espionage in history."

"The task required a plant hunter, a gardener, a thief, a spy. The man
Britain needed was Robert Fortune," Rose writes. Fortune was the agent
sent to sneak out of China the plants and secrets of tea production.

Before Fortune, England engaged in trade with China, sending opium in
exchange for tea.

"The Chinese emperor hated that opium was the medium of exchange,
because a nation of drug addicts was being created. So the emperor
confiscated all the opium [and] destroyed it," Rose tells NPR's Guy
Raz. "England sent warships. And at the end of the day, they realized
that if they were going to keep pace with the British tea consumption
and not deal with the Chinese, they had to own it themselves."

Enter Robert Fortune, a botanist in an era when the natural sciences
were on the ascent in Britain. Think of botanists in mid-19th century
England as research and development scientists in 1970s Xerox PARC
(Palo Alto Research Center) — the company that developed the Ethernet
and many other computing technologies, says Rose.

Many of these 19th century botanists had university degrees and were
trained as doctors, but Fortune, who was Scottish, grew up poor.

"He kind of worked his way up through the ranks of professional
botany, learning with professional training instead of book training,"
Rose says.

Around 1845, when the young botanist was in his early 30s, he took a
two-year trip to China in search of plants. Upon his return, he
published a travelogue in which he described his adventures.

"He was attacked by pirates, he was attacked by bandits, he
encountered all kinds of disease and storms, and he also goes in
disguise, dressed up as if he were a wealthy Chinese merchant," Rose
says.

His memoir having captured the imagination of Victorian society,
Fortune was approached by a representative of the East India Trading
Company, who asked him to return to China, this time to smuggle tea
out of the country.

Enlarge Courtesy of the authorSarah Rose has worked as a journalist
covering food and travel in Hong Kong, Miami and New York. For All the
Tea in China is her first book.

"They wanted really good tea stock from the very best gardens in
China, and they also needed experts. They needed the Chinese to go to
India to teach the British planters, as well as the Indian gardeners."

Fortune succeeded. He managed to get seeds from China to India, and
the impact on the tea trade was immense. Within his lifetime, India
surpassed China as the world's largest tea grower.

"It astonishes me," Rose says. "China has pretty much never really
come back from that, certainly not in the Western markets. Now that
Asia has such a booming economy, the Chinese are again pretty fierce
tea producers. But it took a hundred-plus years."

So was Fortune history's greatest corporate thief, or the man we can
thank for the tea we drink?

Rose says that to understand his role in the history of tea, it's
useful to think of Fortune — who considered himself a gardener and
China expert — in the terms of the market in which he existed.

"Today we have Monsanto, and there are patents on everything. But in
those days, even the notion of a patent or intellectual property was
just being articulated in legal systems. So he didn't see himself as
stealing something that didn't belong to him. He thought plants
belonged to everybody."

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